Strawmen are always easier to deal with.
What is the reason why the question’s a non sequitur?
Because the absence of an explanation is not an argument for a given explanation (especially one that kicks the can down the road anyway).
And it’s not a strawman, I quoted you verbatim up to the word “magic-juice”. It’s exactly analogous.
The magic-juice is the strawman of creation factor.
I asked for a reason why something rather than nothing? I didn’t say anything about your response that you didn’t know.
We have no need to believe in a “creation”, especially since it brings problems of its own – presumably you are not positing a time before time where the event of creation happened?
And as I say, if we posit such a “factor” we can ask how/why that factor existed?
So the argument assumes that the only answer to the fact we don’t know why anything exists is a creation factor, yet this only adds problems and solves nothing.
Well the alternative to a creation factor is interesting.
The alternative is just acknowledging that we don’t know at this time.
This thread is supposed to be about arguments against god. But it wasn’t atheists that appealed to “why does something exist…”; it was something you brought up as a retort to the position that we shouldnt multiply entities.
The fact that it doesn’t work just leaves us back where we started.
I’m afraid, amigo @scorpion, this thread needs structure. Banno’s thread handles these issues more coherently, and it’s clear we need to tighten the framework.
We need a definition of “God,” a definition of “argument,”* and a definition of “failure.” Without these, we’re not analysing arguments; we’re just posting reactions.
As I said in my (closed) agnostic thread:
Arguments often shift unnoticed between classical theism, personal theism, deism, pantheism, panentheism, process theology, finite‑god theories, polytheism, and abstract necessary‑being theories.
If I missed it, let me know—but we must define our God before we defend it. You’re juggling too many conceptions without specifying which one is in play.
There are also several theistic issues that need attention.
Cosmological arguments may establish at most a first cause, necessary being, or explanatory ground—but not the God of any particular religion. This matters. We’re a global species; Christianity is not the default metaphysics. I mention this in case the thread is operating with an unexamined assumption.
And a first cause need not be personal. A necessary being need not be conscious, morally perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, freely creative, historically interventionist, revelatory, or the ground of worship. A necessary being can be entirely abstract. This is the kind of God I think possible.
PhilPapers lists a dozen attributes typically associated with divinity. Nobody here has addressed them. I’d be interested to see your thoughts and can list them as I am sad enough to have memorized the PhilPapers index. That is my philosophical education. Fear me.
*The rational, non-pressured acceptance of a position or standpoint in dispute by a given audience.
We’re not discussing an occurrence within the universe but the occurence of the universe (QG) itself.
There are very few arguments against God. The one that does it for even the staunchest believer is the PoE, which I’ve included in the OP.
If you feel the OP is poorly-structured, you can edit it … please.
Thank you for the feedback. I will also make an attempt to organize the OP in a better way.
Does that invalidate the statement, either the universe had a cause or did not have a cause? Does that also show that the universe isn’t contingent?
OK, so you’re just re-asserting this without addressing arguments for why it isn’t true. I read some more comments and both were covered by @180Proof in posts 53/58, so I don’t see any point in repeating it.
Somehow things got to free will, resulting in some weird comments.
This seems self contradictory. Our choice being ours or not has nothing to do with determinism. So a self driving car using its deterministic software to choose when to make the right turn safely does not mean it isn’t the car deciding when to make the move.
So your conclusion that your choices being yours being incompatible with determinism doesn’t follow. Perhaps it does if you presume that ‘you’ are outside of physics, rendering ‘you’ epiphenomenal, but that would be true determinism or not, since the alternative is randomness, which permits external control no more than does determinism.
Just like Jesus, yea. Problem is, it only works for around the first 3 weeks of December. The Santa story is typically not well leveraged during other months.
Santa and God are both leveraged by those that know better as a method of sheep herding. Children are not very scared of mortality, so they’re move moved by promises/threats of material gains. Hence Santa.
It means that those that administer the myth (the parents/careerists) have to know how the game works, or they’d make not be able to do their job.
Quite true. I watch how much my mother sends to them. It works really well.
And I answered, and got no reply on this point.
How would you define free will?
I’m not reasserting and if I did it’s probably because the message didn’t get through the first time around.
It shows me that the statement ‘the universe has a cause’ is both speculatively arbitrary and empirically unwarranted.
So is the statement the universe has no cause. 
Only if you fatuously ignore my argument (post #172).
Where do I do that?
How I define it is pretty irrelevant. I was using the way you seemed to use it, which is ‘choices being ours’.
By that definition, a sneeze is an act of free will since it isn’t anything else doing the sneezing.
I probably wouldn’t qualify such involuntary acts as being free. But we evolved complex and very expensive brains, a wasted expense if they’re not what are making the choices. I would need a brain no more complex than that of a frog (far less operating costs) if decisions were being made offsite.
You admit then that the universe having a cause is both speculatively arbitrary and empirically unwarranted. In that case, your rebuttal to point 10 is empty since there’s no necessary contradiction to, as you put it, there being something. God is no help here since it just adds another turtle.
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So you don’t have a definition for free will.
AFAIK, free will is about choices and their nature - choices can be due to a particle that originates outside of us striking our brain and not. The former type of choice is unfree while the latter is. This is the clearest understanding we can have about free will.
The biology of sneezing is tied to inflammation and reaction to irritants. Provide us with something better.
If you’re the type who considers the origin of the universe to be meaningless then you’re ignoring metaphysics.
OK. Free will entails awareness of alternatives, lack of external compulsion, and capacity to understand the consequences.
In short, that which is required to be held responsible for the choice. None of the three points is dependent on determinism or lack of it.
choices can be due to a particle that originates outside of us striking our brain and not. The former type of choice is unfree while the latter is.
What an interesting definition. Like any computer, the components of a brain are very insensitive to random particle events, and thus all actions (sneezes, illness, the choice to remain in a locked jail cell, signing a confession at gunpoint) are freely made.
On the other hand, if incoming particles activating a nerve signals that are detected by the brain count as ‘incoming particles striking our brain’, then pretty much no decision is free by your definition. I cannot think of a single exception.
The biology of sneezing is tied to inflammation and reaction to irritants.
That it is. Question is, is a sneeze a freely chosen action? It is not due to ‘a particle that originates outside of us striking our brain’, so by your definition, it’s freely chosen. By mine it isn’t since it violates the first 2 of the 3 criteria.
If you’re the type who considers the origin of the universe to be meaningless then you’re ignoring metaphysics.
Interesting. I never mentioned meaning at all, but since you bring it up, how exactly does a meaningless origin have anything to do with ignoring of metaphysics? I definitely have a metaphysical stance (that does not commit the category error of treating the universe as an object in need of creation), but the stance is completely independent of assigning the universe ‘meaning’ or not.
If your statement implies that I don’t assert that the universe was deliberately ‘created’, then I’d agree with that, but that’s not a case of ignoring metaphysics, it’s just a case of having come to a very different metaphysical conclusion.
That’s a good definition of free will and my definition agrees with it. Free will rests on choices, made under what conditions. The particle that strikes your brain induces a choice. You maybe torn between Coke and Pepsi and the particle that you didn’t perceive collapsed that wave function. 
What could be simpler?
So the question, why is there something rather than nothing?, is meaningful?