I'm not going to debate the argument in this thread. I'm just looking for takers. If you choose to debate me, of course, I will happily address your points.

Silly rabbit.  He just won the debate.

 To be fair, we can't really make anyone refrain from posting, but I do think it would be nice if everyone would let you two go at it.  I'd suggest that if someone really has something they want to say, it would be courteous to start a new thread for it.

Have fun, kids.

Stosis has levelled seven charges against the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA):

(1) None of KCA-4.1 through KCA-4.281 is relevant.

(2) KCA-1 contradicts KCA-4.211, so KCA is incoherent.

(3) KCA-2.11 is an unsupported assertion, and there is no evidence that it is true.

(4) If KCA-2.11 is true, then KCA-4.25 is nonsensical, because timelessness is either an actual temporal infinite, or lacks the temporal dimension.

(5) KCA rests on reserving timelessness, non-causal creation, and infinity to the creator.

(6) There is no reason to believe that timelessness, non-causal creation, and infinity are necessary or sufficient for the existence of the universe.

(7) KCA is a paradox like: This statement is true. The previous statement is false.

On the contrary, it is written: "I AM WHO AM."

Not one of these holds. I will address each of (1)-(7) in order.

(1) Stosis is not clear what the premises in question are allegedly irrelevant to. If we read him charitably, it seems that he is saying that they are irrelevant to establishing the conclusion of KCA. But they are relevant to the conclusion of the argument, as the conclusion states in part that the creator is "changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful and intelligent," none of which could be established without KCA-4.1 through KCA-4.281. So it is reasonable to dismiss this assertion as either ambiguous or obviously false.

(2) The argument for this point is that KCA-1 says that "whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence," which cannot be true if an infinite regress cannot exist, per KCA-4.211. But KCA-1 does not imply that an infinite regress cannot exist, only that each thing that begins to exist has some cause. This formulation allows the possibility (and in conjunction with the rest of KCA's premises, demands the actuality) of a regress that is terminated by something that didn't begin to exist, and doesn't have a cause of its existence. The appeal of (2) presumably follows from an implicit assumption on Stosis' part that everything that exists began to exist. That premise is perhaps plausible to Stosis, but I see no reason to accept it without additional argumentation. So (2) is either false or insufficiently supported.

(3) I will grant that there is not "evidence" that KCA-2.11 is true. It is a philosophical - or perhaps mathematical - premise, however, so it is proper to argue for it on a priori, not a posteriori, grounds. I do not agree that the premise is unsupported, as Stosis claims. If we reflect on the idea that an actual infinite cannot exist, we see that it has some prima facie plausibility, and I think that this plausibility gives it enough support that we can reasonably believe in it until reason not to believe in it materializes. I do not mean that the premise is immune from doubt, but I do think that there is something about the premise itself that inclines us to belief in the absence of opposition. So Stosis has a burden of refutation here, so far as I am concerned. We can also argue for the premise with the well-known "Hilbert's Hotel" argument:

Consider a hypothetical hotel with infinitely many rooms, all of which are occupied – that is to say every room contains a guest. Suppose a new guest arrives and wishes to be accommodated in the hotel. If the hotel had only finitely many rooms, then it can be clearly seen that the request could not be fulfilled, but because the hotel has infinitely many rooms then if you move the guest occupying room 1 to room 2, the guest occupying room 2 to room 3 and so on, you can fit the newcomer into room 1. By extension it is possible to make room for a countably infinite number of new clients: just move the person occupying room 1 to room 2, the guest occupying room 2 to room 4, and in general room N to room 2*N, and all the odd-numbered rooms will be free for the new guests. [From Wikipedia]

So (3) fails unless Stosis can both refute the Hilbert's Hotel argument and argue for the possibility of an actual infinite.

