How many here are atheists?

[Russell Kanning]

For me it's like this...
There is no real evidence of any sort of "higher power".
And if there was a god then I would hate him/it b/c that god would be ultimatley responsible for everything.

I am the opposite.
I like my life, so I am thankful to the creator of that life.

[TackleTheWorld]

Hey, Gods not getting credit for making my life wonderful.  You should have seen me when he was in charge, sick all the time, cowering before every authority, accepting insult after insult.  I get all the credit!  I get it all!  All!

[dalebert]

Alright, I'm finally gonna take a shot at answering Caleb's question about what I DO believe in.

He said something about whether consciousness was inherent or emergent. Something like that. I do in fact believe it's emergent. I look at things like fractals and statistics and bell curves and evolution by natural selection and I see something very remarkable. I see order coming out of chaos. I understand why it happens and I can't help but see a kind of destiny in it. In a vast expansive universe and trillions of years, possibly in a repeating cycle of infinite time, it makes sense that anything that can happen WILL happen. So while the the huge vastness of the universe remains chaotic and meaningless, little pockets of order have to happen given enough time. There is something amazing in that the laws of universe seem to lend themselves to certain things- hexagons, spheres, planes. And when it comes to life, things like eyes, and not just one eye, but more than one for the sake of depth perception. Someone said eyes have evolved separately like at least 8 times. That seems like destiny to me. Not design. That notion seem completely counter-intuitive with how the universe behaves. Eyes just happen because they make sense. They happen because they work to address a need. It's like the free market of biology.

Are you familiar with Plato's theory of forms? I never studied it but it was described to me and something about it stuck with me and I've thought about it ever since. I'm really much more of a thinker than an absorber. Ideas just stimulate me to think. But he had this notion of how everything in this world was just a shadow of a perfect version in some other dimension and it was trying to be that perfect thing but never could quite get there. That seems to be the nature of the universe. We are moving toward some sort of perfection or harmony of existing, and though we will never get there because that perfection can't be expressed in our physical world, the perfection guides us.

It's like math. In math, you have asymptotes. You get closer and closer to them but you can't reach them. There are concepts in math that are perfect and they guide our world, but they can't be expressed perfectly. pie*r^2 is a PERFECT sphere. It describes an infinite number of points. There's no such thing as an infinite number of points in the physical world, but a soap bubbles takes those soap particles and TRIES to make a perfect sphere.

OK, I'll have to continue this later. I'm only just getting started. Suffice to say for now that I do see meaning and purpose. I do not describe what I believe in as "God". Consciousness is just part of this equation of order and it's definitely emergent. The nature of consciousness seems to me to be something of discovery, of growth of experience and understanding. Omniscience or perfection would inherently be an unfeeling automaton which cannot be conscious. Consciousness was meant to be just as eyes were. I jokingly said maybe we are evolving into God and maybe for God time moves backwards. I was only half joking. In a way, I think we are evolving into God though that God is a sort of asymptote. The time moving backwards part was just me BSing.

More later, including how each of us as individuals fit into that whole process.

[kola]

For me it's like this...
There is no real evidence of any sort of "higher power".
And if there was a god then I would hate him/it b/c that god would be ultimatley responsible for everything.

I am the opposite.
I like my life, so I am thankful to the creator of that life.

thats 3!

Kola

[Caleb]

Alright, I'm finally gonna take a shot at answering Caleb's question about what I DO believe in.

He said something about whether consciousness was inherent or emergent. Something like that. I do in fact believe it's emergent. I look at things like fractals and statistics and bell curves and evolution by natural selection and I see something very remarkable. I see order coming out of chaos. I understand why it happens and I can't help but see a kind of destiny in it. In a vast expansive universe and trillions of years, possibly in a repeating cycle of infinite time, it makes sense that anything that can happen WILL happen. So while the the huge vastness of the universe remains chaotic and meaningless, little pockets of order have to happen given enough time. There is something amazing in that the laws of universe seem to lend themselves to certain things- hexagons, spheres, planes. And when it comes to life, things like eyes, and not just one eye, but more than one for the sake of depth perception. Someone said eyes have evolved separately like at least 8 times. That seems like destiny to me. Not design. That notion seem completely counter-intuitive with how the universe behaves. Eyes just happen because they make sense. They happen because they work to address a need. It's like the free market of biology.

