Pefect, thank you for your patience, I just wanted to hone in on the disagreement to prevent us talking past each other.
Ok, let's put forward a defense of P1 and P2.
Premise 1
This is generally considered a relatively fundamental
law of causation. Changes in state (going from not existing to existing) require causation. We should consider that any effect that lacks a cause becomes, by
definition "necessary." And self sufficient effects cannot, by definition "begin." It is also self-evidently true. Rejecting this claim is equivalent to maintaining the claim that; "If null, then B begins to exist." However, the condition set, null is always and in all possible worlds true. Therefore B must exist in all possible worlds and at all possible moments. Thus it couldn't "begin to exist."
In the past, some have sought to object to this premise by forwarding different aspects of Quantum Mechanics. These fail however because the causal mechanism still exists, it is the
quantum wave function. The confusion often arises because we confuse a probabilistic cause for no cause at all. If there was a random number generator that killed a cat on odd numbers, we wouldn't say that the cat's death was uncaused.
Premise 2
This premise also is generally scientifically accepted. Inflationary cosmology dictates that the universe began from a
near singularity. I think it is important here to point out that time is a physical dimension of our universe, just like the
other dimensions. Just as they expanded from a singularity, so did the temporal dimension of our universe. This necessitates a beginning of the universe when the temporal dimension was a singularity as well.
Objections to this premise are usually in the form of alternative hypotheses about our current universe. Historically, the steady state universe was used. That is to say, it was argued until recently that the universe is eternal, that it had always been. This is problematic for several reasons. Primary amongst them is the evidence indicating the universe is expanding. It is for this reason that virtually no cosmologist holds to steady state theory today. The historic objection also still holds. If the universe was eternal, we would expect that all the stars and galaxies to have burned out by now. If there is an infinite past, an infinite amount of time would already have occurred, which is far greater than the possible time limit on all the fission of all the matter in the universe.
The first modification of this theory to deal with the expansion of the universe came with the cyclic model. In which the universe expands, collapses and expands again. This theory however fails because it also cannot recede into the infinite past. Entropy between cycles would build up causing later cycles to be high entropy states and prohibit matter and star formation[I. D. Novikov and Ya. B. Zel’dovich (1973) Physical Processes Near Cosmological Singularities Annu. Rev. Astro. Astrophys. 11 387-412]. Again, if the universe were infinitely old, this would have already occurred and we could not observe star formation now.
Finally, the most modern objection arises from an appeal to a multiverse or multiple universes. This objection also fails for two reasons. One, since it produces a temporal effect, the multiverse itself would need a temporal component (non intentful causes cannot act outside of a dimension they exist in), making it open to the same appeals to an infinite past that we have above. Two, a multi-verse hypothesis would need to be reconciled to the
Borde-Vilinken-Guth Theorem which prohibits low entropy, expanding universes (ie the kind we live in) from any multiverse. To date, no reconciliation has been put forward, with Stephen Hawking noting that this is the single greatest objection to his views.
While I recognize that this argument does not yet result in one of the conclusions you put forward, please bear with me, we'll get there.
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