From Dr. William Lane Craig, ReasonableFaith.com:
Wow, Cyrus, that is quite a mouthful! While a few of these objections strike me as misconceived, many of them raise substantive questions which merit a response. In order for me to get through them all, my responses are going to have to be very terse.
Its important to take these objections in a different order than you present them, since my arguments build upon one another. For example, one of my arguments for the causes being personal is its timelessness and immateriality, so one must consider those properties before one looks at the arguments for the personhood of the cause. So we need to consider the objections in the proper logical order.
But before we do, lets note what you do not dispute: that there is a cause of the beginning of the universe and that this cause is itself uncaused, beginningless, and enormously powerful. That much we agree on.
So, first, is this first uncaused cause changeless? The answer is Yes, if my arguments against the possibility of an infinite regress of events are sound. Since you dont dispute those arguments, we can agree that there is an absolutely first event. Since a change is an event, the cause of the first event must therefore be changeless.
To this you object:
"3.When God created the universe, a change occurred from a timeless state of affairs to a spatio-temporal state of affairs, which shows that timelessness does not imply changelessness."
I agree that God changed in creating the universe. But that only proves that Hes not immutable. Dont confuse changelessness with immutability. A timeless being must be changeless, but that doesnt entail it is immutable (incapable of change). Youre confusing a de facto property with a modal property. God can be changeless but mutable sans the universe.
So now we know that the cause of the universe is changeless sans the universe. A couple of important properties follow. First, its immateriality. Anything material is constantly changing, at least on the molecular and atomic levels. So were dealing with an immaterial being here. Second, its timelessness. On a relational view of time, time does not exist in the utter absence of events. So a changeless state must be a timeless state. Even on a non-relational view of time, time could at best be an undifferentiated time in which literally nothing happened; no change occurs. Third, its spacelessness. Anything that exists in space must be temporal, as it undergoes at least extrinsic change in relation to the things around it. So our cause must transcend space and time, at least sans the universe.
This immediately disqualifies your objection:
"2. The cause could have existed in other regions of space-time outside of the universe."
For they are not characterized by changelessness, immateriality, timelessness, and spacelessness. Moreover, this speculation was already undermined by the arguments against an infinite regress of events (including in other regions of spacetime) and rendered improbable in light of our discussion of multiverse scenarios.
So weve got an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful cause of the universe. Already, theres nothing like this in a naturalistic worldview, but it fits right in with classical theism. But theres more! Consider now whether this cause is personal. I give three arguments for the personhood of the first cause.
First, the argument, inspired by the Islamic Principle of Determination, that only a free agent could explain the origin of a temporal effect with a beginning from a changeless, timeless cause. (See the exposition of the argument in either the Blackwell Companion, pp. 193-4 or in Reasonable Faith [Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2008], pp. 153-4.)
You object:
"6. We parsimoniously should accept by Occam's Razor the initial big bang singularity as the cause of the universe rather than extending the causal chain further to God."
This rejoinder is futile because if the initial cosmological singularity is a physical state of affairs, as you think, then it is the first state of the universe (its initial boundary point) and, hence, began to exist a finite time ago. It cannot have come into being out of nothing, as you agree. So there must be a transcendent cause of the first state of the universe. Here my second argument, borrowed from Swinburne, for the personhood of the first cause becomes relevant. As I explain,
there are two types of causal explanation: scientific explanations in terms of laws and initial conditions and personal explanations in terms of agents and their volitions. . . . Now a first state of the universe cannot have a scientific explanation, since there is nothing before it, and therefore it cannot be accounted for in terms of laws operating on initial conditions. It can only be accounted for in terms of an agent and his volitions, a personal explanation (Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, pp. 192-3).
Ockhams Razor has nothing to do with it. The question is whether everything that begins to exist has a cause.
On the other hand, of course, if the singularity is just a mathematical idealization, then it does not exist and, hence, cannot be the cause of anything. Your response that mathematical objects are viewed by some philosophers as real objects evinces a misunderstanding about the nature of idealizations in science. Idealizations, like a point at infinity at which two parallel lines meet, are taken to be non-existent; thats the very point of calling them idealizations. Theyre useful fictions.