Are you familiar with Plato's theory of forms? I never studied it but it was described to me and something about it stuck with me and I've thought about it ever since. I'm really much more of a thinker than an absorber. Ideas just stimulate me to think. But he had this notion of how everything in this world was just a shadow of a perfect version in some other dimension and it was trying to be that perfect thing but never could quite get there. That seems to be the nature of the universe. We are moving toward some sort of perfection or harmony of existing, and though we will never get there because that perfection can't be expressed in our physical world, the perfection guides us.

It's like math. In math, you have asymptotes. You get closer and closer to them but you can't reach them. There are concepts in math that are perfect and they guide our world, but they can't be expressed perfectly. pie*r^2 is a PERFECT sphere. It describes an infinite number of points. There's no such thing as an infinite number of points in the physical world, but a soap bubbles takes those soap particles and TRIES to make a perfect sphere.

OK, I'll have to continue this later. I'm only just getting started. Suffice to say for now that I do see meaning and purpose. I do not describe what I believe in as "God". Consciousness is just part of this equation of order and it's definitely emergent. The nature of consciousness seems to me to be something of discovery, of growth of experience and understanding. Omniscience or perfection would inherently be an unfeeling automaton which cannot be conscious. Consciousness was meant to be just as eyes were. I jokingly said maybe we are evolving into God and maybe for God time moves backwards. I was only half joking. In a way, I think we are evolving into God though that God is a sort of asymptote. The time moving backwards part was just me BSing.

More later, including how each of us as individuals fit into that whole process.

You probably thought I forgot that I promised to answer your questions. I haven't.  I was actually trying to get around to it today, and have been working on it, not really satisfied quite yet with my response. Believe it or not, I've been spending quite a bit of time thinking about your questions, and how best to frame my answers. I tend to think exactly the opposite of the way you described you think. You described yourself as ideas stimulating you to think, more of a thinker than an absorber. With me, it's pretty much exactly the opposite. I get what I call "a big thought blob", and then I have to spend lots of time deconstructing it into the component parts, or at least something that can be usefully communicated.

It is interesting, though, that you described consciousness as emergent. I actually agree with much of what you said, but obviously don't agree that consciousness is emergent. (I am speaking casually here, so don't go deconstructing consciousness on me quite yet).  I strongly suspect that the question, "Is consciousness inherent or emergent?" is simply a rephrasing of the question, "Does God exist?"

So anyway, I will respond more on both your posts later. Just didn't want you to think I forgot.

[Jacobus]

I strongly suspect that the question, "Is consciousness inherent or emergent?" is simply a rephrasing of the question, "Does God exist?"

Bingo.

[dalebert]

Hey, Gods not getting credit for making my life wonderful.  You should have seen me when he was in charge, sick all the time, cowering before every authority, accepting insult after insult.  I get all the credit!  I get it all!  All!

Hallelujah! Now get down on your knees, but make sure there's a mirror there and give thanx! Tell that person in the mirror how thankful you are that she took personal responsibility for not just her mistakes and failures because she learned from them, but especially for her successes!

[Caleb]

To Dale,

Alright, here is the answer I promised you as regards your questions regarding the perceived incoherence of God. But first, a little overview of the topic may be in order, because I think there are other issues as well, not simply that you felt that I hadn't addressed your questions, but also your frustration that I was unwilling to even attempt to do so.

