mirage

Spacetime cannot exist separately according to your relationalist position. That the whole point of relationalism. So I'm not sure what position to take against you atm.

The universe does mean everything. It's hardly a controversial redefinition. On the other hand, you have ruled out substantive existence of spacetime whilst at the same time creating a god who is not "physical". This is a whole new category of existence of which there is no evidence, or even any coherent idea that I can discern.

I'm still not seeing how you can follow the cosmo arguments chain of causes not just back to the boundary of our spacetime, but outside it entirely. You can argue the possibility or compatibility of meta spacetime gods, but how can they work with this argument? It starts with a temporal relation we observe with everyday events and then traces it back to the First Cause. How does that relate to some mysterious metaframework?

No. I have read some of the dead Van Till's stuff and am glad to learn you weren't referring to him. Shall I look these up and find out what's amusingly wrong about them for you? There's bound to be something.

mirage

O.K.
I just looked up Swinburne's argument.

The first hillarious error is his use of probabilities over which various types of universe are distributed.

I would love to know his sample space and probability interpretation for that one!

Yet another massive failure to deeply understand the Anthropic Principle.

John A. Broussard

Can't be living in Kansas, then.

Herb26

Ultimate cosmic event, or force doesn't sound like it requires a God. It would be equally valid for you to have said "Basically, we know that the First Cause (FC) must be some ultimate cosmic event, entity, or force, which exists without preceding cause"

Which is basically a statement of mutually exclusive unprovable possibilities. . .which seems to support agnosticism(not atheism due to the inclusion of an entity[god] as a possibility nor theism due to the inclusion of a force or event).

i.e. . .this only shows. . .that we can't actually prove anything at this time.

Ckwop

The most convincing argument is from physics. If we wind back the expansion of the universe back to around 10^-45 seconds after the big bang we find that time itself starts to lose meaning.

You see, any clock that could exist in the universe at this time would have to be so small that it's "ticking" would be overwhelemed in quantum noise. The error bars on the time of any event measured using such a clock are so large that they span the whole time the universe has existed up to this point. At this early stage, time is about as useful as asking what's north of the north pole.?

The standard reply to this is: "What caused time to pop into existance then?" but if you use this argument then you're, to quote Back to the Future, not thinking four dimensionally. To illuminate this concept, I present the following argument.

Theorem: The creation of time had no cause.

Definition: "In order for an event it to be caused there must be and event that occured before it."

Observation: From physics, we know that the first event to occur was the creation of time.

Proof: The creation of time was the first event to occur. From the definition, we see that the creation of time can't be caused since there are no events that occur before this event. Hence, the creation of time is not caused.

Simon.

Wiploc

The creation of time would imply a creator, a cause. Perhaps you could say that the first even was the beginning of time.

crc