My challenge to Evan Minton Cerebral Faith on the big bang

Evan Minton is doing pretty much what Frank Turek is doing, and is pushing the big bang as if it is the only "valid" theory of origins and that it obviously implies a spaceless timeless immaterial personal god.  See here.

I posted the following rebuttal to him:

Three objections:

First, how can you acknowledge that running the tape backwards gets us to a point of "infinite density", when in fact elsewhere you cite the "infinite" nature of something as a reason to reject it?  If reeling the tape backwards potentially shows us a point of actually infinite density, well, you insist that an actual infinite cannot exist because we cannot traverse it.  Since the density of an infinitely dense point could never be traversed, your own logic would require that you deny the possibility of a point of infinite density as strongly as you deny the possibility that the universe is an actual infinite.

(this is to say nothing of the fact that you believe your god is a case of real existing actual infinity that we cannot traverse...so apparently, by your own standards, you don't seriously believe that actual  infinites are impossible, otherwise you'd be saying your god, by being a case of actual infinitity, is thus impossible.)

Second, plenty of creationists and anti-evolutionist websites, usually run by classical theist Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy, assert that the big bang theory is contrary to Genesis 1-2.  What do you say to your brothers in the Lord who find the big bang equally as unscriptural and unscientific as some atheists do?   Is confession of the big bang a test for orthodoxy, or is asserting the unscriptural nature of the big bang a position that is within the range of biblically allowable alternatives?

Third, every biblical description of god's activities in heaven would give the ancient reader the distinct impression that events happen up there in temporal chronological progression no less than they do on earth.  They would never have gotten the idea that the "eternity" god lives in is some sort of 'ever present now' or "other dimension" that is impossible for finite creatures to comprehend.  The bible talks about what goes on in heaven no less plainly than you'd talk about what happened at bible camp last year.

That being the case, how long do you suppose the list of god's prior acts is, and why doesn't your argument about the impossibility of traversing an actual infinite compel you to say the list of god's prior actions is limited?  If our inability to traverse an actual infinite proves the infinite is a faulty concept, then our inability to traverse the entire list of god's prior acts would, under your own logic, prove the notion to be a faulty concept.

The way i see it, the bible itself forces you to one of two conclusions, either of which do violence to what you currently believe:  either a) because the list of god's prior acts is infinite, the impossibility of our traversing an actual infinite does nothing to disprove the infinite, it merely speaks to our current inabilities, or b) the list of god's prior actions is NOT infinite...and at that point you can kiss your classical theism goodbye.  You suggest the list of god's prior actions is finite, and you wind up with a finite god and thus that much closer to Mormonism.

By the way, the Court has decided to allow my libel lawsuit against James Patrick Holding to go forward, so if you did in fact pray about this, you might consider that it was God who opened that door, when in fact the earthly judge was initially threatening to dismiss the case.  If prayer works, then thanks for your prayers. 

-------------------

Minton also asks whether we have examples of things beginning to exist.  See here.

Minton failed to deliver the goods, the for the reasons outlined in my rebuttal, which was:

    barry
May 8, 2019 at 1:05 PM

    No, Mr. Minton, things beginning to exist in the sense of new atoms popping into existence, is NOT "self-evident". Those closest you could get is the Copenhagen school of quantum physics, but even that is too tenuous to be taken seriously in your effort to "prove" something.

    The only type of "begin to exist" we have any evidence for, is where the new thing is merely a rearrangement of pre-existing matter. You have no evidence that matter itself ever came into existence, and unfortunately, that's the precise sense you need to justify, in your effort to justify Kalam's first premise. Kalam doesn't say everything that begins to exist, was a re-arrangement of pre-existing matter. But its nice to see that you've pretty much admitted you don't have any serious evidence of anything popping into existence from nothing, rather, you have to "get around" the temporal-origin of things by bringing up the general bb theory. That is, you have no real-world analogies to show Kalam's first premise to be true, outside of the already-questionable and unconvincing BB theory.

    You challenge the atheist reader with:

    "If you, my dear reader, disagree, then let me ask you a question. Where were you the night the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor? Were you lying back in a canopy sipping coconut milk? Now that I think of it; where was I when that happened? I have no recollection of seeing the meteor wipe out the dinosaurs. Maybe the presupposition behind these questions is wrong. Maybe we weren’t there at all. Maybe, just maybe, we didn’t exist yet."

