Invitation for Atheists to Debate a Christian via Skype

[SenseMaker007]

There are sound reasons to believe in a first cause

I'm curious about the reasons you find to be sound.

The fact that there are a number of causes in the world and one of them must be first.

What cause is the cause before the second cause?

That's one reason.

Another reason is that scientists consider the universe to be finite.

And a philosophical reason to believe in a finite universe is the fact that it's more parsimonious.

Occam's razor says that you shouldn't postulate more entities than necessary. Well, what postulates more unnecessary entities than infinity?

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There are sound reasons to believe in a first cause ... but there are no sound reasons to believe that that first cause has a personality.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(philosophy)

^^^ but without the "divine being" aspect.

Is this equivocation I see?

My bold.

I think you're going to have to explain how that's an equivocation.

Also, you have cut out all the stuff in the middle of my post.

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If you look at Griffith's proof above, QM implies that the Universe is eternal, without beginning or end.  It just IS.

I agree that the universe is eternal. That doesn't mean that it's without a beginning. Without an end? Yes.

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If you look at Griffith's proof above, QM implies that the Universe is eternal, without beginning or end.  It just IS.

Aristotle also thought that the universe is eternal. This is why we speak of a First Cause as being essential, not temporal.

Causality requires time ... and the concept of "first" requires time. Nothing happened before time. Time was the beginning if "beginning" is used in a way that means anything we can understand.

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But I still think it's meaningful to talk about the cat's existence. It didn't exist for a long time, and then it existed for a while, and then it didn't any more.

The cat didn't always exist as a cat but it always existed in some form. Before it was a cat the atoms that make up its body were something else instead.

You can apply that to the cat because the cat has a contigent existence. All we mean when we say that the cat used to not exist is that the cat used to be something else. We can't say that to reality as a whole. Reality is not contingent on anything, everything else is contingent on it.

This guy gets it right: