Big Bang cosmology supports atheism over theism.

Howdy! (Ave.)A clarificationI need to make a clarification about something I said in my last post because I can see how it could be misunderstood. I said that I conceded premises 2, 3, and 4. 3 and 4 read:3: From 1 and 2, an initial state is logically impossible.4: From 3, there can be no cause of the initial state.I did not mean that I concede that "an initial state is logically impossible." What I meant to concede was that it follows from 1 and 2 that an initial state is logically impossible. And I did not mean to concede that "there can be no cause of the initial state." Rather, I meant to concede that it follows from 3 that there can be no cause of the initial state.That shouldn't change anything. This debate is still over the truth of the first premise.Science vs. philosophyPro claims that we should favor scientific arguments over philosophical arguments. Well, a sound argument is a sound argument, whether it's scientific or philosophical. We shouldn't prefer one argument over another because of what kind of argument it is, but because of whether the argument is sound. Besides that, his argument is philosophical. Anybody familiar with Zeno's paradoxes will notice the similarity. The only thing resembling science in his argument is his claim that Stephen Hawking changed his mind about the Hawking-Penrose model and that he now denies a singularity. But that is an argument from authority, not a scientific argument. And it's a fallacious argument from authority, too, because there's no concensus on the matter. I could just as easily quote cosmologists who still believe in a singularity.The fallacy of compositionPro mistakenly thinks the fallacy of composition is when you say that if something is true of a part, then it's true of a whole. He thinks his argument doesn't commit the fallacy of composition since he's saying that because something is true of all the parts, then it's true of the whole. But that is the fallacy of composition.[1] This is an informal fallacy, though, so it's true that there are exceptions to it. His cannot be an exception to it, though, because even if every state of the universe is caused by a previous state in the universe, it wouldn't follow that the whole universe caused itself. The notion of self-causation is incoherent.Problem of infinite regressPro misconstrues my argument here. I'm not saying that Pro's argument leads to an infinite past. I'm saying that Pro's argument leads to an infinite causal regress. Granted, he thinks time is finite in the past, but he nevertheless thinks there is no first state because each state has a state before it. That clearly leads to an infinite regress in which the present state could never be reached. Pro hasn't addressed my actual argument.Zeno's paradoxPro responds to this argument by making an irrelevant observation, namely that whereas an object can go from rest at t=0 to motion, he doesn't think there is a state of the universe at t=0. But that misses the point of my argument. His argument is that because there is no first state of the universe, that the universe cannot be caused by anything outside of itself. But it would follow, by the same reasoning, that there is no first moment of motion for anything that moves, and that motion can therefore not be caused by anything outside of itself. We know that motion can be caused by something outside of itself, so by extension, we know Pro's argument is fallacious. Pro needs to answer this argument rather than make irrelevant disanalogies.GR paradoxPro doesn't so much answer the GR paradox as he just dismisses it. He admits that he can't answer it, but thinks it must have an answer because there's no first decimal after zero. But that is why in math, when talking about bounded and unbounded intervals, we take limits in which a function aproaches a number but never reaches it. The "first" moment after zero would be represented as an open interval with zero as a limit. You wouldn't represent it with a decimal. When we talk about approaching some number as a limit, we're not talking about actual infinities, but potential infinities. Open intervals still have boundaries, though, even though their edges cannot be represented by decimals. In the same way, a GR will kill you even if you can't assign a decimal to that GR. In the same way, the universe has an initial state even if you can't put a decimal on it.My argumentPro doesn't try to refute my argument. He appears to grant that if there is an initial state of the universe, then my argument goes through. I hope that with my critique of Pro's argument above that I have established that the universe does have an initial state.Pro's questionPro asked me a question about an argument that I didn't make. Since I still have over 3000 characters left, I'll go ahead and respond to his question, but this should not have any affect on voting. This is just to satisfy Pro's curiosity. In fact, you can skip this section if you want.Rational_Thinker mentioned somewhere that minds and abstract objects may not exhaust the possibilities for immaterial entities. It's possible that there could be a non-personal immaterial entity that is not an abstract object. Although it's hard to imagine what such a thing might be, I can't see why it isn't at least possible. But that doesn't completely destroy Craig's argument in my opinion. If you have three possibilities, and you can eleminate two, then you'd have a deductive argument for the third. But if you can only elminate one, and you can attach an improbability to the second, then you'd have an inductive argument for the third. You don't have to elminate Rational_Thinker's third possibility in order to make an argument for the cause of the universe being a person. You'd only have to say that it's improbable.One possible way to do that might be to point out that it's ad hoc and that it's better to look for explanations amoung the known than the unknown. The only time we invoke the unknown is when nothing known is sufficient to explain something. Unless you can give some content to the immaterial, impersonal cause, then I don't see why we should treat it as equally viable as a mind or even an abstract object.Maybe you could submit the question to William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith web page and see what he says. It's an interesting thought.*****Notes:1. http://www.fallacyfiles.org...See y'all later! (Vale.)