No, I don't think the universe needs an explanation. Other things might, but not the universe.

Ok, but if that's true, then it seems like we are abandoning the entire point of scientific inquiry and even human curiosity, which is to understand the chain of cause and effect and why things are the way they are. For example, let's say someone observes an event - like a large lake appearing in the middle of the desert. The scientific question is to ask: What caused that? And we try to look for underground waterway system, a series of giant rainstorms, something that will provide an explanation for this event. And if someone answers, "Well, nothing caused that; it just happened, that's all" I think we would recognize: that's not a scientific answer, and that's not even a reasonable answer! We could say: "I don’t know yet..." But to simply state that something came out of nothing and that's the end of the story - we don't accept that as an answer, because we intuitively know that for any new event or a new thing that begins to exist, there must be a cause.

In any case, I'm glad we got to have this discussion, and feel free to keep navigating the site!