I only ask because I see no other way to interpret this then one of the following:

"all matter materialized, (there is no evidence of this happening and this is not a view shared by academia)"

"all matter re arranged itself into the universe" this can have several casual causes.

I am disputing premise 2 if it refers to the former and disputing premise 4 if premise 2 refers to the latter.

War and Peace did not exist. Then, Tolstoy wrote it and it came into existence.

I pointed out already that your claim that there is no evidence for (2a) is unwarranted since you have not looked at the evidence presented by the proponents of the Kalam argument. So stop repeating this claim.

More importantly, your brain is trying to tell you something important here. (a) is incontrovertibly what is meant here. The fact that you have such a difficult time realizing this (this is the third? fourth? time that you've questioned that this is actually what is meant) should tell you that you have some kind of a cognitive blind spot that is getting in the way of understanding this argument. Even here you are seemingly unable to state this premise without immediately appending your own bias into the premise.

In my opinion, you would get more utility out of trying to fully understand this argument to try to counteract this bias rather than switching to another attempt at defeating it.

Edit: Also, for what it's worth, here is Sean Carroll, who is an atheist and a professor of cosmology at CalTech. He debated William Lane Craig and he has this to say about premise 2: "My attitude toward the above two premises is that (2) is completely uncertain."

So, I'm not sure why you are so confident that (2) is not true.

I never said i was confident 2 wasn't true. I am pointing out that acting as if you (not you specifically ) know its true is dishonest .

The material that made that book came into existence when?

Also, just show me the evidence for 2)a lol. jesus dude.

Not if you think it is true.

I've already given you links to a video that discusses it. I've linked to the SEP article that discusses it. Here is another link to a book that discusses it. What more do you want?

Oh I know. You want me to spend a couple of hours trying to distill these complex ideas into a few paragraphs so you can not address it like you haven't addressed any of the other arguments I've made in this thread. No thanks.

How about you just summarize this evidence then I will look at the evidence you have linked. It may or may not be arguments I have already looked into.

Mmmm, if you don't mind a comment from an impartial bystander, I think you should read the evidence that OrP has provided for you, in the form provided, you can't expect him to do all the work and you would surely benefit from becoming more familiar with it.

I started to read the stuff OP provided after he posted it and all the "evidence" was just analytical assertions. Explaining why infinite isn't possible in an existential reality. I understand all that and don't know if its true. I was just wondering if OP knew of any real evidence that the matter the universe is composed of materialized.

As far as I know this is not known. And is assumed to have always existed because of thermodynamics.

I also read Craigs explanation of the big bang and he is right on knowing what the big bang is but his conclusions reached based on this do not logically follow. The big bang is not matter coming into existence in this sense. Thats why they whole thing is misleading.

Did I read all of OPs link? No but it is the same stuff ive seen from other apologists in the past (craig included)

The problem I have with this entire line of reasoning is that it is ungrounded and hence of no utility. As an example, take this statement:

On the surface it seems like a reasonable statement, but it is a statement of the time history of the universe. The problem is that the universe is a spacetime structure so that without a universe there is no time. A statement along the lines of "at some point in time the universe started to exist probably has no meaning. If the universe exists within some greater structure we have no understanding of the nature of that structure. At this point in time we have no ability to test the properties of that structure experimentally so that theoretical discussions are unsupported. It is also very plausible that we will never have any ability to test that structure.

I do not see that a discussion about the origin of the universe can clarify anything. It is ungrounded speculation such that anything is possible.

If you believe physicists and chemists, it happens all the time. An electron in a high energy state emits a photon as it drops to a lower state. But that's not because the electron contained a photon in any real sense that was somehow released in the process. There was no photon, now there's a photon.

Or you can look at the more abstract spontaneous matter-antimatter pair creation of virtual particles. You've got nothing, but now you suddenly have something. And that something isn't the same as the nothing you had before because you used to have zero pairs of things and now you have one pair of things.

Or we can talk about waves. Consider a completely calm pool of water. There are no waves. You throw a rock into it, and now there are waves. The waves didn't exist before, now they exist.

Things coming into existence really isn't a hard question to answer.

No, creatio ex nihilio has massive utility. For all you say that it has no practical use, it does. Much like an individual's first memory won't be of birth (except in extremely rare instances lacking scientific validity) it is worth considering the question of Origin if only as a necessary academic exercise to see how such hypothetical beings would develop.

Equally as likely, and even more plausible is the idea of layered emergence and density of intelligence that owes a lot to the temporal age of a specific universe.

Don't discard an idea if it doesn't make sense to you, at least until you can fully discredit it within and without your belief system. How else will people get rid of racism, sexism and discrimination if they don't do the mile in others' shoes thing?

How is it useful exactly?

Also, I am not discarding it because it does not make sense to me. I am discarding it because it has no meaning.

1. Did you not read the rest of the paragraph or did you also discard that because you didn't understand it?

2. Well, oh, ok, sand-sniffer.

I read everything that you wrote but I do not see how that shows utility for the discussion.

This simply says "Yes, it does" (have utility).

The discussion is about the origin of the universe, not the evolution of intelligent beings. At least, that is how I read the discussion. Was I in error?

Again, the age of the universe is not the issue, is it? The issue is how it came to be.

Mile in others' shoes? What does that have to do with any of this?

Also, on an unrelated note, what is the intention of the label "sand-sniffer"? I assume it is some sort of ad hominem, but the intent is lost on me.

