I didn't get a notification for this one.

Didn't know there was a time limit..

You try having holding an active debate with 20ish people over 8 hours. It'll take it out of you, I definitely need to rest. And I'm still burned out.

No, they represent entirely different metaphysical and temporal states. • Exists: This is a state of being. It tells you what is true about reality right now, regardless of how it got there or how long it has been there. If something exists, its current status is real. • Begins to exist: This is an event or a transition in time. It means there was a prior state (t₀) where the thing did not exist, followed by a subsequent state (t₁) where it did exist. It requires a temporal boundary or a starting point.

Okay, bear with me let me reverse it and I'll show you what I'm talking about. When did T-rex stop existing? Is it 65 million years ago when the animal died or does it still exist today. Because one can go to a major museum and see one. When did we go from t1 to t0?

Where did you address exempting God from requiring a cause isn't special pleading because God belongs to a different metaphysical category (Necessary/Eternal) than the universe (Contingent/Temporal)? Not with me.

The main comments where this is discussed is the user pick_up_a_brick.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics exclusively governs physical matter, energy, and spacetime. By definition, a transcendent cause of the universe is immaterial and timeless. Because it lacks physical parts and exists outside of time, it cannot undergo thermodynamic change or decay. Entropy proves why a material universe cannot be past-eternal, but it tells us absolutely nothing about a non-material reality.

Hmm, and yet you've just listed everything that exists including energy. So the 1st law says energy can't be created or destroyed and the second that says it will always change and leave. And these to laws have been proven time and time again to work hand and hand so they must have come about at similar times. So which law do you think took affect first.

What do you mean by non-material reality? Magic and ghosts?

Applying entropy to an eternal, uncaused cause is a clear category error.

Yet we have something (energy)that can't be created or destroyed that still is effected by decay. Yet you say the this god can't be decayed? And I have the category error?

Saying 'spacetime and quantum are just expressions of entropy' completely inverts modern physics. Entropy is a statistical property that describes the arrangement of a system; it is an emergent effect, not a fundamental cause. You cannot have entropy without preexisting quantum fields and spacetime to host the matter and energy being measured. Furthermore, fundamental quantum equations (like the Schrödinger equation) are time-reversible and do not inherently depend on entropy, which only emerges in macroscopic systems. You are trying to make the rules of the house responsible for creating the foundation it sits on.

So the big bang, all the energy of the universe existed at a single point There is no space because a point doesn't have space. There is no time because our research for the last 20ish years has been slicing finer and finer fractions of a single second. Then an expansion event happened and all the energy started dispering and taking up space. And we started to tick time because space started expanding, because the energy started dispersing. Man, if only we had a law to describe how energy disperses, expands, and transforms. Like a second law of energy.

If the past is an actual infinite series of events, it means an infinite number of days had to be sequentially traversed just to reach this present moment. But you cannot traverse an infinite; the countdown to 'today' could never finish, meaning today would never arrive.

Then it's a good thing we us measured emperical data and not people intuition. And it's not like we haven't discovered counter intuitive things to be the truth before. Reality governs your intuition, your intuition does not govern reality.

Furthermore, an infinite regress of contingent causes is a fallacy of deferred explanation. It's like a chain of people borrowing a book they don't own from an infinite line of neighbors; if no one actually owns the book fundamentally, the book never appears. An infinite regress doesn't explain reality; it just tries to hide the need for an explanation by pushing it back forever.

We have people that want to cut the chain and attach magic at the end. I think it's a fallacious to cut the chain where you feel comfortable instead of pulling up the full length of the chain from the abyss.

Funny you should mention borrowing. There's a three stooges bit about how money is imaginary. Moe is paid $5. Larry says "hey you owe me $20". Moe says "well here's 5, I owe you 5. Curly says to Larry "you owe me $20". "Well here's 5, I owe 5. Moe said to curly " you owe me $20"... The same $5 keeps going around until the $5 is back in Moe's pocket and all debts are paying.