The Cosmological Argument is Sound

Ave.Hitch starts off by accusing me of committing several logical fallacies. All of these accusations are based off misunderstandings of my opening statement. I will address each of these individually.Appeal to Authority: I quoted Apeiron for the sole reason that I was using his arguments. If I didn’t give him credit, I would be plagiarizing. I didn’t quote him and mention his expertise in order to show that everything he says must be true. I quoted him because he gave the argument better than I could. The allegation of an appeal to authority is just confused. Hitch hasn’t even engaged with the substance of the actual argument for why the cause must be personal, so this is essentially a concession.Begging the question: Hitch doesn’t actually show that anything I said begged the question, which is when your conclusion is stated in the premises in some way. Instead, he points out that it’s obvious to say modus ponens is logically sound. This has nothing to do with begging the question. I also said that the only issue with the KCA is the truth of the premises. For some reason, Hitch interprets this to mean that the argument is unfalsifiable. Again, this has nothing to do with begging the question. Besides, it’s not the case that the KCA is unfalsifiable. When I said that the only issue is the truth of the premises, I was stating that most of the debate over the KCA is whether the PSR is true, whether the universe began to exist, and whether that cause is personal. In what way does this suggest that this argument is unfalsifiable? In fact, the huge debate over the truth of the premises should suggest the opposite.Association Fallacy: Nothing here indicates that the KCA makes the association fallacy. Hitch just argues that quantum mechanics disproves the first premise. Again, Hitch is throwing highly sophisticated logical fallacies out there, and never actually doing anything with them.Hitch also argues that the KCA affirms the consequent. He says that even if P1 and P2 are true, it does not mean the cause was god. This is just a straw man argument. No theist asserts that ‘’everything that begins to exist has a cause’’ and ‘’the universe began to exist’’ demonstrate the existence of god. Rather, the theist asserts that because of P1 and P2, it logically follows that the universe had a cause. Then, we use deductive inference to show that this cause is most plausibly god. I argued why the cause had to be personal in my opening statement, and Hitch didn’t even address it, instead choosing to falsely accuse me of using logical fallacies.Affirming the consequent is when you argue that P implies Q, Q, therefore P. That's not the logic of the KCA at all. The logic of the KCA is P implies Q, P, therefore Q. It's miles away from anything resembling that fallacy. [1]Hitch sets up another straw man when he says ‘’and everything has a cause and effect as my opponent claims’’. This is a common misunderstanding of the KCA. The premise isn’t that everything has a cause and effect. The premise is that everything that begins to exist has a cause. God would exist outside of time, therefore god did not begin to exist, and did not have a cause. [2]Now, let’s turn to the proper interpretation of quantum mechanics. Hitch argues that quantum fluctuations disprove the PSR. However, this is based on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which most physicists on the cutting edge have abandoned. Scholarpedia says more about how Bell’s theorem puts the Copenhagen interpretation in dispute. [3] We can’t rely on the Copenhagen interpretation, so Hitch’s argument, which depends on that interpretation, cannot be relied on as well. Let’s turn to Hitch’s second argument from quantum mechanics. He argues that virtual particles pop into existence from nothing, so therefore, something can come from nothing. This is based on the book A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss, and critics savaged this example. David Albert is an atheist philosopher and physicist who was heavily critical of Dr. Krauss’s book. [4] In his NY times review, he writes… Vilenkin also explains why this example is incorrect. http://www.youtube.com... This is the best example Hitch can give us?In a final attempt to try and prove that something can come from nothing, Hitch gives an argument first made by Empedocles. Essentially, he argues that there are no rules on nothing, so there is nothing to stop something from coming into existence. This argument, and its attempt to reify negative terms, is absurd. Sure, there are no rules on nothing, but there is nothing that allows nothing to do anything as well. Nothing has no rules, but no potentialities. Here are two good reasons to think that something cannot come from nothing. Firstly, the potentiality argument. If there is a state of absolute nothingness, then there is no potential for anything to happen. If there is no potential for anything to happen, then there is no potential for a universe to come out of nothing. Therefore, it is impossible for the universe to have come from state of absolute nothingness. Secondly, the property argument. If you have absolute nothingness, then you have the universal negation of everything. Logically, you would then have the universal negation of all properties. But if something can come from nothing without cause, then that nothing does have a property. The property of something coming from it. By definition, something cannot come from an absolute nothingness, because then you never had an absolute nothing to begin with.In regards to the second premise, Hitch equivocates. He argues that if there was in fact an absolute beginning, then god cannot act before that beginning, because nothing exists before the beginning of everything. Hitch is just equivocating on the meaning of 'absolute beginning'. I am not asserting that there was not an absolute beginning to existence. I am asserting that there was an absolute beginning of the cosmos. Hitch is changing what it meant by 'absolute beginning' in order to make a point.I think that presentism beats eternalism because of the Grim Reaper paradox. Thus, the A-theory of time is affirmed over the B-theory of time. It is important to understand the context in which I cite Vilenkin. I use it to support the idea that the universe began to exist, in response to ideas of a universe lacking an absolute beginning. It's been long known that Vilenkin believes the universe began to exist as a quantum nucleation event. This, to him, just marks the beginning of the universe. If you listen to any of his lectures or seminars, he explicity states that the universe had a beginning.Hitch argues that, somehow, I must have cherry-picked Vilenkin just because he doesn't believe in god. It simply doesn't follow that I took things out of context because Vilenkin disagrees with my conclusions. It just means that we both derived different conclusions from the same evidence.Let's consider what has happened in the debate so far. Hitch has argued that I've committed several logical fallacies, and I've demonstrated that he's just abused these fallacies. He argues that something can come from nothing, and I refuted his reasoning, giving positive arguments as to why that can't happen. He argues that quantum fluctuations happen without cause, and that virtual particles arise from nothing, but there are good reasons in physics to think this is false. He has equivocated and straw manned at multiple points, and has failed to show that the cause is not plausibly personal. Far from falling in the face of evidence, the KCA is affirmed.Vale.References[1] http://tinyurl.com...[2] http://tinyurl.com...[3] http://tinyurl.com...[4] http://tinyurl.com...