    -----I reply, correct, we did not exist in the days of the dinosaurs. But that doesn't mean our current existence implies creation of new atoms. We are STILL nothing more than a rearrangement of previously existing matter. This is rather obvious, while at the same time, your theory that some of what makes up a human being is "non-physical" has no compelling evidence whatsoever. Just read Moreland's treatment of the subject, and see what ridiculous warps the brain needs to entertain in order to continuing telling itself that thinking comes into the brain from another dimension. Nothing is quite as crazy as the efforts of Christian apologists to "prove" that the mind is different than the brain. When we say thoughts are always influenced by physicality such as brain damage or drugs, you can give nothing in reply, except that these proofs do not absolutely exclude the possibility of mind/body dualism. Well gee, the power of muscles doesn't absolutely exclude the possibility that the muscular power originates in another dimension and merely comes into the body using the muscle as an interface. Do you think the non-absolute nature of this proof is a compelling reason to leave open the option that the ultimate source of muscular power resides in another dimension (!?)

    You then argue "The reality is that we actually have a lot of examples of things coming into being; cars, trucks, galaxies, planets, people, houses, computers, telephones, animals, etc. These things didn’t always exist even if it were true that the matter these things were made of always existed."

    ----I reply, no; car, truck and galaxy did not come "from nothing", so they do not suffice to support your specific contention that things can come into existence "from nothing". When you say matter itself popped into existence from nothing, you are talking about something that has no analogy to how cars, trucks and galaxies come into existence. Creation ex nihilo is obviously quite different from the case of the auto manufacturer who takes pre-existing iron ore and turns it into a car.

    Either come up with real world examples of objects popping into existence without the help of preexisting matter, or we are rational and reasonable to deny that any such thing has ever happened.

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Dennis Ingolfsland's blind appeal to the Big Bang

This is my reply to an article by Dennis Ingolfsland entitled

Not enough faith to be an atheist

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Some fascinating facts:

    "The expansion rate of the Big Bang had to be accurate to within one part in [10 followed by 55 zeros--The actual quotes use scientific notation but as far as I know, that's not possible in blogger]. Any slower and the universe would have collapsed. Any faster and there would be no stars or planetary systems. In either case, life would not be possible."

 The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) is composed of Christians who have advanced degrees in scientific fields, and they push biblical creationism, yet they also declare that the big bang is both biblically untenable and scientifically false.  See "The Big Bang Theory Collapses", here.  Answers in Genesis is another Christan creationist organization that considers the Big Bang to be a naturalistic invention that is contrary to biblical teaching.  See here. 

See also

Christian apologists should abandon the big bang 

Jonathan F. Henry 

Some prominent Christian apologists claim that the big bang was God’s method of creation. Another common view is that the big bang is an apologetic for biblical creation. By this reasoning, Genesis 1:1 says that there was a beginning, and the big bang was also the beginning of the universe. Thus the big bang is an evidence for creation, not evolution. This is a mistaken conclusion. The ministries of the Christian apologists named in this paper, as well as others that could be named, generally take a high view of Scripture which strengthens Christian faith. The critique

That was from JOURNAL OF CREATION 23(3) 2009, link to pdf here.

Is it reasonable for the unbeliever to ask whether Christianity's internal disagreements on the big bang indicate that there is no god of truth guiding either side?  Sure, anything's possible: maybe God wants young-earthers to be wrong in their view of the BB "for the sake of a greater good", but is that speculation remotely near "compelling" upon the unbeliever?  No.  Then we can be rationally warranted and reasonable to dismiss Christian efforts to use the BB to prove god, just like we cite to the several different interpretations of quantum mechanics to justify turning away from the absurd sophistry put out by the Copenhagen school.

    "The force of gravity had to be accurate to within on part in [10 followed by 40 zeros]. Otherwise, stars could not form, and life would be impossible."

 Take a cup full of pennies, toss them onto the carpet.  Take extensive notes about how each coin landed, its proximity to other coins, and which exact carpet fibers were implicated.  If the power of your toss, the shape of the cup, the design of the carpet or the movement of air through the room had been different at the time of the toss, the resulting pattern would have been very different than the one you recorded. 