As I reviewed your posts, I couldn't help but feel that you and I must have been reading different threads. This thread was started by Kola, presumably so people could self-select for his Ignore list. The whole spirit in which the thread was started was irksome to me, and it became increasingly so when the fairly predictable one-liners started coming in, right on schedule. First you have Ryan's oft-posted list. Then Vitruvian's "well let's define this alleged God", then my "drive-by", then Jim's "God is not anything" quip, then another Jim quip where he alleges that the Deity has given him special revelation, then Ryan claiming that Faith is just an excuse to believe something without thinking it through, then Rainey posting her story about christian vs. atheist philosopher, then Vitruvian accusing her of a straw man, on and on it went. You accuse me of a "drive-by", but if so it was a drive-by in a thread chock full of drive-bys. Capped by Vitruvian's suggestion that if you do not take his statements of reality as fact you are stupid, which you correctly realized as tactless, but it's not just tactless. It's also an attempt to completely divorce the question from its metaphysical context, to discuss a hypothetical in a vacuum without any frame of reference.  I enjoy a lively (respectful) debate as much as the next guy. But I'm not inclined now, nor was I inclined at the beginning of this thread, to go down the atheist talking points and refute them one by one. Why is it that I am expected to be the only one with anything serious to contribute? Why is it that one-liners and drive-bys are ok for everyone else, but I am expected to defend and refute my views on every point, and not only that, but to do so on the precise terms chosen by those who hold to the opposite view?  I have long felt that the debate is pretty much pointless. Not only has it gone on on this forum many times before, but it has been going on in society for a few thousand years or so. The point/counterpoint dynamic has been pretty fully developed by now. I doubt that you or I have anything to add to it. Not that I'm attacking either of our intelligence. I think we're both pretty smart guys. But at this point in human history, it's all pretty much been said before. There are volumes of books on the topic. Books of atheist essays, books of theistic essays, philosophies that incorporate either atheism or theism, and of course, books of debates between atheists and theists. If you have a  question about God that is really troubling you, whatever answer I could give has been published ad nauseum already. So hence my reluctance to debate point by point down the line of arguments. It's just not my cup of tea, unless there is something in it for me. Like epistemology, for instance. Towards the beginning, I mentioned that I thought that could be a productive discussion, because I think that epistemology is still something I'm trying to form my thoughts on. But predictably, it didn't go down that path. Or another option would be a person who was at the point of despair, and couldn't see any way out of it, but wanted answers. Ok, in that case I have an emotional incentive to try to help the person, for the sake of helping them. But this wasn't your stated reason, quite the contrary. You personally stated that you felt quite fulfilled in your atheism, and weren't open to the idea of God. Ok. Fine. But by this point in the discussion, it's beginning to seem pointless to me. It's mainly just an intellectual exercise, where people have already firmly made up their minds, avoiding any paths where there is genuine possibility for growth (such as, like I said, epistemological foundation,) concerning material that I've already considered over and over again. I'm not some guy who was raised as an Evangelical Christian who has never thought out my position. I was raised in a cult, became a sort of atheist, although I never would have called myself an atheist. I was the true "weak form" atheist, I suppose. I had no belief in God, but I wasn't exactly happy about that. I didn't find it particularly fulfilling or liberating or any of that. I would never have said, "I believe there is no God" I just didn't see any reason to suppose him. Where I'm at now is the result of reading and trying to make sense out of my world. I may not have all the details, or even close to all the details, but I have a rough outline of what I believe, and it's just not going to likely depart from that. I say this because it's been my feeling that the "point" of this discussion is that you want me to reexamine my beliefs. I'm always reexamining, but by this point, it's not like I'm just drifting through life picking beliefs out of thin air.

Another point that I want to make is that certain points just don't resonate with me. Other objections do. When you say, for instance, that "omniscience and omnipotence are conflicting, you can't be both," to me, that's an argument that just doesn't resonate. To me, it seems that omniscience is just omnipotence restated. If a being is omnipotent, he knows no limits to what he can do. One of the things he can do is that he can know all. It's just the other side of the same coin. This isn't an argument that I'm trying to dispute with you on, because I don't see omnipotence as a necessary quality of God, but the point is that certain arguments don't resonate with me, and I'm unlikely to comment on them because I don't find them persuasive. I usually apply my mental effort in tackling the questions that most cause doubt. Your argument about the concept of God being incoherent is one of those arguments that just doesn't resonate with me. It's not in my top three list of arguments against God's existence that trouble me. I try to be as honest as I know how to be, so if you keep me talking long enough, I'll end up shooting myself in the foot and giving away all my weaknesses. I've done this before on the subject of God, and where I stand, myself, personally, is that the strongest resonating argument against the existence of God is the existence of evil. That's really where my doubts lay, so if you started pressing there, you'd probably find me much more responsive and creative, because I have an emotional investment in coming up with an answer. Of course, that doesn't mean that I want to go down those lines. Like I said, I don't think it's really that productive.

Oh, one more thing. I think earlier you said something like "I'm not questioning the concept of God itself, but merely your ideas about it, which I feel is incoherent." I actually have been seeing that particular expression a lot lately, and I kind of feel that is a meaningless expression. To the extent that our ideas are about something, then to that same extent you are discussing the substance of someone's ideas, not just the way that they are thinking about it. If there is a contradiction in their thought, it will manifest itself in the outcome, the conclusion. So there's no dichotomy between the two. This may be parsing words, but I think that in this case, it is important, because I keep seeing this statement, "the way that people think about it is incoherent" in atheist literature, and I feel that it is an attempt to pull the concept of God away from the infinite down to the finite, where it can be tackled more easily. It's well and good to try to make our conceptualization easier, but not at the expense of failing to do justice to the concept.

