In Defense of the Kalam

[Esquilax]

I didn't make a bare assertion. I stated a self-evident truth.

Oof, come on. Don't take the lazy way out. Nobody else here is so intellectually stagnant as to simply assert that their positions are self-evident, and I have no reason to accept it as true from you, when we already know that in certain circumstances your "self-evident" truth isn't really correct, right now.

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.

More assertions, especially when they're in conflict with the science. Besides, all you're really showing is that within a temporal framework, the majority of the things that you see have causes. But that temporal frame only exists within the universe, and to expect things outside of it to fall into the same category is a fallacy of composition.

That's the third time I've told you that. Strike three. Let's see if it sinks in this time.

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.

Bullshit! For one, you've got absolutely no eternal things with which to draw any information to make that statement at all, so it's a baseless handwave to keep you from having to explain shit you don't have an answer for. Second, it's just another assertion: you've attempted to justify your first assertion ("Eternal things can't change,) with your second assertion ("things without origins are unable to change,") and that's just bullshit. You can layer fantasy after fantasy on top of your initial bald claim, but that doesn't make any of it true. It just means you've got an increasingly complex ad hoc mess.

Come back with something real, and not more stories.

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.

You're still attempting to force these questions into a temporal framework: what does "start" even mean, in a place without a forward flow of time? There's no second to start in, and no additional units of time for which that beginning can differentiate itself from the period where there wasn't such a thing.

And not only are you utterly failing to frame these issues in the correct parlance, you're also failing to answer the questions they raise honestly. Science stops at that point and admits it doesn't know, that we don't yet have an answer for these questions of origins. I'm fine with that, but you're asserting that something definitely cannot happen, and you're asserting god based on fallacious reasoning and no evidence at all, and that's where we find a problem.

You are, right now, completely wrong. The only way to resolve this, to become right, is to give us more than simple assertions and claims.

[Alex K]

you're really showing is that within a temporal framework, the majority of the things that you see have causes. But that temporal frame only exists within the universe, and to expect things outside of it to fall into the same category is a fallacy of composition.

I've already considered putting this stuff as a macro on my F2 key. I swear I've typed it ten times in the few weeks here.