So obviously the pattern you recorded could not have been the result of randomly throwing coins on the floor, but only the result of intelligent design.  Yeah right.  The pattern exhibits what could be viewed as "specified complexity", yet we also know the design appeared without intelligent intervention or purpose, as a similarly complex design would have emerged if such a cup of pennies had been knocked over during an earthquake.

    "The mass density of the universe had to be accurate to within on part in [10 followed by 60 zeros]. Otherwise, life-sustaining stars could not have formed."

 Same answer.

This comes from The Making of an Atheist by philosopher James S. Spiegel (pg 46), quoting from former atheist philosopher Antony Flew.

 Anthony Flew was a dipshit who seems to have avoided doing his best to combat Christian theism.  Your use of Flew to "show what atheists argue" is akin to me using the WestBoro Baptist church to "show what Christians do".

And all of this was just for conditions for the development of life to be theoretically possible! (Antony Flew was influenced by MIT scientist Gerald Schroeder). The actual appearance of life is much more problematic:

    "...two scientists, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, calculated the odds of life emerging from non-living matter to be on in [10 followed by 40,000 zeros]." To put this enormous figure in perspectice, consider that the number of atoms in the known universe is [10 followed by 80 zeros]--a paltry sum by comparison. Moreover, consider the fact that statisticians, as a general rule, consider any 'possibility' less than on in [10 followed by 50 zeros] to be impossible" (Spiegel, 48).

Dr. Ingolfsland, come on:  Do you seriously think the average Christian reading this stuff has the first fucking clue about its actual mathematical basis?  If you have a Ph.d, you need to rise above the "prove-by-anecdote" fallacy and shape up. 

I just don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

 The faith required to be an atheist is far less blind than the faith it takes to believe that 2,000 year old  reports of unknown provenance and authorship, which speak about a resurrected man, are "reliable".  At least atheists are dealing with things that can be empirically detected.  Their theories about how the visible world works might be wrong, but at least they are dealing with matters that are clearly part of reality (excluding the idiots who push "dark matter" and other such nonsense).  But Christians posit an invisible immaterial deity that lives "outside of time" and "beyond the natural", concepts that are incoherent.

Clearly the Christian view is a faith more blind than the atheist viewpoint I argue for.

And I don't worship deities that cause men to rape women, that's why I say the Christian god, if he exists, is nothing but a demon:

 13 Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, And the earth will be shaken from its place At the fury of the LORD of hosts In the day of His burning anger.
 14 And it will be that like a hunted gazelle, Or like sheep with none to gather them, They will each turn to his own people, And each one flee to his own land.
 15 Anyone who is found will be thrust through, And anyone who is captured will fall by the sword.
 16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces Before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered And their wives ravished.
 17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold.
 18 And their bows will mow down the young men, They will not even have compassion on the fruit of the womb, Nor will their eye pity children. (Isa. 13:13-18 NAU)

 Lest you mistake your quick dismissal of my "interpretation" for the very presence of God, yes, there are conservative evangelical Christian scholars who admit that this text means exactly what it says:

17–18 As the macabre scene resulting from the cosmic quake passes, the finger points to historical movement. Yahweh calls attention to stirrings among the feared Medes for which he claims responsibility.

Watts, J. D. W. (2002). Vol. 24: Word Biblical Commentary : Isaiah 1-33.
Word Biblical Commentary (Page 198). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

 If interpreting this part of Isaiah was so "clearly" wrong, how likely is it that OT Christian scholar J.D.W. Watts would have missed it?  Can you really blame the atheist bible critic who agrees with Christian scholars that God is taking responsibility for causing some men to rape women here?

What Isaiah is talking about are standard atrocities that were a known part of real ANE warfare.

Cold Case Christianity: Dear Mr. Wallace, luck does not constitute "miracle"

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Cold Case Christianity: Woman Says It’s a Miracle Her 

Wallet Blocked Bullets – Why Not Believe Her?

Posted: 28 May 2018 01:34 AM PDT

In a recent incident in Tennessee, a woman claimed her purse and wallet were used miraculously by God. As the woman and her husband were pulling into the parking lot of their apartment, they heard “popping” sounds. After getting out of their car, they saw several bullet holes on one side of the vehicle. A few minutes later, the woman discovered a hole in her purse and a bullet lodged in her wallet. When reporting the incident to the press, she told them she believed God used her wallet as a shield: “Just by the grace of God. It`s a miracle to keep me or him from getting hit.”

