When I refur to 'nature'  and 'Mother nature'    I am refuring to the "END result" of what we see,  after a long line of evolutionary partici paction (sorry for the Ontario refrence}   Not really!)

            Now get up and  run, jog,  throw a soft ball   take a Blue Jay to a Major league ball park so that they can see what a big league ball player looks like.  Introduce  Cito to Tanya Harding because unlike Cito  she seems to know people who can HIT what they swing at.

We've observed that things in nature have causes. The argument is that we cannot conclude that nature itself has a cause, because this would be a fallacy of composition.

The problem with Kalam for me is that it does does not even really say what it seems to say. Allow me to explain.

Everything has a cause. Well sure but only if there are an infinite chain of causes. However, those who advance Kalam are trying to argue that something happened first. So there is not an infinite chain of causes. Now granted, they want to then make a jump to god did it but I really don't see where that is warranted at this point. Simply accept that there was a first thing that happened. So what was the first thing that happened?

One possible answer is that the universe began. That is pretty much it, the end of the causal chain. One can then speculate at will over what that means but one is left with the basic statement of what happened first. To make the leap at this point into god did it territory, we are now left with a new first thing that happened. Because for this to work, god has to exist. Done this way, whatever it was that god actually did was predicated on god existing.

However, we have a new problem now. Specifically, where is god? If he is not in some place (whatever that means), then what? OK, go with some type of multiple universe idea. Perhaps god has made a bunch of universes. However, then all of those universes and god itself are all embedded in a larger reality of a currently unknown nature. And that larger reality is now the point at which the chain of causes must break (unless there are more than one of those but let's not go there).

"(1) Everything that begins to exist has a causein any way "suggests that everything in nature has a cause"?"

Everything in nature exists. How are you missing the very simple tie-in here? Seriously, this is simple logic.

Already done, but it didn't help you. Not that I'm surprised, mind you.

I’ve understood this argument to be:

(Premise #1)
Everything that has a beginning has a cause.

(Premise #2)
The universe had a beginning.

(Conclusion)
The universe had a cause.

The problem with this argument (and I’m a Christian) is that A it doesn’t prove anything about the cause and therefore it could have been caused by a material cause of some sort. B, if you use it to say that ‘God’ must have been that cause (prime mover) then what in the world does that have to do with some Middle-Eastern Carpenter who claimed to be God, was killed for it, and raised Himself from the dead to prove it…

It’s just a bad argument for Christians to use.

Grace and peace,

"Apparently you have a problem comprehending basic English. Not that I'm surprised, mind you."

I'll tell you what: get back to me when you have either an argument or an intelligent criticism of an argument. Until then, go back to the sandbox and resume complimenting yourself on how rational you are. And don't worry: no one in the sandbox cares about arguments, either.

"Right back atcha."

Huh? Dude, you make no sense whatsoever. I've already presented an argument. I've critiqued an argument. You've added nada to the discussion. Example: You made a charge, to wit that I suffer from some amorphous delusion (since you've yet to define it). What precisely is the delusion I suffer from, and how precisely is it a delusion?

Exnihilo, as I said, I have my own problems with the KCA, but I don't think the problems you've raised are among them. Craig goes on after the KCA to analyze the concept of a cause of the universe: since it causes space and time, it must be immaterial and eternal. Since it brings the universe into being out of nothing, it must be extremely powerful. Since it brought the universe into being a finite time ago, it must be personal (since an impersonally existing set of eternal necessary and sufficient conditions would entail an eternal universe). And so on. So, while the KCA doesn't get us to Christ, Craig would argue that a conceptual analysis of its conclusion does get us to an immaterial, eternal, extremely powerful personal being who brought the universe into existence a finite time ago. That's not exactly small potatoes, even if it doesn't get us to, say, the entire catechism of the Catholic Church.

Further, Craig makes what philosophers call a cumulative case argument. The KCA gets you an immaterial, eternal, extremely powerful and personal creator of the universe; the fine tuning argument gets you a being who is interested in setting things up to produce intelligent life; the moral argument gets you a being who is good and concerned with our actions; the argument from religious experience buttresses the personal nature of this being; and the argument from the resurrection of Christ gets you to Christianity. Note, I'm not endorsing Craig's reasoning, I'm merely providing a sketch of how he goes about moving from some rather abstract and nebulous creator to the Christian god.

The phrase "Everything that begins to exist" is already problematic.

Everything around us is a collection of fundamental particles, most, if not all, of which condensed out of the plasma somewhere back not long after the Big Bang. That plasma emerged as the energy of the Big Bang cooled as the Universe expanded. In a sense, the fundamental stuff of which everything is made up has existed since the singularity, and has 'just' been re-arranged into different collections of atoms which we perceive as specific objects/entities. 

The energy which also ultimately derives from the Big Bang is what drives the rearrangement into different structures, and in that sense is the 'cause' of all activity, including re-organisations of matter which we perceive as the 'coming into existence' of some discrete object, but really "begins to exist" is a not really a precisely defined event for anything, just a point on the actually continuous rearrangement of the raw stuff of the universe that we perceive as a particularly significant transition.