(4) Stosis poses the disjunction ""timelessness" is either an infinite in the temporal dimension, or lacks the temporal dimension." But if he had paid closer attention to KCA-4.251, which says "In the complete absence of change, time does not exist, and the Creator is changeless," he would have seen that only the latter is a plausible interpretation of the argument. He seems to believe that it is a problem for KCA that timelessness denotes an absence of a temporal dimension, but it isn't obvious why. It is possible that he believes it is impossible for anything to lack a temporal dimension, but that is a silly objection, since KCA-4.251 says that the creator's lacking a temporal dimension just is the creator's not changing, and it is obviously possible for something not to change. In any event, we can say that even if KCA-4.25 is nonsensical for some as-yet-unspecified reason, it is not nonsensical because of KCA-2.11, as Stosis claims. So (4) is strictly false in any event, and it is also broadly false barring better argument against KCA-4.25.

(5) and (6) commit essentially the same error. They state that KCA is defective because it only grants certain traits to the creator and holds that it is necessary for the creator of the universe to have those traits, but neither (5) or (6) addresses the reasons why KCA concludes that those claims are true. So we can dismiss both of these because they simply do not engage the argument.

(7) This seems to be a sort of wrapping-up of what was said previously. I include it here to point out that if it was meant as an argument, it needs to be clarified. A lot.

I look forward to Stosis' response.

While Google would give you responses to KCA, it would not tell you how to defend the specific objections nigel made to KCA against the specific objections that I made to nigel. Anyway, the arguments that nigel made have a large following, as evidenced by the many posts in the thread "Comments on 'Requesting a Debate on the Kalam Cosmological Argument'". So I am sure someone else will step forward to defend nigel's post.

That said, try not to agree to any more 1000-word formal debates that you do not plan to participate in.

"1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence."

What do you mean by "begins to exist"?  That at one moment it doesn't exist, but later it does?  If that's the case, it doesn't apply to our universe as a whole.  Time is a part of our universe - it doesn't exist without of the universe that contains it.   But that implies: there is not a time when our universe didn't exist.

Realize that this does not imply anything about whether the universe is infinitely old.  In some physicists views time behaves like latitudes on the earth.  As we travel north, we get closer to the north pole, but if we continue past the north pole but keep traveling in the same direction, we are travelling south again.  In a way, "north" ends - but in a clean manner with no abrupt edge of the earth or anything.  Einstein showed how time and space can curve with each other.  It's possible that if a time machine existed that could take us back to the earlier moments in the universe - by continuing in the same direction, initially backwards in time, we'd pass the "beginning of time" pole and without noticing any abrupt edge to time or space, we'd find our time machine going towards the future again.  I doubt such a time machine could ever be built or survive the harsh conditions at the early moments of our universe, but that doesn't change the fact that this sort of description of time is mathematically consistent and physically plausible.

That is to say, there can be earliest point in time without time having "to begin".

"2.1 Argument based on the impossibility of an actual infinite:..."

Infinities exist in mathematics, and mathematics is the abstract study of what is logically possible and noncontradictory.  Mathematics has also been shown to describe the real world exceptionally well.  Saying that actual infinities can't exist in the real world is mere special pleading.  There is no logical reason why they cannot - having actual infinities in the real world entails no contradiction.  Now one might argue that due to our own human limitations we can never prove the existence of an actual infinity in our world, if we found something potentially infinite we could never be sure it wasn't really finite - but that's a limitation on our condition, not a restriction on what our universe could be like.

"3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence."

Even if we disallow actual infinities in the world, and even if something has a definite beginning in time, there is still not any logical necessity for it to be caused.  Causation is merely an observed property of our world, and is related to conservation of mass and energy.  But it is still possible to imagine other worlds where causality is violated.  Even in our own world, it depends how deep we look...  pairs of virtual particles may simply pop into existence seemingly randomly and uncaused.

I want to ask you what the difference is between an existing thing and a nonexisting thing.    Does something about a nonexisting thing have to change before that thing can exist?

Now I want to introduce an alternative viewpoint that makes better sense of why there is something rather than nothing.

The idea is that infinitely many varied worlds exist in the realm of possibility, some are really similar to ours with just minor variations, and some are radically different from ours.  Philosophers, such as David Lewis, have found possible-world talk extremely useful in resolving other issues in philosophy - such as how counterfactual statements can have any real truth or falsity.  (The counterfactual question of "Would America still have slavery if the South had won the civil war" has an answer.  It is false if among the alternative ways the world could be that are as similar to ours as possible except that the war was won by their counterpart to our South, slavery has been abolished by now.)

