The Kalam Cosmological Argument is Sound

Thank you for your response, Miles, and thank you for your important clarifications and your humorous conversation about the tidal wave. Let's take a look again at the three warrants he uses to support his first premise, that whatever begins to exist has an efficient cause, and why they fail.(i) Something cannot come from nothingMy opponent has clarified his first warrant (i) is indeed, not a counter-objection to the idea that the universe came into being ex nihilo; he says it's not to say that "things can't come into being out of nothingness", but that "being cannot come from non-being" (or, in other words, without an efficient cause). So, to summarize, my opponent's first premise states "Whatever begins to exist has an efficient cause" and his first warrant to support this premise is the principle that nothing can begin to exist without an efficient cause; but this principle and his first premise are one and the same. Basically, he supports his claim by repeating it in a slightly different way: "Everything that begins to exist must have a cause, because nothing can begin to exist without a cause." In light of this sneaky use of tautology, I don't even consider his first warrant a warrant anymore, but a restating of the premise itself. Now his premise is left with two warrants: (ii) if things can begin to exist uncaused, why aren't they now? and (iii) personal experience always verifies the first premise.(ii) If things can begin to exist uncaused, why aren't they now?/(iii) Personal experience always verifies the first premise If it is true that the universe came into being ex nihilo or sans ex, then it has existed for all points in time; in other words, there was nothing temporally prior to the universe (which my opponent, of course, concedes). That is the salient difference between the universe itself and the things in the universe which we witness beginning to exist: the former was temporally preceeded by nothing while everything that fits into the latter category was.So, if we were to categorize things in an even broader way than I did in my previous round into a true dichtomoy, we can say there are (a) things which begin to exist and temporally proceed something else, and (b) things which begin to exist and do not temporally proceed something else.The only things my opponent has given us are good reasons to believe those (a) things (such as tables) have efficient causes, yet he's done nothing to show us why those (b) things (such as time itself and the universe) must have efficient causes. His third warrant, that personal experience varifies the first premise, holds true only for those (a) things. Our personal experience tells us absolutely nothing about things which begin to exist and do not temporally proceed something else, like the universe. He wants to tell us that his inducting reasoning is valid in this case, but it isn't. Good inductive reasoning would have us conclude that because all (a) things we see have efficient causes, then all (a) things ever probably have efficient causes, but it would not have us conclude anything at all about (b) things.To respond to the question: "If (b) things can begin to exist without causes, then why doesn't it happen nowadays?" It's because it would be logically impossible; it's not T=0 anymore! We're not living in the Big Bang's singularity; we're living in the year 2013 ACE some billions and billions of years after (b) things ever began to exist! (b) things can't even begin to exist anymore because every thing that begins to exist nowadays does so temporally proceeding something else. The question itself is point-missingly irrelevant.Without any substantial warrants to support Miles' first premise, we cannot embrace the truth of it or the argument's eventual conclusion. And now I hand the floor to my opponent.