First order logic, set theory and God

[The Grand Nudger]

The point to P2, if I'm reading it right, is that we can't pick an arbitrary point in an essential chain and declare that that's the cause of what follows on. 

-and yet we will do just that in determining that some thing x has no meaningful cause in the way that all other things simply must.

That's the hook of -every- argument from cause.  Assert a rule or set of rules for no purpose other than to assert some x to break them.

When the OP wants to talk about the First Cause, it requires that we follow the essential chain all the way back. 

Back to what, and how do you know when to stop?  

Someone might say that a quantum flux started the whole universe. They would say that the causal chain begins there and continues through what we have now. But if we agree to P2, we're not allowed to begin at this arbitrary point, where something was already there. There was obviously  something quantum there which could fluctuate. More importantly, there were already laws of nature which meant that when the quantum flux occurred, it resulted in a universe. OK, the quantum flux was caused by a previous quantum flux, and pretty soon it's turtles all the way down. 

If it seems like turtles all the way down.., why not go with that...why not accept some form of infinitism?  That's one way out of manchhausens trilemma.  Otherwise, what are we doing? Saying, "it seems like that..but...no..not that, anything but that".

That's how rahn did it, in the rejection of p1, lol. Either the chain of cause extends infinitely, or some things in the chain do. Between two things asserted to have existed concurrently for an indeterminate amount of time, one actual and the other hypothetical..whats our explanation for rational preference in considering one of them the cause of the other...again?

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What we have here, is an argument that asserts something even more inexplicable than the things it purports to explain.

Rejects whatever rule it asserts at any point of convenience.

In which any premise can be rationally rejected.

In which every premise accepted has a rational exception.

Which can be accepted in it's entirety without objection and still won't prove what it purports to report.

That leaves us, even at the end of it, asking precisely the same question as we began with.

Otherwise known as a giant pile of trash wrapped in clumsy and unnecessary formalism to occlude all of the above.