A simple challenge for atheists

[Esquilax]

@Beccs Arguments like what caused God creates an infinite regression. Within the definition of God is the property of aseity. God just is or we would not be talking about God.

Which is very convenient for you, I'm sure, but it also means that you're now stuck right in the middle of the corollary of Beccs' argument: if you're just going to assert that god "just is," without evidence, then you have no reason at all not to accept the same argument in return to the "what caused the universe?" question, and we end up going nowhere. If you're willing to believe that god "just is," then your own beliefs allow for the existence of uncaused things, and the issue of the universe no longer poses the stunning, showstopper conundrum to atheism that theists often take it for.

Persisting with that question, now that god "just is," is effectively demanding that everyone else play by a set of rules you have no intention of following yourself, and that's not a game we need to play.

Regarding the initial topic, can someone give me an answer why the popular Kalam cosmological argument does not prevail--that the universe has a cause (leaving God out of if for now). Hawkings seems to need to change the definition of time and quantum theories all seem to have the same problem: quantum fields etc. are not "nothing" and therefore need a cause.

Well, with regard to the universe, Kalam fails for the reasons Davka stated earlier; spacetime is a condition within the universe, so there's no reason to think- and there are fairly good reasons to think otherwise- that a pre-big bang universe, in which the conditions were radically different, would follow a linear pattern of causation. Black holes already do weird things to time and space, and Kalam requires that we assume that an infinitely denser, weirder point of matter will just act like business as usual.

So there's a clear factual case against Kalam, but that's leaving aside the obvious flaws in argumentation too, like the fact that it relies on the sophistic "begins to exist" language, as though just asserting the existence of a category that doesn't play by the rules of the argument is sufficient justification, or the similar fiat assertion that the universe has a cause. The biggest problem with Kalam is that it's not even an argument, contrary to its name: it's just a set of petulant demands made with no evidence.

I don't understand why it's as popular as it is, in that regard.