The point I want to emphasize is that by merely having a possible way for an inhabited world to be - that is all that is necessary for intelligent inhabitants of that world to think that they exist.  In this view, "actuality" is understood as indexical term, meaning it's referent varies depending on the circumstances wherein it is used.  "Here" and "now" are also indexical terms, where I call here is not necessarily the same place you mean the next time you use the word "here".   We call things "actual" if they are part of the same world as us.  Things that exist in other worlds are not actual, but merely possible.  People in alternate worlds call their worldmates actual and consider many of the things in our world to be unactualized possibilities.

I also want to point out that these worlds are only transcendable by abstract ideals.   The realm of mathematical truths is shared among all worlds.  But anything that could be different than it is; which includes all living beings, places, and things; exists in only one world, although they have identical counterparts in other worlds.   It is debatable whether it is even possible for a god to exist.  (Impossible things are not part of any world.)   But if, just for the sake of argument, we grant that a god could exist, there are thus possible worlds were he does and other possible worlds where he doesn't; possible worlds where God is good and worlds where he is evil or insane; and worlds where he sends his only daughter rather than his only son.  Since the plurality of worlds exist solely out the logical necessity that there be many variations on ways things can be - beings can't transcend these worlds.  In a way, the plurality of worlds turns out to be more fundamental than any god could be.

For an in-depth philosophical defense of possible worlds theory, read "On the Plurality of Worlds" by David Lewis.

That was an intellectually bankrupt response, Stosis. I'm not a big fan of Kalam, but simply dismissing it is adolescent.

but pretty damned accurate.

"An actual infinite is a collection of things having a proper subset which has the same number of members as the original collection itself." ~from your source article.

This isn't entirely correct because "number of things" doesn't work with infinities.  What the article should say is that an actual infinite is a set having a proper subset which has the same cardinality (number-ish, but works with infinities) as the original set itself.

Accordingly I present the set Z, that is the set of all integers.  It fits this article's definition of actual infinite, thus demonstrating that such infinities are possible.  I also submit the position of a particle P as an actual infinite.  By virtue of the uncertainty principle, the position of P is by its nature "spread out" across some region, or length in the simplified 1D scenario.  Since any length contains an infinite number of points, we find that P is in a superposition of an actual infinite number of states.

Furthermore, the source's assertion that a set formed by successive addition cannot be infinite fails to consider the possibility of infinitely many successive additions.  This is the basis for proofs by induction.  By proving the base case and then proving that from any case we can add one more case, we demonstrate that via infinitely many successive additions of a single case the theorem holds for all cases, even though the number of cases is an actual infinity and we are essentially adding one case at a time.

The source also resolves the Tristram Shandy paradox poorly.  Rather than assert that Tristram's future is a potential infinity, the source asserts that future itself is a potential infinity, which is more than needs to be claimed to resolve the paradox.  In "turning the story around," the resolution would be that Tristram's past is a potential infinity, rather than that the past itself is a potential infinity.  The paradox lies in giving Tristram an infinite past, not in having past itself be infinite.

The source also makes a subtle error between minimum and infimum.  In support of premise 2, the argument basically goes from "there is a time zero" to "there is a beginning," which is just like saying "this set never drops below zero" thus "zero is the minimum."  The problem is that even if there is a time zero, a time than which nothing earlier exists, this does not mean that there is a first cause.  Time zero forms an infimum, which is not necessarily a minimum.  It is entirely possible (especially considering that distance is also tending towards zero as we wind back the clock) that as we approach time zero the length of time between an event and its cause decreases, allowing an infinite regress of causes to approach time zero asymptotically.  Thus, for any event, you can find an earlier cause, and there is no first cause or minimum despite the fact that no cause occurs before time zero, the infimum.

The source fails to explain why the oscillating model cannot work.

The source then asserts 4.11, which is a dichotomy that is not well-established.  The source assets that either the universe began from sufficient and necessary mechanical conditions, or it began from an intelligent free agent.  While I myself am unable to offer a third option, the argument does nothing to demonstrate that such a third option cannot exist.