My understanding is this: we can track the history of the universe back to just after the Big Bang. We don't know what happened at the actual moment of the Big Bang because classical physics breaks down at the density levels of the Big Bang and so we need a theory of gravity that works on quantum levels, which we don't have right now. However, cosmologists have developed various models that purport to explain some of what happened. Some of these models postulate a universe where time began with the Big Bang (I think the Hawking-Hartle model is the most well-known of these). Others postulate a universe where time extends back before the Big Bang.

So you're right that whether or not time began with the Big Bang or not is a matter of speculation for now. Now, there is a semi-technical issue here, where William Lane Craig claims that the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem shows that any viable model of the universe must show that time begins with the Big Bang. I've not found any actual physicists who agree that this is an implication of this theorem, but insofar as there is an empirical claim by the proponents of the Kalam, it is that the BGV Theorem proves that time began with the Big Bang.

My objection to the OP, which never really got off the ground, is that the main problem with the Kalam argument is not just that we don't actually know whether time began with the Big Bang. That seems to me one of the weakest objections. It is especially weak if you don't bother to show how Craig's interpretation of the BGV theorem is incorrect, or that his arguments against the possibility of an actual infinite also fail. In fact, it seems to me very plausible that it did begin to exist then! But I don't think that shows that the universe needs a transcendent first cause. Nor do I think that if we proved that the universe began with the Big Bang that suddenly all the cosmologists would become theists.

This is because I think that Carroll, Hawking, and other physicists are correct when they say that the idea of causation as we ordinarily understand it doesn't really apply to things like the beginning of the universe - especially because it relies on an older understanding of time that probably is inconsistent with modern scientific definitions. Thus, premise (1) is, in my view, the more serious problem with the Kalam argument. Premise (2) is an empirical claim, one that most cosmologists seem to believe is still open.

so Santa Claus exists, right?

As a manifested idea.

He's got an address too.

Write Santa in English et Francais.

Collectively expressed principles.

------

Modeling aside and the determination of the beginning of time...

It only affects perception. There isn't an universal sense of tense when you take in all human languages, for instance. In some, there aren't any.

A better question to ask would be:

What significant differences would there be in two universes with all the same conditions, and in the first, time began with an original singularity; in the second, the singularity was (is) a positive cataclysmic event with conscious awareness of creating massive amounts of redundant space-time?

One thing to be careful of in speculations in these and really discount is the fact that for spatial uncertainty of a particle's position, there is also temporal uncertainty.

Copenhagen MWI cannot be applied here because it is not a valid solution or a framework on which to build one. Neither are Tegmark's ideas.

I agree although I would word the problem differently. There is no theory that fully reconciles general relativity and quantum mechanics. QM treats time as a variable that is very different from spatial variables. Relativistic QM does bring in special relativity, but that falls short of my point. The models developed on the fundamentally flawed theories that we have today are unlikely to have much real value imo, until the fundamental flaw is fixed.

The entire concept of "time beginning" such that there is a time zero may have no meaning. It may not be a question that has an answer a or b. It just may be a meaningless question.

I sort of agree again. At least, I do not think it is possible for us to reason out whether the universe has a "first cause". The entire conversation around the subject has so little content that it seems as if you could almost say anything that came to mind and as long as you used sufficiently complex language you could make it sound like something important.

It truly reminds me of reading Dennett and his discussions of consciousness. So many words, so little content. I realize that could start an entirely new and heated disagreement, but it truly is what came to mind for me.

I agree with this although I would go further to say that our modern scientific definitions of time are almost certainly inadequate for this conversation also. There is a very real problem at the heart of physics that should not be underestimated. Its significance is very high when you start to talk about questions like that raised itt.

Which is a statement that can be applied to pretty much anything.

Best to assess its relevancy, then model with it both being all-important and that it isn't at all.

Double blind testing is essential to empiricist data being viable and sustainable. That the same rigor does not always apply to notepad or sketchpad sciences is sometimes disappointing.

You could construct an entire branch of hypothetical mathematics using results gleaned from x/0. Which makes the branch no more or less real; just a colossal waste of time.

First cause, or lack of.

Changes nothing.

"There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago." - Bertrand Russell.

"Doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" - Wittgenstein.

Aside from learning who said what, about what and when, the entire discussion is in fact, devoid of meaning.

Deepity versions of Wittgenstein are the worst Wittgenstein. Also, he was wrong about the nature of language here, which even he later admitted.

When you say the discussion is devoid of meaning you might mean that it is unimportant or without more than historical value. If so, fine, not going to argue with you.

However, if you mean this more literally, that there is no propositional content to discussions of first causes, you are incorrect. Don't be misled by hack evangelists who utilitize these concepts for their own pragmatic ends into thinking that these are just stand-ins for ill-defined religious ideas. The idea of a first cause of the universe, or related ideas of a telos in nature, are at least as old as Plato and Aristotle. They were originally developed as scientific and metaphysical concepts with real explanatory power. For instance, here is SEP's summary of one of Aristotle's argument for the existence of final causes in nature:

This looks to me like a conceptual precursor to evolutionary explanations. Today we have a more exact definition of the final cause (natural selection) and a better understanding of the mechanism of change (genes), but evolutionary explanations still uses a phenotype's function as part of understanding why something is the way it is. Of course, we do science differently and better today, and we've mostly dropped these concepts from our modern scientific lexicon. But that doesn't mean that they don't still have meaning in their original senses.

Apart from always admitting to the possibility of being wrong (as any good philosopher should do), I don't recount him admitting flat-out to be wrong on the nature of language: especially the quote that I included: the very conclusion/contention of his greatest work.
Yes. Beyond historical value, it has nothing to teach.
A lot of statements can have propositional content or structure. It doesn't make them meaningful or important. I'm confident Wittgenstein would agree here.
Sure, there's historical meaning and historical value. If you're into that.