Self-evident truth is a thing

[MindForgedManacle]

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.

I doubt you know what an actual self-evident truth is in philosophy, but we'll see.

The Kalam does presuppose a couple things. It presupposes that nothing can never equal something (which is why everything that has a beginning has a cause)

..,No. The Kalam presupposes (among other things):

1) The A-theory of time
2) That there cannot be actual infinities
3) Something cannot come from nothing

The reason Kalam proposes "that which begins to exist, has a cause for its existence" is because of assumptions 2) and 3).

and that anything that moves has a starting point and an ending point (why everything in the universe must have a beginning).

Again, no for the reasons above. Alsom you're confusing Kalam, which is a cosmological style argument, with Prime Mover arguments.

These are not scientific laws, brought about by testing things time and time again and getting a consistent answer.

Uh, YES THEY ARE. Repeated experience of things having causes for their existence is why apologists find Kalam's 1st premise indubitable. Further, Kalam's 2nd premise IS based on science COMPLETELY. It's debatable, but to say it's not an premise whose attempted justification isn't from science is flat-out false.

These are mathematical and logical laws, laws that we know because it would be completely impossible for them to be any other way, and the kind of truths that the scientific method itself is based on.

Firstly, Kalam is making metaphysical assumptions, not strictly logical or mathematical ones.
Secondly, the claim that it is "completely impossible" for things to come into existence without a cause in any possible world is a whopper of a philosophical overplaying of your hand. Pray tell how you know it's impossible?

If nothing can equal something, then what's the point of looking for a cause for natural phenomena? They could just happen randomly for no reason.

Okay, you can't even make your own points properly, and you're - AGAIN - confusing two different argument styles. Firstly, Kalam does not presuppose "nothing can equal something". That is a clearly either violation of the Law of Identity, or you're equivocating "nothing" with a kind of thing.

Secondly, you're now confusing Kalam (a cosmological type argument) with arguments from contingency, which all rely on question-begging by their assumption of the ontological truth of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Thirdly, the reason we look for causes is because we live in states of affairs that have causes for effects. But to extrapolate that to the entire universe by such a chain of reasoning results in a composition fallacy.

Or if motion does not require a starting and ending point, then why would anyone want to know how the history of anything, or how something was before it changed in some way?

Because we're interested in it? Nor would a beginning of motion even imply God. Under the B-theory of time, there is a first "moment" of time, but the universe remains eternal because there never was a time when the universe didn't exist, since time and space are properties of the universe.

The fact is that these questions only make any sense because of self-evident truth, which is what a lot of arguments, including the Kalam, are based on.
Can we not agree on this?

No, and we finally come full circle: You don't understand what a self-evident truth is. Nothing about the Kalam has anything to do with self-evident truths. Self-evident truths would be something like the Law of Identity (A is A), i.e something that must be true, even for it to be considered false. So if I said the following:

"The Law of Identity is false."

I first assume the Law of Identity by declaring the Law of Identity. That is, I'm implicitly saying "The Law of Identity is the Law of Identity", and then I'm saying it's false, and hence create a contradiction.
THAT is a self-evident truth.

Go back to jerking off to William Lane Craig in a speedo. :p