Ok, on to the substance of your question.

My initial take on the idea that God is incoherent (because personality requires a finite nature) is that it is based on a mistaken concept of the infinite. I can't tell you what it would be like to be an infinite being. But I do think that when you think about it, our conceptions of this infinite aren't that much different. The only difference seems to be that I add self-awareness to the mix, but that hardly seems any more incoherent than any other aspect of the infinite. I think our language trips us up, we want to define a "person" as an "individual". Hell, the word itself is stuck in the finite. But these words are based upon our own understanding of being an "individual", which is skewed toward the finite aspect of it. Another thought that I had, as I try to picture it in my mind, is that being infinite doesn't preclude finite aspects. The infinite can absorb the finite, just not vice versa. So, even if we conceive of a thought as being finite, because a thought is itself defined in relation to that which it is not, that doesn't mean that an infinite being couldn't produce a finite thought. It is the finite that cannot produce the infinite, not the other way around. I also think the time illustration was a lot more applicable than you seem to appreciate. Granted, any analogy will only be approximate, but time itself consists of both a finite and an infinite nature. When you go back to the big bang, you have the beginning of space/time itself. But the question can then be asked, what happened "before the big bang." This question is in a sense incoherent. The big bang was the beginning of time. At least as we know it. Yet to me it seems self-evident that something has always been. Thus time that we speak of is finite time, compared to the infinite time of existence itself, in which the universe has its being. I see consciousness in almost exactly the same way; thus, we *do* have some everyday experience of God, even if we don't recognize it as such, only it is in a finite way. It is us that is limited, God is infinite. But the way that you conceive of the infinite makes it seem supremely limiting.

Here's a take on it that is articulated better than I think I can do.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08004a.htm

Anyway, I will get around to your philosophy a little later. It's late, and I have to get up early.

Caleb

[grasshopper]

My head hurts AGAIN!
  Kidding!
   I think therfore I am.  This line is loaded.  Because we thing and are self aware, does that make us God like?  I don't think so.  I am made up of plants and animals that eat plants a few strands of DNA and a few bucketts full of water.  How did I get here?  How did those things get together and make me?  I don't know but I want to know.  The big bang?  How did it gfo bang in the first place?  What heal together the 2 nukes gravity and the other stuff?  I don't know but if I did know. I'd be the God.  Am I a dog?  I don't know, I think I'm human but what makes us human and not a dog?........

[kola]

My head hurts AGAIN!
  Kidding!
   I think therfore I am.  This line is loaded.  Because we thing and are self aware, does that make us God like?  I don't think so.  I am made up of plants and animals that eat plants a few strands of DNA and a few bucketts full of water.  How did I get here?  How did those things get together and make me?  I don't know but I want to know.  The big bang?  How did it gfo bang in the first place?  What heal together the 2 nukes gravity and the other stuff?  I don't know but if I did know. I'd be the God.  Am I a dog?  I don't know, I think I'm human but what makes us human and not a dog?........

Aint u a grasshopper? 

[J’raxis 270145]

/ME peeks in.

Did anyone change anyone else's mind?

Nope, didn't think so.

Congratulations... you have discovered the result of every thread everywhere.   

Nah, we've had some fruitful discussions that have changed how people think about some things.

[Caleb]

Ok, Dale, I'm finally getting around to your philosophical piece. I want to address a few things first, though, to help clear up confusion later. This piece won't really come to any definitive conclusions, because of where my epistemology is headed. Epistemology concerns itself with the question of knowledge itself. How do we "know" what we know? The outline of where I am going with it is that I feel that man himself must be the measure. This isn't really a new way of looking at it. Descartes started with man as the measure, "cogito, ergo sum". But if you are going to start with man, and only go so far as you can prove, you won't get very far. That's why, as Ryan mentioned in a post earlier, it is important to distinguish between "beliefs" and knowledge. And further it is important to distinguish between everyday propositional knowledge, and absolute knowledge. To build a philosophy based only on absolute knowledge, well, you wouldn't get much past "cogito, ergo sum." So, I take it as a much better idea to use man as our reference point. We don't have to start with man. We don't have to limit ourselves to any starting absolute fact. We can begin with assumptions and unproven premises. However, when the conclusions of the philosophy get to the question of "what is man?", then it must align with my experience. It must resonate. If it doesn't, the entire approach is invalid. Now, there's much that has left to be said about this approach to epistemology, such as how to deal with competing valid philosophies and how to discern between what in my experience is absolute and what is not. "Cogito ergo sum" seems pretty indubitable. But my experience might include assumptions about myself that aren't quite so absolute. Like I said, there's a lot to work through the details on, and I'm still trying to do so. But I can say this much, I can't even begin to approach a philosophy with any sort of conclusions about its validity until I see how it deals with the very important question, "what is man?" not so much because man is the center of the universe (obviously he is not), but because that is my only personal frame of reference. So what I comment on thus far will be merely to try to frame your ideas more clearly in my head, not necessarily to draw judgments on where they will ultimately lead.

