The Problem with Christians

[Angrboda]

This is conflating creation ex materia with creation ex nihilo.  The muffin is created ex materia.  The universe is posited to have been created ex nihilo.  The two are not equivalent cases.

You are right, Jorm. But does this muffin analogy actually damage the overall argument? Or is it generally useful? 

If you were walking alone in the woods and you came upon black metal box with hinges and a padlock in the middle of the trail, would your first thought be like that of Bertrand Russell, "Well, locked black boxes like this just are, and that's all there is to it"? Or would you assume implicitly that someone made the box, locked it, and placed it in the path?

And if the box can be presumed to have a maker, why not something larger...like a house, for instance? Or an aircraft carrier? Or a planet or even the universe itself? Does the size of the thing in question really change our willingness to conceive of its maker?

You're all over the map with your argument. This black box analogy has nothing to do with the Kalam style argument you were making. And since I wasn't complaining of a composition fallacy, your concerns about the size of the object are unrelated to the complaint given. The fallacy in the Kalam argument noted is equivocation, and none of what you've written addresses that.

This is an abduction from the basic result and thus requires verification, which you obviously can't provide.  We have no way of inferring the accuracy of your claims here.  Thus the reasoning is pure conjecture.

And how reasonable is that conjecturing, Jorm? Pretty good? Yes.  

Without some form of verification, it's as useless as conjecturing that something can come from nothing, which is an equally likely alternative. (Which is to say the likelihood is unknown.)

You're dancing around the issue: if something (real, physical, material) exists, then everything that is necessary for its existence must also exist.

If you think otherwise, demonstrate an example.

It's funny how you want verification of an alternative hypothesis, yet require none for your own. That's special pleading. When you can provide independent attestation to your abduction, then you can demand that I do likewise.

Design is something either evolved brains or created souls do.  If you insist that it was souls, then you're begging the question of the existence of the theist worldview.  If evolved brains, then the analogy from human design is flawed because God is not a similar designer and thus constitutes an unrelated phenomenon.  Since design, even if true, may point to a naturalistic designer, you have made no headway on demonstrating a supernatural God.

I'm not arguing for "created souls"; I'm arguing for an uncreated, necessary, Intelligent Designer who must have existed outside of space before they were created.

You're arguing for a supernatural basis of design, namely that the human designer is a spirit, and thus not subject to the constraints of evolution. That would make the parallel between human design and God achieved design a suitable analogy. Without that, you've got a dissimilarity in your analogy between the thing being analogized and the analogizee. That makes your design argument a false analogy. And as noted, your argument for why an intelligent designer who existed outside of time and space is doubly flawed in that the argument for a cause rests on an equivocation, and the nature of the cause rests on an unsupported abduction.