The Kalam Cosmological Argument proves the existence of a Personal Creator

P1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.My opponent's contention boils down to an insistence that there is equivocation at play between types of causes and beginnings: ex nihilo and ex materia. Of course, we have ever only observed beginnings ex materia, so it seems to him too great a leap in logic to allow this premise to point to a beginning ex nihilo. However, I am quite confident I am not engaging in equivocation here.This premise is concerned with neitherex nihilonorex materia. This premise is abstract in that it is a purely philosophical statement. The first term in the statement is "whatever." It's a universal statement. Thus, it is asserting that any beginning has a cause. This premise is utterly independent of the types of beginnings, entities, and causes. As a philosophy (as opposed to a scientific theory), it is meant to apply to all beginnings, even those we cannot observe.This might seem unfair until you consider that we do the very same thing with the laws of logic. The laws of logic are abstract. Even though he have not experience every single instance of the laws of logic (such as those occurring at the edge of the universe), we agree that they are universal. Why? Because, so far, everything in our current experience confirms those laws.Likewise, even though we have not observed every cause, everything we have observed confirms this principle. Con, however, wants to limit this principle only to creation ex materia because we've never observed creation ex nihilo, which changes KCA's first premise to this: Whatever begins to exist ex materia has a cause of its existence that is also ex materia Con's new premise has added an unproven assumption: Because all observations of beginnings are ex materia, all beginnings must be caused ex materia. This may seem rational according to the principle of induction, but it also makes Con's position run contrary to Occam's razor as he's taken a simple hypothesis and added additional criteria for no other reason than a pre-commitment to naturalism.Con is injecting naturalistic criteria into a metaphysical premise. This constitutes a bias against abstract entities and philosophy in favor of materialistic explanations. Indeed, the KCA fails when Con's premise is used, because Con's premise begs the question. It carries naturalistic assumptions that can only lead to naturalistic conclusions.Quantum FluctuationThe Heisenberg uncertainty principle asserts, "the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known." [1] Nothing about this principle attacks the premise. This is a red herring. Uncertainty does not equivocate to uncaused.P2. The universe began to exist.Actual InfiniteI just don't understand how Con can accept his logical defense here. He insists that because infinity is valid in mathematics, we can accept the idea of an infinite number of things. He even accuses me of not giving due attention to the usefulness of infinity in mathematics.I never once rejected infinity as a concept in general. If anything, I'm the one in this debate rightly applying infinity in its proper domain. Infinity is an abstract concept and mathematics deals in the abstract. There is certainly no problem. But just because it is useful in abstract mathematics does not make it useful in concrete reality. Just because we can accept the paradoxical nature of mathematics doesn't mean we should automatically accept that a realized actual infinite is possible. Con's premise seems to be this: If an abstract concept is possible in mathematics, then it is possible in reality. If this is true, then I would like Con to explain how imaginary numbers translate to reality as well. How can someone have 10i dollars? If imaginary numbers do not translate to reality, then his premise is not sound and his insistence that a realized actual infinite is possible is dubious at best.VilenkinThe citing of Vilenkin's 1982 article might hold some sway were it not for Vilenkin's 2006 book, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes. Vilenkin himself, along with his contemporaries Arvind Borde and Alan Guth developed a unifying theory in 2003, independent of our universe, showing that all expanding universes must have a singularity and therefore a beginning. In Vilenkin's own words: "It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning." [2] If my opponent trusts Vilenkin's scholarship, then I hope he doesn't selectively ignore Vilenkin's work post 1982.P4. All eternal causes of temporal effects must be personal.My opponent finally addresses this portion of the argument when he says the notion of "change" is a problem for me as much as it is for him. He asks, "But isn't the formaton [sic] of a will a change in itself?" My opponent insists that willing to create a universe constitutes a change in properties.I suppose I confused my opponent when using the term "will" to describe the personal agent. There are multiple meanings to the word, and my opponent is using the term will as the equivalent to intent. He insists that the intent to create the universe constitutes a change of wills. But this inadvertently becomes a strawman argument because that is not a proper description of the personal creator for which I was arguing.Con's criticism implies that the personal agent has a finite set of wills, or intents, and that when the agent "decides" to create the universe, it changes the set of wills.But I never said that. I said the agent has a will. Given the context of my argument, it should have been clear that I meant the agent was intelligent, i.e., it has a mind. And I don't mean a human mind existing in a brain, but an abstract mind: "the faculty of thinking, reasoning, and applying knowledge." [3] The faculty of thinking is the unchanging property, and the faculty does not change when thinking is exercised.So, my opponent has failed to show incongruity between the notion of decision making and the will of a personal creator.Sources http://en.wikipedia.org... http://books.google.com... http://www.thefreedictionary.com...