This reminds me of some physicist I can't remember trying to refute William Lane Craig's formulation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, a classical Islamic arg

This reminds me of some physicist I can't remember trying to refute William Lane Craig's formulation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, a classical Islamic argument for the existence of God going something like: 1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe must have a cause of its existence, and that cause is God. The issue is with the first premise. If you only understand causality from within a temporal framework, then your understanding only works from within a temporal framework. "Everything that begins to exist has a cause" presupposes the cause exists before the effect and that presupposition becomes incoherent at the beginning of time itself. If the big bang is the start of time, then nothing exists "before" the big bang because the very notion of "before" is meaningless without time. Our understanding of every event on the universal timeline is that it is linked inextricably by necessity and sufficiency to some set of prior events, and we call that causation, but attempting to use the same logic and language regarding the existence of the timeline results in paradoxical, meaningless statements.