When I was an atheist, I would roll my eyes at statements like this.

You were correct to do so.  In this case, the women is not reporting a phenomenon for which it is difficult to find a naturalistic explanation.  She is reporting something that is on the order of "luck".  I've also been shot at and managed to avoid the bullet. 

In my mind, Christians were always attributing accidents, coincidences, and chance events to the “miraculous” work of God.

That wasn't just in your mind.  They do.  If they lose $50 at the casino, God must have wanted them to do without that $50.  If they win $50, surely the creator of the universe wanted them to have the extra $50.  There's no talking to committed religious freaks like you, who insist God is the basis of all "luck", but who are still unwilling to embrace 5-point Calvinism.

I rejected such nonsense. I was a “philosophical naturalist,” and as such, I believed that every event (including this one in Tennessee) could be explained with purely “naturalistic” explanations. The bullets that entered the car took a trajectory that was dictated by the material properties of the vehicle and the laws of physics. Nothing more. The bullet just happened to land in the woman’s purse. Unusual – perhaps – but no big deal, and certainly not an act of God.

Now, many years later, I’ve reconsidered my position.

Why?  Do you suppose that perhaps something more than naturalistic laws were responsible for the causes that led to the bullets finding their way into her purse?  How much time do you suppose a non-Christian should spend checking up on this story?  5 minutes?  One hour?  Several days?  Your Fox News source even admits

The woman, who was not identified, was on her way back from the hospital with her husband on Thursday, when the couple suddenly heard gunshots.

 You don't understand why a skeptic would have difficulties believing the miracle explanation provided by an anonymous source?

Your Fox News source has her being intentionally ambiguous about whether or not the bullets that hit her purse would have hit her had the purse not been in the way:

"I was like, 'Oh my God, honey! Here's another hole that came through my purse!'" she told the station. The woman's bag was sitting in the back seat, and she credits the location with possibly saving her life.

But most people would expect that if the woman wishes to make a miracle-connection, she would provide a bit more detail, such as her body being in line with the purse, so that the purse did, IN FACT, prevent the bullets from hitting her.

I admit that I also believed in miracles – of a sort – when I was an atheist. Dictionary.com provides the following definition of a “miracle”:

“An effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.”

They also provide this definition of “supernatural”:

“Of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal.”

Given the way these terms are defined, nearly everyone believes in one kind of miracle or another, including those who reject the existence of a supernatural God. Even as an atheist, I too accepted the reasonable reality of at least one supernatural event.

I embraced the Standard Cosmological Model offered by physicists to explain the origin of the universe. It is known as the “Big Bang Theory,” and it proposes that all space, time, and matter (the attributes we typically think of when describing the natural realm) had a beginning.

That's where you went wrong.  The Big Bang is total bullshit.  The universe and matter have always existed.  But regardless, most physicists who accept the Big Bang, do not think it points to god. 

And the bigger problem for you is that the originally intended audience of Genesis 1-2 were mostly illiterate Israelite farm hands.  Moses' story of creation neither expresses nor implies some giant cosmic explosion, and it is highly unlikely the original Israelites under Moses would have read such a concept into the text, or added an explosion to the story in their mind as they heard a storyteller speaking the story to them.  If you must be a Christian before being a detective or scholar, you need to worry about how the Big Bang contradicts your own bible, before you pretend that it refutes atheism.

And one of fundamentalist Christianity's most vocal "creationist" think tanks, ICR, who require their members to uphold biblical inerrancy, entirely deny the scientific validity of the Big Bang theory.

Everything came into existence from nothing at a point in the distant past.

That's illogical.  Zero wouldn't have the function in math that it does, if it could ever produce anything.

"From nothing" is nonsense.  Yes, the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics says virtual particles can appear from nothing and disappear out of existence, but that's just one school.  There are several schools of quantum mechanics, and not all of them espouse indeterminism.

I accepted this model of the universe’s origin, even though it presented me with a problem.

If all space, matter and time came into existence at some point in the past, whatever caused them to leap into existence cannot (by definition) be spatial, temporal or material.

That's also foolish, the explosion of the singularity in the alleged big bang did not create dimensions.  Dimensions were the necessary implication of there suddenly being at least two bits of matter separated by some distance.  You may as well say time didn't exist until clocks were invented.   Worse, you posit the existence of the "immaterial" by denying the cause was material, when in fact you couldn't demonstrate the existence of any non-physical thing to save your life.

