The Kalam Cosmological Argument is Sound

Premise 1My opponent claims my contention with regards to "beginnings" of the existence of things is largely irrelevant as it does not rebut his definition of the phrase "beginning to exist". This however assumes the transformative process does in fact show this, and that effectively anything truly "begins to exist" at all. With the lack of a clear delineation of a "beginning" even in a transformative cause (when does a block of marble become a sculpture? When does the ocean become the beach?), it points to the very definition of the "beginning to exist" as untenable since we have no evidence of anything experiencing a "first moment" in a constant state of flux. Without this being established, whether things have causes is itself a bare assertion- a fact he tries to shift the burden of proof when he claimed that "That we do not know or experience X does not mean X is not true." It is up to him to prove it is true.Denying that "all things that begin to exist have causes" does not automatically translate to that "nothing can create something". For one, "nothing" itself as a complete absence of being is an incoherent notion. Also, it is worth noting that though he had previously claimed ex nihilo nihil fit, he then claims that exact thing had occurred when the universe was created by a personal agent. Premise 2My opponent erroneously claims that the First Law only applies once the universe is already created, which is an implicit assumption that he assumes the universe was created to begin with. Due to the fact that a "nothing" itself is an incoherent concept this assumption regarding the universe is already baseless, especially given the classic definition of universe as "the whole body of things and phenomena observed or postulated: cosmos" [1], this already knocks that notion down. He further goes to claim that almost every cosmologist claim that the universe was created ex nihilo- a claim which is without evidence. With regards to actual infinities, he misses the boat when he claims that I've somehow conceded his point when I said that infinity is a concept and not a number, and thus does not exist in reality. However, one could extend the argument to include numbers themselves. There are no "3", but there are 3 bananas. He only shows his ignorance with regards to the use of infinity when he claims that one could "add or subtract" from infinity, when with taking out a certain number of coins from an infinite number of coins would still leave you with infinite coins, not a number less than infinite since there are no longer. All this shows is that the opponent is mathematically ignorant, especially with regards to what infinity entails. Notice that previously he had argued that infinity itself was an absurd, incoherent notion which he no longer claims, granting it has at least a conceptual validity, and has yet to answer the charge that it is in fact used in both physics and mathematics to solve real problems. He goes on further to ignore the fact that the second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law, all the while ignoring the First Law which is one of the fundamental laws of physics. In short, the second law can be violated. It's not a common event but given the extensively long period of time one that presumably a heat death would occur in, it's not inconceivable that it would occur at least once. In fact we have evidence of this occurring, namely the Big Bang. It is an event which went from a compressed state of low entropy expanding to high entropy. That's not where the dishonesty lies, however.Firstly, my opponent's analysis of the "no-boundary proposal" as being "un-warranted" is based not on solid science but in a misunderstanding of several key concepts of the theory. Like his ignorance regarding infinity, he mistakes "imaginary time" as being "intelligible" without proper regard to what it means. Hawkings himself had written "If the universe really is in such a quantum state, there would be no singularities in the history of the universe in imaginary time. … In real time, the universe has a beginning and end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real time is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like."[2]With the BVG theorem we enter a less than honest venue of misinterpretation and wilful ignorance regarding what it actually states. To begin with, Vilenkin himself challenges the claim that the BVG states the universe must've had an "absolute beginning", noting that "No. But it proves that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning. You can evade the theorem by postulating that the universe was contracting prior to some time." [3]He further points out that the "conclusion" of his theory is avoidable. "For example, Anthony in his work with Gratton, and Carroll and Chen, proposed that the universe could be contracting before it started expanding. The boundary then corresponds to the moment (that Anthony referred to as t=0) between the contraction and expansion phases, when the universe was momentarily static. They postulated in addition that the arrow of time in the contracting part of space-time runs in the opposite way, so that entropy grows in both time directions from t=0." [3]In short, any and all charge regarding the "certitude" of what my opponent claims the theory entails is false. It is also worth noting that the BVG applies to certain MODELS of the universe, which given the current wall of evidence of the planck time, is not complete. Later, my opponent attempts to cherry-pick what the author Vilenkin states by claiming certain aspects were speculations (despite the fact that they do pose possible extensions beyond the BVG) while others are more or less unshakeable truths. By further mis-applying the term of "beginning to exist", he attempts to obfuscate the case and thereby making it seem as if the BVG states that it states the universe in fact "began to exist" from nothing- and not just nothing in the quantum sense (or a quantum vacuum) but an absolute nothing- an absence of being. With his question regarding time's finitude, however, that is when he shoots himself in his proverbial foot. Premise 3:With the assumption that time is finite, it logically follows that god is "outside of time", or timeless. With this, my opponent sends his entire house of cards crashing, even if all his previous arguments and rebuttals were somehow to turn out to be correct. Firstly is the problem of a timeless mind. This is, to put it succinctly, paradoxical. Mind is based on change, which is based within time. Without time, there is no change. Without time, there is effectively no "mind" that can "cause" (another temporal concept, by the way) anything, much less a universe to exist. Furthermore, with the finitude of time it raises further paradoxical question of "time beginning". How does time "begin" to exist? In order for something to "begin existing", there must first be a prior moment in which it did not exist, or else it effectively never "did not" exist. This is enough of a problem with the universe "beginning to exist"Finally, it is Vilenkin's quote on the theorem itself which nails the case shut in my favour:"Theologians have often welcomed any evidence for the beginning of the universe, regarding it as evidence for the existence of God … So what do we make of a proof that the beginning is unavoidable? Is it a proof of the existence of God? This view would be far too simplistic. Anyone who attempts to understand the origin of the universe should be prepared to address its logical paradoxes. In this regard, the theorem that I proved with my colleagues does not give much of an advantage to the theologian over the scientist."