The question of whether this sounds forced or not is a hard one to make a judgment about, but the answer, as I understand it, is pretty much the one you've heard. If one prays to a saint, one is asking the saint to intercede; not to perform the miracle. Although we might say loosely that a saint "performed a miracle," the saint has no powers over nature of his/her own and if a miracle occurs, the source of the miracle is God.

This isn't to suggest that your question is a bad one. Why bother, one might ask, with this circuitous route? After all, God (assuming there is a God) hears the prayer, knows what the petitioner want, and grants the request or not—even if the petitioner addressed the request to a saint.

Perhaps a panelist with a deeper understanding of Catholic tradition can chime in, but Catholicism has a genius for appealing to the religious imagination of its adherents. And since religion is at least as much a matter of the heart as of the mind, one can imagine an argument to the effect that God, understanding full well that humans are like this, created the order of things in a way that takes account of the human heart and not just the mind. That, however, is a gesture at an answer rather than a piece of theology, and in any case, a gesture that amounts to a guess by someone who's not part of the tradition you're asking about.

There is a well-known equivocation on "nothing" here. According to quantum theory, there are two particles that go in and out of existence, and leave behind "something". You might as well argue that when I win a trick in bridge, my score came from nothing because the trick disappeared into the "book" (the pile of tricks I needed to make") afterwards. How are two particles interacting "nothing"? Besides, there is also the structure of the sea of quantum gravity, with fluctuations. Is a sea nothing? Is a fluctuation nothing? The fluctuation in the sea of quantum gravity is a most definite something. No, when in metaphysics we talk about something coming from nothing, the nothing has to be a pukka nothing - absolutely nothing at all, and not just a vacuum, for example, which has a structure and is therefore not nothing, but merely not air.

Leibniz considered the question, and perhaps was the first to ask it, in "On the Radical Origination of Things" of September 23, 1697. He gave a comparison for the sequence of things demanding explanations.

For a sufficient reason for existence cannot be found merely in one individual thing or even the whole aggregate and series of things. Let us imagine a book on the Elements of Geometry to have been eternal, one copy always being made from another; then it is clear that though we can give a reason for the present book based on the preceding book from which it was copied, we can never arrive at a complete reason, no matter how many books we may assume in the past, for one can always wonder why such books should have existed at all times; why there should be books at all, and why they should be written int his way. What is true of books is also true of the different states of the world . . .

This puts the skids under the type of explanation Quentin Smith gives. He commits what informal logicians call an ignoratio elenchii, the fallacy of the irrelevant conclusion. For the question is not how each individual state is to be explained, but how the totality of the sequence of states is to be explained. Answering the former does not provide an answer to the latter. It may also be a case of the fallacy of composition, in which some characteristic of the parts (in this case having been explained is attributed to the whole. Leibniz's own answer has to do with the metaphysical or absolute rather than conditional nature of the necessity and exigency ("urgency") of things to exist, and this for him can only be found in the region of eternal ideas, which is the mind of God, and without whom the necessity for things to exist would remain imaginary.

What question are you referring to? I'll hazard a guess that you are talking about why there is something rather than nothing. Then your idea seems to be that, because something can't come from nothing, there is no explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. But does this really follow from the claim that something can't come nothing?

Perhaps there was always something and this allows us to explain why something exists in the following way. There is something now because at an earlier time there was something and it is a physical law that the earlier something developed into what exists now. You might ask, Why was there something at that earlier time? But we could then employ that same style of explanation at this earlier time. You might also ask, Why was there something rather than nothing at the first moment? But suppose there is no first moment to the universe. Would this explanation then have provided an answer to why there is something rather than nothing? After all, for any arbitrary moment you pick, we can explain why there is something rather than nothing at that time.

This style of explanation is inspired by Quentin Smith's article "The Reason the Universe Exists Is That It Caused Itself to Exist."

True: only sentient beings can think about moral questions, and so moral questions don't arise in a world with no sentient (or better, sapient) beings.

Of course, in one sense of "arise," no questions arise unless there are creatures who can ponder the questions. Nonetheless, that doesn't make the way things are depend on the existence of thinking beings. There were electrons before we came on the scene, and there would be electrons even if neither we nor any creatures like us had existed.

That said, you're right: moral matters have an intrinsic connection with beings who can ponder them. There are no live moral issues in a lifeless world, nor even in one with sentient but no sapient creatures. Moral truths are truths about how certain kinds of creature should behave if there were any. But this is consistent with there being moral truths even if nothing in the world knows those truths and even if none of the relevant kinds of creatures exist. Thus, one might say (I would) that before any thinking beings existed it was true that if there were creatures such as us, it would be wrong for them to be cruel to one another.

Now the moral truth here takes a conditional form. Furthermore, it's not a truth that amounts to a constraint on the way the universe actually unfolds. But that doesn't get in the way of its being a truth.

Is it an objective truth? Well, it's not as though it could turn out to be false if thinking creatures came into being and believed that it was false. There's no contradiction or paradox in saying that these creatures would simply be wrong—rather like the way they'd be wrong if they thought that the square root of 2 is a rational number. That sure sounds like objectivity to me.

Of course one could doubt (some people do) that there are any moral truths even as things are—even given the existence beings like us who can contemplate them. But that strikes me as a rather different issue. The general point is that there could be truths that really are objective even though they are merely hypothetical unless certain kinds of things exist. That general point is the one I'm trying to apply here.