Kalam Cosmological Nonsense

[Lord Privy Seal]

Premise 1 is flawed: A carpenter can build a house where none previously existed.

As has already been pointed out, the house is a re-arrangement of pre-existing energy/matter. A carpenter cannot create a house from the non-existent.

Prior to Newton and Leibniz calculus did not exist, now it does.

Are you suggesting that cannonballs did not follow ballistic trajectories before Newton and Leibniz? "Calculus" is a mathematical description of the behavior of entities in Universe under certain conditions. So is "2+2=4." Such descriptions are discoveries, not "creation" from non-existence.

Just for Fun:
Define 'global universe'. What does it include and more specifically what, besides God and silly examples like pink unicorns, does it exclude?

Seeing Median's definition, I now must diverge from him a bit. I define "Universe" (capital-U, no "the") as the total of everything that exists, including any gods, goddesses, faeries, djinn, sprites, angels, demons, ghosts, dryads, spirits, etc. and so forth (whatever those might be, should any of them turn out to exist), as distinct from "the Cosmos" (everything that emerged from our Big Bang).

I see no need to try to "exclude" gods/goddesses a priori. However, before we can add the purported existence of any such entities to our inventory of the known, I think it is up to the claimant (the theist, the believer in faeries, etc.) to provide a coherent non-self-contradictory definition of what they're talking about, and provide sufficient evidence in favor of its existence. Basically, the same thing any scientist would need to do if they want to assert the existence of a new quantum particle. "Sufficient evidence" means that the evidence presented must rise to a level that makes the most sense of all observations, not just those in favor of the phenomenon. For example, a person who wanted to claim that Phlogiston does, in fact exist and is the proper explanation for thermodynamics would have a higher burden of proof than someone proposing a new flavor of Higgs boson that would explain cosmic inflation, but otherwise contradicts no solidly-validated observational evidence. In a nutshell: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Define the essential properties a real thing must have in order to exist.

This is one of those things that can result in endless philosophical tail-chasing. For the sake of simplicity, I'll go with two overlapping stipulations: "When you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away" (paraphrase of Philip K. Dick), and "it produces observable consequences that would not result if it did not exist" (paraphrase of a more extensive discussion by Eliezer Yudkowsky).