In Defense of the Kalam

[Avodaiah]

Hi all, sorry I haven't replied in a while. Anyway...

Bare assertions don't mean much, especially when others are bringing to bear real science, and all you're doing is saying no, without providing anything.

I didn't make a bare assertion. I stated a self-evident truth. The fact that everything that begins to exist has a cause is not something we're unsure of until we see or detect it happening. It is a simple truth about existence itself. 0 does not make 1. Nothing does not make something. A lack of cause does not make a real effect.

The argument simply indicates that something must have caused the universe to exist. Why wouldn't that something be "the big bang"?

Let me answer your question with a question: Forget about why the universe's cause had to be outside of time, why do causes propagate inside of time? It's the way time works: The state of the universe at any point in time depends on the state of the universe immediately before it. It couldn't just have started by itself when there was nothing immediately before it, because then time would have been completely different from how we know it. This is an extroardinary claim to make, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
But like I said before, it can't go on forever into the past, either.

Speaking of which...

This... doesn't really follow at all. Why couldn't an eternal thing change too? To be honest, this is just a non sequitur.

I kind of already answered this question: If something doesn't have a starting point to change from, it can't change. Literally the entire universe changes. Therefore it had a starting point, i.e. not eternal.
Kind of reminds me of a quote I read earlier today...

all you're doing is saying no, without providing anything.

So if time didn't go infinitely into the past, and it didn't start by itself, then it must have been started by something outside of it. God? Maybe. Something else? Maybe. Nothing? No.