If I was born the night before last,
Were you born the night before last?
and my experience is limited to the sun rising yesterday,
Is your experience limited thusly?
With all due respect my friends I see so much misinformation and lies by omission here that I don't know where to start.
With all due respect, you managed to make an entire post without saying anything of value at all.
... People relying on wikipedia quoting as if its credible source!
No. People relying on wikipedia as an encyclopedia. If it's wrong, fix it. But don't just whine here about how severely wrong it is. If you have something of value to say about it, say it. Nobody's going to fall for your false appeal to authority act.
Furthermore, you are being insanely presumptuous by suggesting that we have only just heard of the KCA by quickly looking it up on wikipedia. What do you think the people on this forum do? (And yeah, I'm relatively new
here, but as alt.atheism atheist #272, I can assure you I'm not a spring chicken).
Anyway your statement above is correct, but you should be impressed! It solves infinite regression neatly! A first cause argument like the KCA states anything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
And this claim has flaws. First, it merely begs the question. There is absolutely no basis to even state this in the first place. None of our observations apply to things coming into being ex nihilo.
And in fact, our
only knowledge about things that come into being kind of has said things come into being
uncaused.
So the cause that caused the universe to begin to exist did not have a cause.
...if and only if said cause did not "begin to exist", and even then, it doesn't actually
follow; it's simply immune to the carefully phrased assertion that anything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence. With all of that sophistry, effectively, you've done nothing but address the question "why is there anything at all" by saying "because of God". It's not even a real answer--it's the
same exact question to ask why God is there.
All it is, is Godidit.
It existed before time existed (time was created in the big bang).
As you approach a black hole, besides all of the fun tidal effects that happen to you, the passage of time will slow. You won't notice this by staring at your hands, but an observer who isn't approaching the black hole would notice that your watch starts to tick slower. As you continue to approach the black hole, this guy will notice your watch ticking slower and slower--asymptotically slow. By the time you pass the event horizon, an infinite amount of time will pass to this outside observer. And
here, we haven't even touched the singularity.
The reversal of this is a rough model of the big bang, only there, you have touched the singularity (and the tidal effects aren't manifest).
The point being--it's not even clear there
was a before to the big bang--our current physics give no meaning to the concept (as Hawking says, it's like asking what's south of the south pole). There's no current a posteriori sense in which to speak of this in the first place. So you have a way to go to build the case that you can even
speak of a before to the BB.
An MA in comparative religion doesn't help you here.
So infinite regression stops with the 'cause' that caused the universe to begin to exist!
And could just as well stop one step earlier. In fact, by going that one step, you have added nothing--you solved no problem. And
in fact, all you've done was to add something else which needs to be explained.
KCA solves one and only one issue--it puts God there for people who want God there. (And it doesn't even do that).
) that most of us are not.
