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Straightforward enough. A Phoenix is a potential creature, not yet instantiated in reality. So how does this relate to existence?

My point is about that validation of concepts. The illustration (of Phoenix) you understood, but did not apply it to the concept existence. I meant, if there is even one existent, no matter what it is, existence, as a concept, is established materially.

I could have used a better example, because "Phoenix" is a concept of an "entity" (in this case an imaginary one), but "existence" is actually a concept of a quality, like "red" or "round." In the case of qualities, so long as even one thing has that quality, the concept for that quality is valid.

The odd thing about the quality "existence" is, everything has it. That is why it is both universal and axiomatic. (I do not use the word "universal," as in epistemology, but to mean, always to all things true.) It is also why we talk about "existence" as though it were a thing, because, unlike other qualities, such as "red," which require there to be some existent things they are qualities of, the quality, "existence," for anything that has it, means that it is. That is why we can wave our arm, indicating the entire world, the universe, and heaven, too, and say, "everything is existence," which is to say, "everything that is, is." If everything had the quality red we could say everything is red, but we cannot say that about redness, but we can and must say it about existence.

Now, the question, "why is there something rather than nothing," supposes, "nothing," is a possible metaphysical universal fact. While the answer to the question, "what is in the box," can be "nothing," the answer to the question, "what is there," can never (logically, not temporally) be "nothing," for two reasons:

It is conceptually or logically impossible. To say there is nothing is to say nothing exists, but existence is a quality only of something. If anything exists, it is something, not nothing.
We have agreed that a concept is validated by at least one actual particular, but so long as not even one actual referrant can be discovered, the concept remains purely conceptual without material verity. The concept "nothingness" or "non-existense" (as metaphysically universal) is a concept which cannot have a referrent, by definition.
Existense exists. There is something (everything, actually). The fact of existence refutes the possibility of nothingness. For those who entertain the idea of nothingness, as metaphysically possible, since there is existence, it is impossible to escape the notion of nothingness being "before," or "after," existense in some sense, since non-existence cannot be while there is existence. But there can be no "before," or "after," existense, because these are qualities of existense. Non-existense has no qualities.

[I will be very interested in your response to these thoughts, as they were in part an exercise for me to clarify some of my own views in this matter. I am fully convinced, actually on other grounds, that the notion of nothingness is meaningless outside the context of existense, that is, it is a quality for cases like a box being empty, but as a concept for there being nothing but emptiness is absurd.]

Hank