The Kalam cosmological argument

But there's no reason why there shouldn't be an endless slope and a beginningless succession of causes --- or if there is, you have not yet articulated it. You say we shouldn't get on that slippery slope, I say, why not? Well, now try applying that reasoning to a god outside our observed universe.In any case, my point still remains. Going one step back from God doesn't commit us to going an infinite number of steps back.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

True. But the fact is that premise one is contentious, for reasons that perhaps we have discussed sufficiently by now. Or there's something behind that ... in any case, the creator of the universe does not have to be an ultimate explanation for everything, just for the universe. We may at least in principle have a demiurge on our hands.

Well, that's a view of time which is not held generally by physicists or indeed theologians. Time, many of them would say, is something like space: it does not move, we move through it; moments do not arrive, we arrive at moments. If we could see time from a God's-eye view, sub specie aeternitatis as the philosophers say, then we would see a monk making the same argument as you in the thirteenth century and a licensed crodwrangler making it in the thirty-seventh. Under this hypothesis of time, your objection vanishes.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.