The same with your "temporal" word: you are implying that what set off the big bang set it off from within the realm of eternity, when in fact your own bible represents the passing of time in heaven no less than it represents time passing on earth, in fact, it always presents the acts of God as having a before and an after, up there in heaven:

 24 Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven, (Gen. 19:24 NAU)

What?  Was God throwing down fireballs on Sodom from the realm of eternity, and somewhere along the way down, those fireballs switched dimensions and continued coming down in the realm of time?  No, the author, obviously not concerned about biblical inerracy or systematic theology, felt free to talk about God as if his abode were in the same dimension, just higher in the sky, as man's.

In other words, the cause of the natural universe does not possess any of the attributes of the natural realm (i.e. space, time or matter). See the dilemma? My naturalistic belief in “Big Bang Cosmology” required an extra-natural “Big Banger.”

Then perhaps you were a stupid atheist and you didn't know what any fool knows, that plenty of scientists who accept the big bang, do not think it implies god.  You simply characterize it that way because of how easily such a childish view can be sustained (i.e., the bumper sticker "The Big Bang Theory:  God spoke and *bang*, it happened").   Like the toddler who thinks an invisible person causes the car to move forward.

The non-spatial, a-temporal, immaterial first-cause of the universe clearly fits within the definition of “supernatural” we’ve described. The cause of the universe is, by definition, “above or beyond what is natural” (in that it does not possess the attributes of the natural realm) and cannot be explained “by natural law.”

After becoming a Christian, I eventually wrote about this in a book called God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe. The beginning of the universe from nothing is actually evidence for the existence of an all-powerful, non-spatial, a-temporal, immaterial God.

Dream on.  Being omniscient or "all-powerful" is refuted by the question "Can God make a box so heavy that he cannot lift it?".  People make boxes too heavy to lift every day, so doing this does not require a logical contradiction, therefore, if God can do all logically possible things, he should be able to make a box so heavy that he cannot lift it.  Furthermore, God regrets his own choice to make mankind in Genesis 6:6-7, and since you think everything else in the immediate context there is real and not figurative, you cannot escape this problem by pretending that God's remorse is mere anthropomorphism.  The originally intended audience for that passage were illiterate Israelites around 1300 b.c.  They would have no contextual, historical or linguistic reason to think God's regretting his own prior choices was any less literal in v. 6 than the wickedness of men mentioned in v. 5, or Noah's finding favor with God in v. 8.

And the more you talk about things non-spatial and a-temporal, the more you justify the skeptic to write you off as babbling incoherently. I don't listen to such talk any more than I listen to desperate idiot scientists who talk about "dark matter" or how worm-holes area shorter distance between two points than a straight line is.

The most spectacular and impressive miracle recorded in the Bible is recorded in the opening line of Genesis, Chapter 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Christians believe the beginning of the universe was a supernatural event.

And Christians like you add a gigantic "explosion" to the biblical record of creation, which the record itself neither expresses nor implies, and explosion other inerrantist creationist Christian scholars insist is wholly fictitious and unbiblical.  But you live in a day where religion is dismissed if it doesn't account for scientific truth.  So apparently you've chose to adulterate the biblical creation account just to make the bible sound more impressive to modern day people.

As a skeptic investigating the claims of Christianity, I eventually had to admit that I also accepted the origin of the universe as a supernatural, miraculous event, and if God had the power necessary to create everything from nothing, he could probably pull off the miracles described in the New Testament. In fact, He might even be able to use a wallet to stop a bullet.

But the claimant didn't claim anything that couldn't be accounted for by naturalistic explanations.  She didn't claim the bullet bounced off her skin, for example, or that it created a fatal wound which immediately healed because she immediately prayed over it.

What's next, Wallace?  If a Christian credits God with their winning the lottery, will you write a blog piece asking why we shouldn't believe them?

Why don't you ascribe to God's miraculous doings, the opposite type of events, that is, where poverty and injury are created?

For example, when a foreign power invades and they rape the women and beat the children to death.  After all, Isaiah 13 says it is God who will stir up the pagan Medes to do all these things to the Hebrews.

