Self-evident truth is a thing

[Esquilax]

So a while back, I started a thread defending the Kalam argument. Eventually I got pretty busy and ended up letting the thread expire, but it ended up being mostly about the difference between making a bare assertion and stating a self-evident truth.

Let's see if I can't simplify this for you:

In order for something to be self evident, it needs to be evident, which means you need evidence that demonstrates it to be true. When it comes to universal origins, you don't have that, because you have exactly one universe at your disposal, and an extremely limited understanding of its past, to the point where your brain literally may not be evolved to think in terms applicable to its beginning. That's not a slight on you, we're all in the same boat there.

The difference is that science stops at that point, admits that we don't know exactly how all this works, lists what evidence we do have and pledges to find more. You, on the other hand, claim to know certain things based on logic that we already know may not apply past a certain point, and your only defense of this is that it's self evident to you, while you're using an intuitive understanding of the universe as it is now, when we know for a fact that the universe back then was remarkably different.

That's the problem, and that's why claims of things being self evident are lazy shortcuts; you simply do not have enough of anything to make a claim like that here.