The Kalam Cosmological Argument

[Disagreeable]

Quoting from Wikipedia: 'The most prominent form of the Kalam cosmological argument, as defended by William Lane Craig, is expressed as the following syllogism:

Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.'

I find this argument laughable because it's supposed to be an argument for God but the conclusion is just that the universe has a cause.

[Ivan Denisovich]

Quoting from Wikipedia: 'The most prominent form of the Kalam cosmological argument, as defended by William Lane Craig, is expressed as the following syllogism:

Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.'

I find this argument laughable because it's supposed to be an argument for God but the conclusion is just that the universe has a cause.

Let's agree with it and then ask what caused god to exist. Super god obviously. What caused super god to exist? Ultra god perhaps. What caused ultra god to exist? ... It's the turtles all the way down and anyone who takes this crap of an "argument" seriously is simply delusional.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Quoting from Wikipedia: 'The most prominent form of the Kalam cosmological argument, as defended by William Lane Craig, is expressed as the following syllogism:

Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.'

I find this argument laughable because it's supposed to be an argument for God but the conclusion is just that the universe has a cause.

And it doesn’t even do that much, since the first premise is not obviously true.

Boru

[Sheldon]

Quoting from Wikipedia: 'The most prominent form of the Kalam cosmological argument, as defended by William Lane Craig, is expressed as the following syllogism:

Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.'

I find this argument laughable because it's supposed to be an argument for God but the conclusion is just that the universe has a cause.

I don't accept the first premise, as we don't know everything needs a cause, also all the causes they are citing to make this rule are natural every single time, and they occur within the physical universe we now observe. 

I am not sure the second premise makes sense, since beginning is defined as the point in time or space at which something begins. Since time and space are characteristics of the physical universe, you can't just assume it existed prior to the BB. 

I don't think the conclusion follows from the premises either, again because you can't assume cause and effect prior to the big bang, or that evidence of only natural causes gives us any reason to posit a supernatural cause. Finally the claim god did it, has no explanatory powers whatsoever.  

Also as has been pointed out, even were we to accept a cause, there is no objective reason to believe a deity was the cause, and of course you can't create a rule that everything needs a cause, then break that rule for a deity, without begging the question and using a special pleading fallacy. Perhaps Lane Craig is another professional religious philosopher who was off sick when they studied fallacies in informal logic? 

He also in a debate with the late Christopher Hitchens, didn't know what atheism means. Something else his theological and philosophical training skipped? 

[The Grand Nudger]

Kalam asserts a rule for no purpose other than to immediately reject it.

[Belacqua]

I find this argument laughable because it's supposed to be an argument for God but the conclusion is just that the universe has a cause.

All the first cause arguments only attempt to show a first cause. 

All of them make clear that additional information about that first cause, e.g. that it must be the God of the Bible, are not included in the argument, and must be argued through other means. 

That's just how such arguments work.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I find this argument laughable because it's supposed to be an argument for God but the conclusion is just that the universe has a cause.

All the first cause arguments only attempt to show a first cause. 

All of them make clear that additional information about that first cause, e.g. that it must be the God of the Bible, are not included in the argument, and must be argued through other means. 

That's just how such arguments work.

Nonsense. Craig resurrected (pardon the pun) Kalam for the express purpose of proving God, and that the God involved is not only the God of the Bible, but the God of Craig’s particular flavour of Christianity. Look up his two theses.

Boru

[Disagreeable]

'Being' can just refer to existence and can also refer to a conscious agent. I've seen theists equivocate on that fact plenty of times.

[Sheldon]

I find this argument laughable because it's supposed to be an argument for God but the conclusion is just that the universe has a cause.

All the first cause arguments only attempt to show a first cause. 

All of them make clear that additional information about that first cause, e.g. that it must be the God of the Bible, are not included in the argument, and must be argued through other means. 

That's just how such arguments work.

Whilst this was originally true, it certainty is not true of all of them. As others have explained, William Lane Craig, as one example, has included his deity in the argument. Very badly I grant you, but from what I've seen of his arguments he is a very poor philosopher, as a very strong bias skews and permeates all his reasoning.

[brewer]

Can't argue anything into existence. Can agure that anything might exist and that's when the problems start.