Here's the entire chapter for your convenience.  Maybe someday you can tell the Christians why it is that you refuse to speak as bluntly about God's causing evil as the biblical prophets did.  Common sense says you so refuse because you don't agree with what those prophets taught:

 1 The oracle concerning Babylon which Isaiah the son of Amoz saw.
 2 Lift up a standard on the bare hill, Raise your voice to them, Wave the hand that they may enter the doors of the nobles.
 3 I have commanded My consecrated ones, I have even called My mighty warriors, My proudly exulting ones, To execute My anger.
 4 A sound of tumult on the mountains, Like that of many people! A sound of the uproar of kingdoms, Of nations gathered together! The LORD of hosts is mustering the army for battle.
 5 They are coming from a far country, From the farthest horizons, The LORD and His instruments of indignation, To destroy the whole land.
 6 Wail, for the day of the LORD is near! It will come as destruction from the Almighty.
 7 Therefore all hands will fall limp, And every man's heart will melt.
 8 They will be terrified, Pains and anguish will take hold of them; They will writhe like a woman in labor, They will look at one another in astonishment, Their faces aflame.
 9 Behold, the day of the LORD is coming, Cruel, with fury and burning anger, To make the land a desolation; And He will exterminate its sinners from it.
 10 For the stars of heaven and their constellations Will not flash forth their light; The sun will be dark when it rises And the moon will not shed its light.
 11 Thus I will punish the world for its evil And the wicked for their iniquity; I will also put an end to the arrogance of the proud And abase the haughtiness of the ruthless.
 12 I will make mortal man scarcer than pure gold And mankind than the gold of Ophir.
 13 Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, And the earth will be shaken from its place At the fury of the LORD of hosts In the day of His burning anger.
 14 And it will be that like a hunted gazelle, Or like sheep with none to gather them, They will each turn to his own people, And each one flee to his own land.
 15 Anyone who is found will be thrust through, And anyone who is captured will fall by the sword.
 16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces Before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered And their wives ravished.
 17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold.
 18 And their bows will mow down the young men, They will not even have compassion on the fruit of the womb, Nor will their eye pity children.
 19 And Babylon, the beauty of kingdoms, the glory of the Chaldeans' pride, Will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.
 20 It will never be inhabited or lived in from generation to generation; Nor will the Arab pitch his tent there, Nor will shepherds make their flocks lie down there.
 21 But desert creatures will lie down there, And their houses will be full of owls; Ostriches also will live there, and shaggy goats will frolic there.
 22 Hyenas will howl in their fortified towers And jackals in their luxurious palaces. Her fateful time also will soon come And her days will not be prolonged.  (Isa. 13:1-22 NAU)

 If Wallace wishes to be "biblical", he would have to add "rape" and "child massacre" to the "miracles" that God does.

And because all of God's judgments are good and righteous, Wallace would not see the slightest sign of psychological problems in the fools who praise God for ALL of His works....which would thus mean praising God for his causing of rape and child massacre.

Cold Case Christianity: Who Created God? Answer: mankind

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Who Created God?

Posted: 20 Sep 2017 01:00 AM PDT

If the intelligent design theory be true (i.e., that which is complex cannot exist except by being created by a prior equally if not more complex production-agent), then assuming God created us, we only have our degree of complexity because God himself possesses at least this degree of complexity.  So if our own complexity implies we were intelligently designed, why doesn't God's own complexity imply He was intelligently designed?

Apparently, the only reason you stop the "complexity requires intelligent designer" argument before it starts asking questions about God's complexity, is because you need to stop it at that point for the sake of theological convenience, nothing more.   Well if "complexity implies design" is a safe rule of thumb, your gonna need something more than theological convenience before you insist that there are cases of complexity where the rule doesn't apply.

 287Richard Dawkins, the famous English evolutionary biologist and renowned atheist, revived an objection related to God’s existence in his book, The God Delusion. In the fourth chapter (Why There Almost Certainly Is No God), Dawkins wrote, “…the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.” In essence, Dawkins offered a restatement of the classic question, “Who created God?” On its face, this seems to be a reasonable question. Christians, after all, claim God created everything we see in our universe (all space, time and matter); He is the cause of our caused cosmos. Skeptics fail to see this as a satisfactory explanation, however, because it seems to beg the question, “If God, created the universe, who (or what) created God?”

