You said “the Kalam argument” to Michi. That’s too advanced for him. Speak at the level of Hebrew Wikipedia and below, preferably well below.

B,
Rabbi Michi doesn’t deal in names but in arguments. Present an argument and you’ll get an answer. Names say nothing. And by the way, I think it’s actually Kalam.

There is the Kalam cosmological argument:
For everything that began to exist, there is a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Conclusion: the universe has a cause.

There is a criticism that disputes premise 1 by saying that we haven’t actually experienced anything beginning to exist; rather, we have experienced only changes within things that already exist. And if we have no experience with things beginning to exist, then the argument from “experience” (“that’s how it is in everyday life, and in general”) falls apart.

Thank you.

I don’t see a difference. If a change needs a cause, then coming into being needs a cause too. It’s a kind of change.

To B: Y.D. explained it well.
I think the Kalam argument depends on many versions; today people usually talk about Craig’s version, which I’ll attach below.
In any case, what the questioner is asking has already been mentioned here in these Q&As several times.

I think you can simply replace the term existence with the term change of form, until you get to something primary that did not change form. (The religious also don’t speak about absolute creation ex nihilo, but rather being from being—God.)

Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.
No scientific explanation (in terms of physical laws and initial conditions of the universe) can provide a causal account of the origin (very beginning) of the universe, since such are part of the universe.
Therefore, the cause must be personal (explanation is given in terms of a non-natural, personal agent).

In short, we throw out the Kalam cosmological argument and go back to Aquinas’s argument from change.

A. I don’t know what Rabbi Michi would answer; that was my answer.
B. I’m not aware that he has such an argument. Here it only shows something that did not change. He spoke about a necessary being…

This claim of Alex’s is well known and worn out—and mainly not serious.
It’s true that in our world we are almost unfamiliar with creation ex nihilo (depending on how one defines emergence from the energy vacuum in quantum theory). But it doesn’t matter very much. If everything whose identity was shaped needs a cause, then all the more so anything that was created must also have a cause. The world was created—and it’s not reasonable that it happened on its own—so it has a cause.

Similarly, one could say philosophically that the creation of the world is not ex nihilo. It was done by “energy” whose source is the Holy One, blessed be He. When I say energy, I do not mean energy in our physical sense. Rather, I mean it in the sense of power. In our world, one thing is created from another thing. Here, the world was created from a power that was transformed into matter. The source of that power is the Holy One, blessed be He.

And there are many more flaws in Alex’s argument. Of course, that does not mean the Kalam argument is successful; like anything else, it has problems. But Alex’s criticism is certainly not what threatens it…