You say “from nothing, nothing comes”.

Have you, or has anyone else, observed a nothing?

If not (and the answer is of course “No”), how do you know at all, let alone to deductive certainty, what a nothing does or does not do?

Just a footnote to Dennis’s Question 2: the positive reals includes infinite numbers between zero and one (all possible fractions); as opposed to the positive wholes, which excludes fractions. This is why the positive reals are both infinite into the past (count back from 1 and you will never reach 0 in finite time) and at the same time finite into the past (they stop at zero).

This has relevance to cosmological models such as Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology where scale continues to grow infinitely and thus can shrink infinitely into a nevertheless finite past, allowing an infinite series of past universes prior to ours and a measurable beginning to them all.

Just n.b. Alvaro’s position is more coherent than W.L. Craig’s. Craig asserts God to be timeless; yet at the same time has that God fully attached to and involved in time. Alvaro carries the statement to its actually logically entailed conclusion: if God is timeless, then he doesn’t exist in time—at all. Christianity is therefore necessarily false. Because no timeless God can have been talking to anyone, or thinking about anyone, or arranging futures for them, much less have visited Earth.

Example or GTFO.

And Daniel’s argument here can be succinctly put in Bayesian terms.

1) Your first premise talks about things which come into existence, which you later apply to the universe. What do you mean by “come into existence”? In ordinary discourse “X came into existence” means “the universe changed from a state where there is no X to a state where there is an X”. But if you apply that to the universe then you’re referring to a universe in a state where there is no universe, and I can’t figure out what that would even mean.

2) You seem to be assuming that an infinite past and an earliest moment are the only two possibilities. Am I correct in that? If so, then what’s your argument against a finite past which doesn’t have a beginning? Mathematically that’s possible, if it’s isomorphic to the positive reals, for instance.

3) I don’t understand your Empire State Building analogy. Walking an infinite distance to get to the bottom is only impossible because humans have finite lives. If you posit an immortal being, though, who walks 100 floors a day, then there’s no contradiction is saying that N days ago he was on floor 100N, for all N. You seem to feel there is a contradiction, though. What would that contradiction be?

Craig concludes that the cause of the existence of the universe is an “uncaused, personal Creator … who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful”; remarking upon the theological implications of this union of properties.

no, they say we don’t know what was before the “big bang”. We have no evidence in either direction if there was time or space, or something else entirely or nothing.

It’s a deepity.

It’s consistent with a lot of what shows up in this blog.