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If we've accepted that an uncaused cause exists (for whatever reason), Occam's Razor properly applied would suggest that:
I think you're speaking to the same issue as Demonslayer, but in a roundabout way.
We are here so imo something would have had to be forever. Might it have been more than a singularity? I don't see how. Whenever two things exist there is also some disagreement. I don't see things at the simplest level changing much. I am sure that there is someone who will disagree with that.
It is generally believed (thanks to centuries of experimentation and theoretical developments) that most physical systems can have observable measurements that can take on values over intervals of the real numbers. For example, we can say that an object which accelerates from 60 kilometers per hour to 70 does so continuously (it doesn't skip over any speeds in the interval [60,70]). In any interval, there are not only infinitely many rational numbers, but infinitely many irrational numbers too. So for an object to go any distance or travel at any speed requires that it "traverse" an uncountable infinity (an infinity "larger" than that of the rational numbers, integers, etc.).
I was actually stealing this point from a philosophical text: Logic and Theism. I highly recommend it, and it is apparently available for free (I just googled it).
I'm sorry too, I don't wish to interfere with a person's right to define their own terms as they wish. You can define the word "potato" as four wheeled means of transportation, or you can define it as a feathered hat. And further I can define a potato as being uncaused if I define "uncaused" as "grown in dirt". So yes, each person has the right to define their terms, but for any conversation to be meaningful the terms must be based on something. So the theologian has no special right to impose their definition on the questioner, unless there can be shown a reason for defining the term in such a way. So I say again theologians cannot make the question invalid just by declaring it so, they can not make God uncaused anymore than they can make a potato a ferrari. So me that God is uncause, otherwise God might as well be a potato (whatever that means).
True (although they can make it invalid within a particular context, but this holds true for everything- I can make it invalid to speak of god as anything other than a potato by defining god as such, in which case it is invalid to ask about non-potato gods, but who cares?).
True. However, a first cause isn't really uncaused. It is the start or origin of causality/causation itself. That which causes causality is necessarily uncaused. This is true even if one accepts that the universe originated without a creator (nothing caused it, but it was the origin of causality).
Not true. In fact central to the most sophisticated logical "proofs" of god is the possession of properties which necessarily make god unique. I think the better point (or perhaps the same point better made?) is this:
Even here we can make the simplistic move that god is by definition that which need not be caused or explained (i.e., that entity which can "cause" existence and causation). The real problem is getting from god as that which is uncaused to the unique entity defined into existence by being so (there can be many uncaused causes; we don't need a singular uncaused cause to "start" the would-be causal chain).
My view is that Aristotle, with his First Cause argument, he wasn't arguing for what we're arguing today. When he said "First Cause" (as one of the four causes), he meant something more akin to what you suggested (the cause of causality, something that pre-exists).
I mostly agree, in that Aristotle certainly wasn't arguing for what Craig et al. argue for. But he envisioned cause as requiring an agent. In fact, he held back mechanics for a thousand years by failing to realize that things can move without a mover (specifically, that spears can continue to travel despite no longer being moved by a person because of some imagined displacement of air). Also, just for clarity for readers, the first cause fit into one of Aristotle's four causes but wasn't itself one of these causes (i.e., regardless of whether the first cause was a final or efficient cause, it was only an instance of one of these causes). I'm not saying you meant to imply that the first cause was one of the four categories of causation Aristotle describes, but I thought it important to clarify.
Absolutely. And, moreover, we see it mostly coming from one form of Craig's argument. I dislike him particularly because he feels it is ok to present the non-specialist public an argument that he reveals in more technical writings to be flawed as if it were iron-clad. He doesn't simplify so much as he does distort.