Part of the problem lies in the nature of the question itself. If I were to ask you, “What sound does silence make?” you’d start to appreciate the problem. This latter question is nonsensical because silence is “soundless”; silence is, by definition, “the lack of sound”. There’s something equally irrational about the question, “Who created God?” God is, by definition, eternal and uncreated.

Then you are avoiding the skeptic's objection merely by defining it out of existence.  You insist your god is eternal, therefore, there can be no questions about where he came from. But you don't know your god is eternal, you simply trust a book full of fairy tales which says as much.

It is, therefore, illogical to ask, “Who created the uncreated Being we call God?” And, if you really think about it, the existence of an uncreated “first cause” is not altogether unreasonable:

It’s Reasonable to Believe The Universe Was Caused

Famed astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “The Cosmos is everything that ever was, is and will be.” If this is true, we are living in an infinitely old, uncaused universe that requires no first cause to explain its existence. But there are good scientific and philosophical reasons to believe the universe did, in fact, begin to exist. The Second Law of Thermodynamics,

No, this law does not teach that the energy in the universe is running down.  Energy is nothing but matter in motion, matter doesn't disappear into nothing when it is converted to energy, it just changes its physical form.  The first law of thermodynamics prevents the creation or annihilation of matter, logically requiring that what's here, has always been here, and new things are just recombination of the same original atoms.  I am made of the dust of the stars and the oceans flow in my veins.

the expansion of the universe,

 That's based on the Doppler interpretation of the red-shift (stars moving away from us).  Wouldn't matter if it was true, the Andromeda Galaxy is blue shifted (moving toward us), and your big-bang theory, if true, would not allow for an entire galaxy to do a complete u-turn while racing away from us, and start coming back toward us.  There's not enough matter around the Andromeda Galaxy to explain how it managed to slow down from the initial big bang thrust, do a u-turn, and start heading in the opposite direction.  The proper conclusion is that movement of celestial bodies in the cosmos goes in all directions, which of course contradicts the "expanding away from each other" theory required by a big bang explosion.  Guth's Inflationary theory does not fix this problem and remains speculative nonetheless.

the Radiation Echo,

This is likely misinterpretation, see
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/big-bang-echoes-that-proved-einstein-correct-might-just-have-been-space-dust-admit-scientists-9461699.html

http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/do-we-have-the-big-bang-theory-all-wrong

And of course, who doesn't know that the conservative evangelical young-earth scientists over at two creationist websites deny the big bang theory and explain this radiation echo otherwise:

https://creation.com/echoes-of-the-big-bang-or-noise
http://www.icr.org/article/big-bang-theory-collapses/

You can hardly say spiritually dead skeptics/atheists "should" know the scientific truth proving your god, when your own spiritually alive brothers and sisters in the faith disagree with your interpretation of the scientific data.  Does it makes sense to tell you to avoid trumpeting from the rooftops until God's like-minded ones get their act together?  Or do you care somewhat less about divisions in the body of Christ than Paul and Jesus did?

and the problem of Infinite Regress cumulatively point to a universe with a beginning.

No, if the universe is indeed infinite, as appears likely,an infinite regress of causes would be real and would correctly explain any currently moving object.   And your God's eternal nature logically requires that the list of his past actions goes on forever, as a real and true infinite regress.  So you cannot say infinite regresses are logically impossible.

In the classic formulation of the Kalam cosmological argument: (1) whatever begins to exist has a cause,

This assertion is stupid, we have no scientific evidence that anything ever came into existence in the sense of being composed of new previously non-existent atoms.  A baby begins to exist, of course, but this is only a recombination of previously existing matter.  You probably don't mean "begins to exist" in the sense of "using preexisting atoms to produce a new shape" when you talk about God creating the universe.  You probably meant "begins to exist" in the sense of "brand new atoms that didn't previously exist".  And there you go...we have no empirical evidence that any material thing is composed of atoms that previously didn't exist.  its just a cosmos wherein the same atomic sub-structures that have existed for infinity continually combine and recombine.    If you think some of the matter in a log disappears into literally nothing after the log has burned up in the fireplace, you are sorely mistaken. ALL of the matter that was once part of that log, still exists after it has burned up, it is just that the application of heat caused it to change chemically and physically and for some of its matter to depart from it.  The heat that comes out of the chimmney is made of atoms that continue to exist even after the heat cools down.  Matter is eternal, just like the 1st Law of Thermodynamics says.