So from our point of view within our Universe, the only thing which possibly could be said to have "begun to exist", is the Big-Bang, ie the Universe itself, and that could well have been the start of Time itself, making even "begin" a tricky term.

it all just boils down to what, if anything was required to trigger the Big-Bang? Science suggest that it need be nothing more than a random quantum twitch which happened to exceed some threshhold level.

Arguments which express things in such archaic terms as these 'classic' arguments are just so outdated in their concepts that they don't really get to first base.

IOW we don't actually observe anything "beginning to exist", we just see specific recognizable objects forming from other pre-existing stuff, driven by a flow of pre-existing energy. There is not necessarily any discrete, unique , identifiable 'cause'.

"BobSpence" is a label applied to an identifiably coherent, persistent collection of matter which can in principle be linked continuously back thu time to a very different collection of matter which emerged from the womb of my mother. And further back to a single fertilized cell, and and then traced back thru two cells, one that originally grew in the womb of my mother's mother, and another in the gonads of my father. And so on.

My personal awareness of myself, which is a process, not a material object, and so not subject to the Law of Conservation of matter/energy, and so can really "begin to exist", emerged gradually at an early stage in this process after "I" emerged from the womb.

Precisely what are you claiming "began to exist"? And where along this chain would you say that event occurred?

I am saying that that is not a meaningful phrase to apply to real world 'entities' within this universe. It is best applied to processes, not objects, or specific entities.

MY awareness began to exist at some time in my development, as it will cease to exist when I  die or go into a final stage of unconsciousness. Or it may gradually dissipate if Alzheimers or some such deterioration takes hold. My body will still exist.

We can say that before the fusion of egg and sperm, there was no unitary entity which was part of the sequence which came to be described as "bobspence". So that could be said to be when "I" "began to exist", but "I" as a thinking person did not begin then.

"Formed" or "began to develop and/or grow" would be better questions, somewhat more precise,  especially if you are conducting serious discussions on these issues.

When did the Sun "begin to exist"?

We can say that probably a large collection of gas and dust began to coalesce under the influence of gravity, getting hotter, until some nuclear reactions began to occur, releasing energy in the form of heat and light, and eventually forming a spherical glowing ball of nuclear fire.

Did it begin when the cloud started to collapse, or when the nuclear reactions started, or when it reached some level of light output?

All we can ask is when some entity reached some point in its growth and development. 

So all we really see is change. Using the term "begin to exist" is a matter of how we classify the different aspects of the changing forms we see.

That could well apply to the Universe. Whatever is the ultimate elementary 'stuff' of existence just became rearranged, due to the endless churn and twitchiness that Quantum Mechanics sees to reveal at the fundamental level of reality, in such a pattern that a Big Bang was triggered.

Matter cannot be created or destroyed, but the structures it can be arranged into can form and disappear.

Something that simply exists and does not change is just part of the background on which reality 'happens'. It may provide and constrain the nature of change that actually can occur, but to think of some such changeless thing as initiating and 'creating' anything would be like saying that the inert rocky foundation of the continents created life.

Let me be clearer.

If you abandon the Bible to make arguments on the same grounds that unbelievers want and you somehow get them to think God 'probably' exists as a result then all you really do is prove that some type of god or godlike thing, perhaps even pantheism is responsible for creation... its zigging when you need to zag, it's probably the reason God made the argument bad..  The next step is always a fight about some other point that the unbeliever disagrees with. Cuting to the chase is best I think.

Also this method will be bad when you later try to direct them back to the Bible as if you've needed it thus far.

If you appeal to science, reason, and history to prove your case then God is no longer your ultimate authority, science, reason, and history are. You have just made God subject to evidence and thus have elevated your own courtroom of reason and the unbelievers over the authority of God himself.

The Bible never encourages us to prove that God exists, rather we are told that men know God and in their unrighteousness they suppress the truth. They are therefore without excuse as Romans 1 tells us.

Probably not the best place to talk about this

Grace and peace,

This question is funny. Clearly you want him to say yes so you can have an aha! moment, failing to realise that answering yes doesn't give you that moment at all. Water has properties that aren't shared by oxygen and hydrogen, but there's no need to make up a god to explain it.

Interestingly, here's Craig responding to your very objection (the relevant part starts at 1:24). He's even less impressed with it than I am!

"he has the same simplistic view of what I am arguing that you have."

Not at all. I acknowledged the version of the sorites paradox you're raising; I merely maintain that it does no work here.

What I would like to know is if you consistently apply the reasoning you're defending here to other areas. For example, consider the mess it would make of a host of key concepts we use in evolutionary theory. (I'm a thoroughgoing evolutionist, mind you; I merely use evolution as a counterexample every chance I get when discussing these issues with atheists, for rather obvious reasons.)

"Yes, forms and processes and patterns and specific structures can be said to "begin to exist", but it is meaningless to say everything."

How would it be meaningless? I can make sense of the proposition, "The universe began to exist," or, "The universe came into existence a finite time ago from literally nothing (a la Vilenkin's sense of nothingness)." That is to say, these statements are not 'meaningless'; I wonder if you meant something else. If 'meaningless' is the correct term, then I must ask what your criterion (or criteria) of meaning is (I'm surmising it's akin to the positivist criterion of meaning, but I'll wait until you respond).