Let me begin by starting with the kalam argument, because I want to show you what issues we are tackling here. It is quite possibly the most self-evident proof that theists use, although it is remarkable by the fact that it doesn't prove God's existence. But theists would argue that it at leasts suggests his existence. Let's look at the argument.

Premise 1: Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe has a beginning.
Conclusion: The universe has a cause.

Ok, there's little dispute with the first premise, but most of the effort goes into attacking the second premise. On the one hand, you have the theists who will use cosmology and logic to attempt to establish that the universe has a cause. On the other hand, you have atheists who will say that the universe as we think of it may indeed have a beginning, but that the "universe" as conceptualized is just a finite part of an overall infinite universe of existence, which is, and must be, eternal. Thus, the tendency is to either doubt the cosmology itself, or more common to suggest cycles. On this point, I want to notice that the atheist and the theist are in agreement: There is an overarching infinite, they only differ on the nature of this infinite. The problem, as I see it, is that the words are getting confused. "Universe" seems to float between different categories. On the one hand, we speak of the "beginning of the universe" at the big bang, and on the other we speak of it as if it is eternal. That's why I am growing increasingly reticent to use the word "universe", it seems to be a floating concept. Depending on how the speaker uses it, it is either finite or infinite, depending on what you are talking about. So what I would suggest is that we are essentially trying to figure out why anything finite exists at all. Let's restructure Kalam to make this point more clearly:

Premise 1: Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
Premise 2: The finite has a beginning.
Conclusion: The finite has a cause.

I think that this seems so sound as to be self-evident. What we are both trying to get at here is the question of why there is such a thing as the finite. Whence is the finite? What was the cause which impelled the infinite to produce the finite. It does no good to simply say, as some might be tempted, that the finite is merely zooming in on a particular section of the infinite, as to do so we must first presume finite concepts, which is begging the question. So the problem is really one which is more foundational.

With that overview, I'm going to now go into what you posted. You observe order coming out of chaos. True enough. And you also assume some teleological purpose because of that observation. I think that is also a fair enough assumption. But the problem becomes explaining such order. The second law of thermodynamics would tend to suggest that such order is implausible in the extreme. Instead of order, we should find an increase in disorder. Thus, I think, the platonic forms that you suggested, which seem to articulate your vision of how such order can be possible in a universe which tends toward disorder. It's interesting that you should mention Plato, as I roughly align myself with Whitehead's process philosophy, and Whitehead has been described as a neo-platonist. Forms of perfection through which everything is striving may need further clarification, though. Do you see these forms in the plural or in the singular? Do you see them as finite or infinite? There would be a big difference. Depending on your answer, we would either have the question of what is the cause of the finite forms, or if you conceive of the forms as infinite, you would then need to address why anything ever departed from the perfect in the first place, such that it would need to strive for the perfect form from which it has been separated.

I suppose that's all for now. Like I said, I can't really begin to do much to endorse or refute your views until they address the question of "What is Caleb?" because I have no frame of reference. Until that point, I can only kind of look it over and suggest areas where the philosophy needs further development.  I will sort of prognosticate, though, and tell you that I think you're going to have problems addressing "what is man?" from a perspective that views consciousness as emergent. You might want to look into the work of a man named Jaegwon Kim, who I think has dealt a death blow to non-reductive materialism. What's funny about Kim is that, not satisfied with the results of his work, he has embraced a tiny bit of dualism. Just enough to make his materialism work. It's funny enough because that is a truly incoherent position, "mind is emergent mostly, except at those few critical pieces where it's not." But like most sensible men, he can't live with the reductive conclusions of his work because they are completely foreign to our experience as men.

