Reply #97: My crack at this

[mdhunter]

A1, A2, and C1 are all true, of course.

The next question, obviously, is so what?

Why that cause must be God is not at all clear and certainly cannot be held based on these three principles alone.

It remains as likely that chance was the cause, and, even, likely that alien consciousness was the cause.

I do not agree that there is now or has ever been "a state where nothing existed." I have no evidence for this to be true and, in fact, find it unlikely. This doesn't pose a problem for me because I also reject your statement that, "If, per Hume, we cannot perceive or assign cause and effect, we may as well throw out all of science as cause and effect are foundational to all science."

What you're suggesting is that we throw out a perfectly good system of being based on the inability to have knowledge of it in one particular situation. Why we have to throw out cause and effect because it is unknowable at some singularity in time isn't clear. Does it's being valid now rest on its applicability throughout time and place? No, it doesn't, what matter for functional purposes is that cause and effect can describe perhaps every imaginable event save one. The existence of that one doesn't render the rest meaningless merely because someone says so.

The cosmological argument, at best, suggests only that which humans intuitively already know - something cannot come from nothing and therefore something must have prexisted the universe. It says absolutely zero about what that "something" is, much less that it is a God, much less that it is a God who didn't simply create the universe and then vanish, much less that it is the omnipotent Christian God as imagined today. Further, the argument, even if granted, is still prone to a reduction ad infinitum of causes. For it provides no basis why God should not have a cause as well. Indeed, the argument's effectiveness is in declaring that God too, must have cause - the argument defeats itself.