(2) the universe began to exist,

that logically requires the logical absurdity of a beginning to time itself, so your second premise is assuredly false. What fool talks about things that happened before time itself?

therefore, (3) it is reasonable to believe the universe has a cause.

Nope, see above.

It’s Reasonable to Accept the Existence of An Uncaused “First Cause”

This “first cause” of the universe accounts for the beginning of all space, time and matter.

Only if you ignore the serious problems that attend the concept of a first cause, such as this first cause logically existing temporally prior to time itself, your God being intelligent without a physical brain,  and the other problem previously stated, that your god has at least as much of the complexity that humans have, which you say implies an intelligent designer, but you blindly insist no intelligent designer is implied by God's own an infinitely greater complexity. 

You just stop the "complexity implies intelligent design" train where you need it to for no other reason than theological convenience, not for any logically compelling reason.   You either ride that train all the way to the end of the logic line and admit God's own complexity proves he himself was intelligently designed, or admit that because you know of at least one case of complexity that can exist without being intelligently designed, your rule of thumb that complexity implies intelligent design is not as logically forceful as you wish.

It must, therefore, be non-spatial, a temporal and immaterial.

Yeah, about as believable as something existing "beyond nature".  But I certainly agree that your god is immaterial.

Even more importantly, the first cause must be uncaused. If this was not true, the cause of the universe would not be the “first” cause at all. Theists and atheists alike are looking for the uncaused, first cause of the cosmos in order to avoid the irrational problem of an infinite regress of past causes and effects.

No, the atheists who think the universe is infinite, like me, no longer search for a first cause since that logically wouldn't exist in the infinite universe.

It is, therefore, reasonable to accept the existence of an uncaused, first cause.

It’s Reasonable to Believe God Is the Uncaused, “First Cause”

Rationality dictates the ultimate cause of the universe, (even if it isn’t God), must have certain characteristics. In addition to being non-spatial, a temporal, immaterial and eternal (uncaused), it must also be powerful enough to bring everything into existence from nothing.

No, creation ex nihilo is a logical contradiction.  We have no empirical evidence that zero could ever produce something, and the mathematical impossibility of this strongly argues the notion doesn't work anywhere else either.  SO if God really did create matter, than it can only be pieces of God or God's power, and thus pantheism is logically implied.

 The apologists who say quantum theory allows for virtual particles to be created from nothing and disappear back into nothing, are being dishonest by failing to inform you that this is only the Copenhagen school of quantum theory, there are several schools of quantum theory, and some of them deny that particles can come into existence from nothing. 

Finally, there is good reason to believe the cause of the universe is personal. Impersonal forces cannot cause (or refuse to cause) at will.

Stuff in the universe was never proven to have been put here by a will anyway, so no dice.

The minute an impersonal force exists, its effect is experienced. When the impersonal force of gravity is introduced into an environment, for example, its effect (the gravitational attraction) is felt immediately. If the cause of the universe is simply an impersonal force, its effect (the beginning of the universe) would occur simultaneous with its existence. In other words, the cause of the universe would only be as old as the universe itself. Yet we accept the reasonable existence of an uncaused first cause (one that is not finite like the universe it caused). For this reason, a personal force, capable of willing the beginning of the universe, is the best explanation for the first cause of the cosmos. This cause can be reasonably described as non-spatial, a temporal, immaterial, eternal, all-powerful and personal: descriptive characteristics commonly reserved for the Being we identify as God.

The universe was never caused, its always been here, obviating any need to refute your above-cited statements which stand on the falsified premise of the universe having a beginning.

All of us, whether we are atheists or theists, are trying to identify the first cause of the universe.

Count me out, the universe is infinite, there is no such thing as a "first" event in an infinite universe.  I've stopped looking.

The eternal nature of this non-spatial, a temporal, immaterial cause is required in order to avoid the problem of infinite regress.

Infinite regress was never a problem in an infinite universe.  Ever see the Hubble deep field?  The farthest we can see into space, there is no outer limit to the field of stars, it just continues on indefinitely.  There's no reason to think we'd ever reach the farthest star if we flew in a rocket ship in a straight line for 99 trillion years, we'd still see endless stars in front of us the whole time.  But we'd have to have eternal life to make this observation, and Lord knows, I don't want that.