"Everything has a cause and an explanation" discussion.

[Pyrrho]

I would not go as far as that, but until a reason is given to think that everything does have a cause, and everything does have an explanation, there is no reason to believe that everything has a cause, and everything has an explanation. With an absence of evidence, the most sensible position is to withhold judgement, and neither affirm that they are true, nor that they are false. And as others have observed, the questions themselves are less than perfectly clear, so it is entirely possible that we could be led in different directions with different interpretations.

I rather doubt we are going to see any proof of either proposition appearing in this thread any time soon.

I think we can. I provided logical proof that not everything has a cause or a beginning in another thread. What's nice about it is it's pretty intuitive.

Pretty much goes like this:

Out of nothing, nothing arises.

Prove it. The fact that people generally believe that that is the way the world works is irrelevant. They may be mistaken. What we typically observe are correlations (Hume's "constant conjunctions"), and suppose that they are causes. And as some people are fond of saying, a correlation is not a cause. One may say, even if the correlation is coincidentally constant.

Even setting that aside, and imagining that normal things cause other things, that does nothing to prove that nothing cannot cause something, or, what would appear to be the same thing, something spontaneously coming to be without some external cause.

The "out of nothing, nothing arises" is an assumption people make, not something that they prove. I am not presently willing to grant you such an assumption.

But we know that nothingness does not exist as we have this reality existing. This means all things that exist either arose from something or have always been. Allowing only the possibility that all things come from something fails to acknowledge that at some point "back" in "time" (whatever "time" is), there must have been some eternal stuff leading to this reality. So we should accept that there are stuff that have always been (i.e. without any causes or beginnings).

Now what this thing may be could be anything. And that's where I believe we should withhold judgement about what this whole thing is until sufficient relevant information is revealed.

If I understand your meaning, you seem to reject the possibility of an infinite regress, that everything cannot have a prior cause, that the universe cannot simply have always existed (where "the universe" is understood to be the collection of all that is; a collection of things, not a separate thing). I see no reason to accept that claim.

So that, even if I accept "normal" ideas of causation, everything that exists at any point in time may owe its existence to something else that existed in a prior time. Consequently, there is no reason to accept the idea that anything is eternal; it may all be contingent, caused to be from prior things. There need not be any ultimate "beginning."

In fact, an argument (but short of a proof) can be made for the opposite, for we have no experience of anything being eternal, but everything comes to be, and ceases to be. Why suppose that there ever was a time when the universe was fundamentally different from the way it is now? If we grant the "normal" idea of causation, for all of our lives, for any time t, the cause of t may be found in t - 1, a prior moment in time. Why suppose that that rule does not apply eternally, so that there is no beginning, and no end?