[Russell Kanning]

2 pages of text .... and caleb edited it .... I guess not for length

[ReverendRyan]

Caleb - The whole "uncaused cause" or "unmoved mover" argument is full of inconsistencies.

To start:

Premise 1: Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
Premise 2: The finite has a beginning.
Conclusion: The finite has a cause.

Cause and effect only have meaning in the context of time. So I will assume you mean that time itself is finite, because mere existence is not contingent on cause and effect. There are three schools of thought on time, none of which support your position:

1. Time is a dimension complimentary to the 3 dimensions of space. - In this case, You can go up and down, left and right, and forward and backward forever. Claiming that time is the one finite dimension amounts to special pleading.

2. Time is only a human construct. - In this case, time doesn't exixst except as a system for humans to organize things, and finiteness is irrelevant.

3. Something caused time actually began at some point. - Here we really get into the unmoved mover argument.


As formulated by Thomas Aquinas, the unmoved mover argument is stated as follows:

"Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God."

And the uncaused cause as:

"Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause. This leads to a regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God."

For some reason the two are considered separate justifications, while they are essentially the same.

One can argue that the conclusion "God is the first cause" contradicts the premise "everything has a cause", and that the first cause argument is therefore self-contradictory.

1. Premise: every event has a cause.
2. Premise: there can be no infinite regress.
3. Premise: there exists some event e₀.
4. From (1) and (3), it follows that e₀ has a cause e₁, which in turn has a cause e₂, and so on, in an infinite regress.
5. From (2) we know that there can be no infinite regress, which contradicts (4).
6. Therefore, at least one of the premises must be false.

Even if we accept the argument from first cause, the conclusion is still problematic: the word "God" carries a lot of undesirable cultural baggage, denoting an intelligent being. If the ultimate cause of our universe turns out to be, say, a random vacuum fluctuation, then that would be "God" by Aquinas's definition, but to call this phenomenon "God" would be misleading.

If nothing moves without a prior mover, then God must need a prior mover, as well. Otherwise God is nothing, which contradicts the conclusion. Thus, either the premise is untrue, in which case the argument is unsound, or the conclusion doesn't follow, in which case the argument is invalid. In fact, as stated, the argument is clearly self-contradictory.

More exotically, if time were circular (i.e., if time repeated every so often, so that the year 1 were also the year ten trillion and one), then every motion could have a prior cause without infinite regress. This does not seem to be the case, though.

Even if there is an infinite regress of causes, so what? The human mind is uncomfortable with the concept of infinity, but reality has no obligation to make us comfortable.

In short, the argument that everything must have a cause except for my preferred invisible buddy is just a classic example of special pleading.

[Caleb]

Cause and effect only have meaning in the context of time. So I will assume you mean that time itself is finite, because mere existence is not contingent on cause and effect. There are three schools of thought on time, none of which support your position:

1. Time is a dimension complimentary to the 3 dimensions of space. - In this case, You can go up and down, left and right, and forward and backward forever. Claiming that time is the one finite dimension amounts to special pleading.

2. Time is only a human construct. - In this case, time doesn't exixst except as a system for humans to organize things, and finiteness is irrelevant.

3. Something caused time actually began at some point. - Here we really get into the unmoved mover argument.

I think I can make this very easy.  I hold that only the finite requires an explanation. I may be baffled by the infinite, but to say that something has always been removes any need to explain its cause, because, as you say, cause only has meaning within time.

1) I believe that time is a dimension, sure, but I don't see it as a special dimension; I also think that space is finite. To speak of something happening "before time" is to refer to the infinite. It's not really time at this point, not as we understand it anyway.

2) I don't believe this.

3) Like I said, I'm not really concerned with Aquinas' argument (which is platonic in origin,) but merely with establishing that we need to explain only the finite. It is the finite that has a cause.

It actually seems that, from your post, you are agreeing with me. It seems like you are postulating an infinity. I am too.  The question being the nature of said infinity. And my use of the kalam wasn't used to prove God, it was used to clarify Dale's use of the platonic forms, I desired to ascertain whether the forms as Dale expressed them are finite or infinite. I have restructured kalam to be self-evident. It doesn't seem to be the argument itself that you are nit-picking, only it's application to time, as well as your belief that the argument doesn't prove God's existence. If you reread carefully what I wrote originally, you will see that I specifically said that the ironic thing about kalam is that, while it remains the most common theistic argument, it doesn't prove God's existence.