Credible/Honest Apologetics?

[Simon Moon]

If someone's looking for credible and honest apologetics - and you whip out your kalam....calling them a joke when they tell you they'd already heard it and didn't find it credible or honest...might be a bad approach.

First of all, Simon M didn't say he didn't find it "credible" -whatever this is supposed to mean-, he said that the cosmological argument is structurally invalid. Secondly, the kalam is an extremely short syllogism and the conclusion follows from the preimses, that's the definition of validity.

Validity is a very low bar, the following argument is perfectly valid, even if it's ridiculous:

Premise 1: Peanut butter is awesome.
Premise 2: If peanut butter is awesome, aliens exist.

Conclusion : aliens exist.

If anyone who reads this doesn't understand why it's valid, they should spend some time studying logic and syllogisms.

So atheists can rest assured that they're not doing us a favor by granting that the kalam is valid, but if they don't grant us even that, then yeah, they are a joke.

Kalan contains an equivocation fallacy, thus making it invalid.

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Premise 1 is referring to the things we observe in the universe, beginning to exist from other stuff that already exists; trees, chairs, animals, cars, etc. This is creation ex materia.

Premise 2 is referring to the universe beginning to exist ex nihilo (unless you are claiming that your god needed other, already existing stuff to create the universe?)

This is an equivocation fallacy, using the same word(s), "begins to exist", to mean 2 different things; ex materia in one premise, ex nihilo in another premise.

So, if we use the first definition of "begins to exist", ex materia, that means the conclusion would be, that a god would be creating the universe out of already existing stuff. I don't think that's what theists mean when they claim a god created the universe. Which also leads to another major problem, "who" created the already existing stuff the god used to create the universe?

If we use the second definition of "begins to exist", creation ex nihilo, then that means that all the stuff we observe in the universe (trees, animals, chairs, etc) began to exist from nothing.

Kalam also contains the fallacy of composition.

Just because parts of the universe begin to exist, does not mean the universe itself began to exist.

Which leads to the main contentious premise. How do we know the universe began to exist? It is quite possible, that the universe always existed, but just in another form.