Kalam Sucks Butt

I. The chief concernPro may have misunderstood me on this point. I was questioning how it's possible for there to have been a state of affairs in which God existed but the universe did not since the state of affairs could not have been before the beginning of the universe, nor since the beginning of the universe. He answered with simultaneous causation. I don't have a problem with the notion of simultaneous causation, but I don't see what that has to do with my objection. If the cause and the effect are simultaneous, then both exist at the same time. But the question isn't how they could both exist at the same time; rather, the question is how God could exist without the universe since there was nothing before the universe.II. The fallacy of equiovcationI claimed that the KCA equivocates on the meaning of "beginning" because in the first premise, and in the examples to illustrate it, things begin to exist in the sense that there is a period of time in which they don't exist followed by a period of time in which they do exist. But in the second premise, there is no time prior to the universe in which the universe did not exist.Pro responds by saying, "Begin is just to come into being." But he doesn't flesh that out. It's pretty clear what it would mean for a robot to come into being. And means the robot used to not exist, and now it does. But if there was no time before the earliest moment of the universe, then it's hard to give meaning to "come into being" when talking about the universe. The universe could not have "come into being" if there was never a time in which it didn't exist.Some of the stuff Pro said in this part was incoherent, and he referenced an article which I read but which didn't say anything remotely like what Pro was saying.III. Problems with the first premiseI gave two arguments against the first premise. First, I said that the radioactive decay of Cobalt 60 serves as a counter-example. Second, I said that the conservation of mass is not universally true since matter can be converted to energy, and vice versa.In response to the first, Pro said quantum physics is false, and he knows it because he has a huge understanding of quantum physics. What does it even mean to say quantum physics is false? Does it mean there are no subatomic particles? Or does it mean subatomic particles don't really have the properties physicists tell us they do? I think we're going to need Pro to elaborate on this point and provide some evidence that is relevant to my counter-example. Unless he has a PhD in physics, I don't think we can take his word as expert testimony.In reality, "Quantum mechanics is the most successful quantitative theory ever produced. Not a single one of the untold thousands of experiments done to test it has ever found the basic principles to be in error, and the agreement can sometimes go to ten significant figures (as in some predictions of quantum electrodynamics)."[1]Pro mentions that several interpretations of QP provide a cause for all quantum events, but he doesn't tell us what those interpretations are, why we should believe them, or what the causes of seemingly undetermined events are. According to a poll in 1997, "the Copenhagen interpretation is the most widely-accepted specific interpretation of quantum mechanics,"[2] and it is indeterministic.Pro suggested that perhaps there are hidden causes we don't know about, but John Bell and others have shown that "there cannot be a local hidden variables model for quantum theory."[3]Pro insists that the conservation of mass supports P1 even while admitting that mass can be converted to energy, so he is contradicting himself. Moreover, if the conservation of mass were a law that could not be violated, that would falsify P2.IV. Problems with the second premisePro pretty much ignores my argument here. Instead, he affirms some of the premises of my argument. He says that the A theory of time is true and that "finite and beginning are the same." As I argued already, if the A theory is true, then God is temporal with the universe. That means that God's temporal duration is exactly the same as the temporal duration of the universe. And since "finite and beginning are the same," it would follow not only that the universe has a beginning, but that God has a beginning as well.If Pro insists that God did not have a beginning, then he falsifies his claim that "finite and beginning are the same." It would not follow that just because the past is finite that the universe therefore had a beginning. Pro has yet to prove that the universe had a beginning. All he has done so far is to show that the universe is finite in the past. The universe has always existed because there was never a time in which the universe didn't exist. It just has a past boundary.V. The strangeness of the universePro fails to grasp the weight of my argument here. I argued that nature behaves in a counter-intuitive way on extremely small scales and extremely large scales. The beginning of the universe is surely a boundary of physics, which means we should not expect it to behave according to our ordinary intuitions. That means any argument we make about the nature of the beginning of the universe from our ordinary intuitions cannot carry much weight. We have to leave room for the wildly unexpected and counter-intuitive unkown.VI. Personal and intelligentPro claims that the cause of the universe is "intelligent because the creation event and the universe was precisely designed," but he offers no evidence that it was designed. And in fact, to use the "design" of the universe as a premise in an argument for intelligence is circular reasoning because a "design" is an intentional plan. He needs to tell us why we should think anybody intended the universe to turn out like it did.Pro claims the cause of the universe is "personal because it made a choice to convert a state of nothing into something (impersonal forces dont make choices)." He's right that impersonal forces don't make choices, but he hasn't given us any reason to think that choice was the cause of the beginning of the universe. He just asserts it.He asks, "how can an impersonal cause give rise to a temporal effect?" Impersonal causes give rise to temporal effects all the time. For example, gravity causes the earth to stay in orbit around the sun. I suspect what he meant to ask was, "How can a timeless cause give rise to a temporal effect?" After all, that's how Bill Craig poses the question. Pro needs to tell us what precisely the problem is and how agent causation solves the problem.As I argued in I. The chief concern above, it's not possible for the universe to have a cause, whether personal or impersonal. The problem is precisely the notion of converting "a state of nothing into something." There was no state of affairs at all prior to the universe because there was no prior. So there was no conversion of a state of nothingness into something.ConclusionAll of Pro's responses were inadequate. There were some incoherencies in there, he ignored some of my arguments, and he made unsubstantiated assertions. In addition to the five arguments I already made for why the KCA sucks butt, I have added a sixth in this round. That makes six good reasons to think the KCA sucks butt.[1] http://www.astro.umd.edu... article doesn't have the author, but the author is Professor Coleman Miller of the Astronomy department of the University of Maryland.[2] http://en.wikipedia.org...[3] http://www.math.rutgers.edu...