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”The equivocation was certainly more subtle and harder to see than the bank example. It didn't boil down to two parts of the same word like your former error with "portray". I will try one more time to point it out to you, although I doubt you are in any mood to recognize it: “

I’m all ears.

Well both these snippets appear to make sense. However, when did we ever hold this premise as stated in the second snippet? It kinda sounds like the previous one, only stated with more brevity. But it isn't really the same. I hold the first premise, but in a different way than you do that does not support your restatement: that everything in nature has to have a cause, and that exceptions are properly called miracles because they are thus an effect of some super nature.

Wait a minute. I thought you said you were going to show me where I equivocated. Instead, you are not talking about the premise at all, but instead complaining about an irrelevant aside.

So worse than being wrong… your complaint here is irrelevant.

The existence or non-existence of super nature was not a premise at all in my argument. I never asserted it, and it certainly served no role in my chain of reasoning. To do that would be to commit the same viciously circular illogic that I abhor among you guys. I neither included nor concluded the non existence of super nature. I did not even introduce the concept in the reasoning.

I simply pointed out that if every effect must have a cause, the only logical conclusion that would not violate that premise is that the universe is eternal. No consideration of super nature anywhere involved.

I simply pointed out that if every effect must have a cause, the only logical conclusion that would not violate that premise is that the universe is eternal.

Well I never signed on to the idea that every effect has a cause. It was not a premise we agreed to, it was one you were arguing for. You stated the premise twice. The first time it sounded in line with both our world views. The second it was only in line with yours. You equivocated to get to that "premise".

But I am more interested in knowing how you think an eternal universe can have nothing infinite in it. Are you thinking of time as a part of the universe, or of something that transcends the universe and need not be considered part of it?