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Which is it, Andy? Are you a naturalist who accepts that nothing comes from nothing, or are you a super-naturalist who believes that cause and effect is just a sometimes thing?

I am starting by assuming neither premise is necessarily correct. And arguing

I then consider the laws of physics and nature, and see if it makes sense that it can exist without a super natural cause.

Since I know nothing little about super nature...I am uncertain initially as to if it could exist without an external cause.

However nature, without super nature does not seem to be able to. Everything in it, in whole or in part has a cause outside of itself. It makes no sense to allow that the whole thing together is an exception.

Let me expand on my reasoning for this last assertion:

We all would accept a hamburger can not simply come into existence by natural law with no external or internal cause (albeit a naturalist would also reject external causes as non existent). Simarily we would agree about any finite subset of nature as well. This we know as a very well established principle of nature.

So now, consider all of an eternal nature rather than a subset--which I think is the only part of this argument that is not immediately obvious--I say that logically, it would need an external cause as well:

Going back to infinity in time (or if you like in a cause and effect chain or web) just postpones and multiplies the inevitable need of an initial cause to an infinitely large balance. Every iteration just results in more stuff that needed to be caused by something external. Does one really have to be a competent mathematician to know what that limit adds up to? Mathematicians aren't asked to add up the limit of 1 over n as n approaches infinity. Philosophers need not bother to do the same. Every iteration back to earlier causes makes merely more stuff that can not exist without an external cause.

I am a very skeptical person, and great lover of reason. Which caused me to reject naturalism. I regret that not everything in the Heavens is something I understand. Nor even everything in nature. But that gives me no excuse to refuse to accept what I do understand about nature. Including that she can not be the whole picture.

"However nature, without super nature does not seem to be able to. Everything in it, in whole or in part has a cause outside of itself. It makes no sense to allow that the whole thing together is an exception."

And there you go. That's the classic fallacy of composition. You are trying to attribute to the whole the characteristics of its components parts. The "whole thing together" is not an exception, and it contains no exceptions. It is the sum of all causes and all effects. It is not itself an effect, so it demands no cause.

But more importantly, look what you have done here. You have started with the premise that you keep vacillating over. You have alternately embraced and rejected that all effects have causes, yet here you are again embracing it.

Having embraced it (again) for a moment, how can you justify a conclusion (God) that denies it, thus contradicting yourself again?

Joining you argument in progress:

"So now, consider all of an eternal nature rather than a subset--which I think is the only part of this argument that is not immediately obvious--I say that logically, it would need an external cause as well."

Reflect back on our previous discussion of time. I described time (and you ended abandoning the discussion and up making no ultimate objection) as not actually existing. "All of an eternal nature" is bounded by the universe that exists "now." All the causes of all the effects that constitute the universe "now" all existed in previous instances of now, and no longer exist. Boiling it down to the universe itself as a comprehensive entity and treating it as single "effect" (though we know it actually is not one), the "cause" of the universe that is "now" is the universe that immediately preceded it. Thus your intuitive need for "an external cause" is met perfectly.

That entire prior instance of "now" is external to this one. Thus the cause of this "now" is external to it. And this "now" is the external cause of the next.

And again, it requires no embrace of an entity for which we have no evidence in favor of one for which we have overwhelming evidence.

"Going back to infinity in time (or if you like in a cause and effect chain or web) just postpones and multiplies the inevitable need of an initial cause to an infinitely large balance. Every iteration just results in more stuff that needed to be caused by something external. "

Actually, no. The conservation laws actually solve that concern quite neatly. The sum total of energy and matter in the universe is constant. So there actually is no multiplication effect of the sort you describe here.

But more to the point of the discussion, you are offering here a near complete admission that you are arbitrarily inserting God into the chain of causality. What difference does it make if you insert that God 4 billion years ago or five minutes ago? In either case you have no actual evidence that demands it... you simply have already decided that there must an external cause. And rather than demonstrating a genuine need for such a cause, you are merely deciding where to put it.

If every instance of "now" finds its "external cause" in the immediately prior instance of "now" there is neither a place nor a reason to insert something different.

"Does one really have to be a competent mathematician to know what that limit adds up to? Mathematicians aren't asked to add up the limit of 1 over n as n approaches infinity.

Excuse me? Mathematicians do that all the time. The study of "infinite series" is a huge part of mathematics. Archimedes was doing infinite series thousands of years ago.

"Philosophers need not bother to do the same. Every iteration back to earlier causes makes merely more stuff that can not exist without an external cause."

We know better than that now. Conservation laws make such a phenomenon impossible.

"I am a very skeptical person, and great lover of reason. Which caused me to reject naturalism. I regret that not everything in the Heavens is something I understand. Nor even everything in nature. But that gives me no excuse to refuse to accept what I do understand about nature. Including that she can not be the whole picture."

And so you replace that gap in your own knowledge with a particular sectarian version of God as reflected in the Bible? Do you understand why I see that as more than a mere intuitive leap?

Your posts make a stronger case that you have reasoned in exactly the opposite direction from your claim here. You did not reason to God from any skeptical review of nature. You accepted God as dogma, and rationalized your rejection of naturalism accordingly.

There is certainly no genuine effort here to justify the abandonment of the premise that you (sometimes) accept regarding cause and effect.