An atheist must believe "something comes from nothing."

"It is my position in this debate that atheists believe that something came from nothing. 1. There is a sequence of events. 2. Somewhere, the sequence of events must stop. From 1 and 2, we can clearly see that there is a 'first cause', as many call it. This first cause existed, yet did not come from anything. There was no thing it came from, it simply existed/happened." I will not argue the causal god side of this debate as that is unnecessary. "no thing" and "nothing" are separable outside of semantics and it was a clever ploy, but one I challenge. "no thing" is a causal statement; "nothing" is a form of negative existence. I clearly stated "nothing". Your syllogism is flawed by the way. No premise states anything about "cause". Big Bang theory uses Einstein's general theory of relativity to draw the history of the universe back to a moment in time when the entire universe was concentrated in a point of infinite density, called a singularity. This account however ignores quantum mechanics: at a point in time called the Planck time, the universe was small enough to be subject to quantum mechanical effects. To know accurately what impact these effects would have had on the universe before Planck-time requires a theory of quantum gravity, which combines general relativity with quantum mechanics (so we have at least 2 possibilities). General relativity: One outcome of relativistic physics is that space and time (spacetime) are themselves inseparable aspects of the universe. Consequently, by general relativity alone, the origin of the universe was the origin of space and time. There cannot have been time prior to (or space outside of) the initial singularity; "prior to" (or "outside of") the singularity makes no sense. In turn, this shows that the vision of the universe somehow "arriving from" an elemental nothingness, far from being a proviso of Big Bang theory, is inconsistent with it. For the universe to have "come from" nothing there would have to be a point when, there was nothing, and then, at some later point in time, the universe suddenly existed. One cannot argue that the universe existed at the first moment of time, and then, in the next breath, imply that there was a time before this first moment of time in which nothing existed. "We have known for twenty-five years that Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that time must have had a beginning in a singularity fifteen billion years ago. (Hawking 1993:46)" Options with quantum gravity: 1. We still have a first moment in time. 2. The singularity is removed by some quantum mechanical effect. When we run the clock back, the universe does not reach a situation of infinite density. Something else happens when the universe reaches some very high density that permits time to continue indefinitely into the past. 3. Something new and different and quantum mechanical happens to time. Possibly we reach a state where it is no longer suitable to think that reality is composed of a series of moments that follow each other in series, one after another. In this case, there is perhaps no singularity, but additionally it also does not make sense to ask what happened before the universe was exceptionally dense. (Smolin 1997:82) Possibility 1 gives us the identical situation as that described by non quantum mechanics Big Bang theory: a universe which exists at every instant of time, and hence cannot have "come from" nothing. Possibility 2 arrives at a universe stretching back infinitely in time, similarly eliminating the supposed issues raised by the universe "coming from" nothing. Possibility 3 (which is the scenario proposed in the quantum cosmological speculations of Hawking) again gives us a universe that cannot "come from" nothing, as the very concept of time-ordering ceases to have meaning in the early universe. In fact, then, under possible options for a Big Bang supplemented with quantum gravity, it would still be mistaken to characterise the Big Bang as stipulating that the universe "came from nothing." On each possibility, there is no moment of time at which the universe did not exist. Other theories of an uncaused/self causing universe can wait next round. :)