The source's support of 4.11 demonstrates the difficulty in thinking about "before time."  The source assumes that if the universe were a result of sufficient and necessary mechanical conditions, then those conditions must have existed for all eternity.  However, the source has previously asserted that time itself begins with the universe, and thus there is no "all eternity" for these conditions.  These conditions could, conceivably, have existed timelessly, and the effect (the universe) started time off.  This avoids the apparent paradox of having the conditions wait around for eternity, because there is no eternity.  There is no time, so the conditions weren't "waiting" at all.

The source claims that its refutation of the mechanical first cause results in the necessity of a free agent first cause, without explaining how such a free agent could overcome the same difficulties presented to the mechanical cause.  It's conclusion is based on an un-demonstrated dichotomy.

"And then on the rest of the page it's fairly obvious how I deduce the remainder of these attributes..." is insufficient.  Since this occurs at the end of the document, it seems that "the rest of the page" is referring to the outline, the only other time such attributes are mentioned. 

While "timeless, spaceless, and imatteareal" do make some sense in the outline, the source merely assumes that creating the universe requires "power" (power is not defined.  The physics definition is energy per time, which being timeless and energyless (imatteareal) cannot apply to this supposed being.  What does the source mean by "power"?), while not supporting the claim.  The source seems to use the word power as a measure of capability, but the only apparent capability needed to create the universe is the capability to create the universe.  This says nothing of what the supposed cause might be capable of later.

The source also assumes "fine tuning" and attributes this to the supposed cause's intelligence.  However, this could be equally explained by saying that a stupid creator made many trillions of different universes, and got at least one right through mere chance.

Finally, the source concerns itself with demonstrating the existence of a first cause with supposed attributes, yet does nothing to demonstrate that such a cause continues to effect the universe.  This source essentially argues the deist position, rather than the theist position.  Contrary to its final claim, such a cause is NOT what most people mean by God.

He's still correct. The response from EXC was shallow and not thought out.

An integer is not an actual item. It is a concept.

This is not an actual infinite since it is not an infinite number of particles else it would be infinitely energetic or massive. This is another example of a bounded potential infinity of states.

Neither has any physicist. So you seem to be refuting via science fiction at this point.

You are refuting via the same argument YE creationists use. Despite the evidence something else could have happened. Very weak and illogical.

The dichotomy is definitionally  natural vs supernatural. The only burden is to overcome the known scientific problem of creation ex nihilo. 

I don't see why you put theory in quotes.  In science, the term theory generally means the whole collection of ideas, investigative methods, past results, and further questions that are involved in forming one school of thought on one subject.   The Theory of Relativity, for example, isn't one statement that is either true is false - it is an extensive body of knowledge with multiple assumptions and multiple conclusions.  Two of its assumptions are the constancy of the speed of light in vacuum, and the equivalence of gravitational mass and inertial mass.  And the various mathematical methods people have later found for finding new solutions to Einstein's field equations are just as much part of the Theory of Relativity as the premises he started with.  One doesn't falsify scientific theories - one falsifies individual assumptions that may be shared by various theories, and much of the time, those theories can live on with minor revisions.

But, anyway, we were originally talking in the context of philosophical theory, not scientific theory.  Falsifiablity is generaly not a useful criteria for comparing philosophical theories against each other.  Karl Popper, who was a major proponent of falsifiability in science, often pointed out that his own philosophical theory (which he refered to as Realism) was not falsifiable - but he didn't consider that to be a problem for it.  Philosophical theories are compared, rather, by their scope of application, their ease of being taught and explained, their usefulness in resolving philosophical conundrums, their own internal consistency, and more often than not, just the general feeling of satisfaction that proponents get from them.

In the context of this thread, I introduced David Lewis' theory of modal realism just to show the original poster that there is at least one major alternative to the line of thought he was taking.  That is, I didn't want the original poster to be stuck on one line of thought from the mistaken belief that his was the only game going.   He has other choices to explore.

...Wait, wait.

All that you want, Presup, is somebody to poke holes in a centuries-old theistic argument? And then you'll try and plug them up?

Fuck, dude, sign me up. I'll 'debate' you. Uh, who's going to judge the debate, though? Or is this just a shits'n'giggles affair?

So the argument only works if you assume the existence of the being that the argument is trying to prove?