Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[R00tKiT]

Are you saying that the APS is allowing the publication of scientific papers that purport to model physical impossibilities?  Also, if an eternal past is impossible is an infinitely spatial Universe also physically impossible?

I am not sure the references you presented really suggest an eternal past. Although physics isn't exactly my field of expertise, in the few undergraduate courses I took, simplifying (but unrealistic) assumptions are very common. We assume, for example, the existence of a frictionless plane [Flash news: it doesn't exist] in basic classical mechanics courses in order to illustrate some Newtonian law.

As of an infinite space, I can't think of any reason of why it may be impossible. An eternal past is surely impossible, though, an "infinite amount of time elapsing" is clearly a contradiction.

No, I did not say that.  I said the cosmological argument can't be applied because we can't know whether that predecessor universe began to exist.  The rest is your invention.

If the purported predecessor universe didn't begin to exist, then it's eternal, and we use the same argument as before: inside this (eternal) predecessor universe, there has to be an infinite duration preceding the point where it causes our universe -impossible.

Thus, any possible predecessor universe must be finite in time, otherwise we have an eternal past. And because of that, we can still apply the cosmological argument to the predecessor universe.

Regardless of its irrelevance, you haven't presented a valid argument against actual infinities, so until you do, your objection is groundless.  You can't rule it out until you do.

Again, the only possible argument against actual infinities is to show that they yield an eternal past. Other than that, Swinburne, a professional theologian, conceded in his famous book The existence of God that there are no good arguments against actual infinities independently of time. 

It's clear why an infinite chain of universes yields an eternal past. If we assign every event or element in the causal chain to some point along the flow of time, then we must exhaust an infinitely long portion of time to get to present element of the chain (our universe), this is clearly impossible.

I meant deductive inferences, but even inductive inferences are falsified by counter-examples, it's just a question of how much.  Since it's irrelevant, I won't discuss that aspect further.  You stated an absolute rule that has a counter-example; that invalidates the rule as an absolute, regardless of whatever else you might say.  Since your rule admits of exceptions, it is not itself a bar to a valid exception to it and is thus not absolute.  I'm not making any case for a malevolent deity, but rather pointing out the flaw in your reasoning that a malevolent deity could not be responsible for the good that exists in the world.  For the same reason that a good god may allow evil, a bad god may allow good; it may even insist on it.  It's the same logic in both cases, that an overriding goal may justify subgoals that are not themselves apparently consistent with that overriding goal.  That you endorse the logic when made on behalf of a good god, but object when it is used to defend the possibility of a bad god either shows that you are a hypocrite, or that you simply haven't the first clue about what you are talking about.

Regarding the issue of benevolence/malevolence, my argument was simply that the instances of good outweigh evil. If this is the case, we can't infer a malevolent deity based on minor instance of evil. We know, for example, that natural disasters are occasional, they are not the default state of the Earth. One simply can't ignore the default state and use an exceptional state as a premise in an inductive argument.... you know what I mean.