Theists cannot escape the notion that their God created the universe out of nothing. And by 'out of nothing' I mean that God caused absolutely nothing to start existing in the form of a universe. This is a necessary conclusion because theists, who invoke cause and effect to prove that God created us, cannot say that God caused something that already existed to become the universe since theism necessitates that all things once did not exist. So if there was no object for God to cause to become the universe then it had to have been nothing. But as I already pointed out, the universe cannot be said to have came into existence from non-existence since non-existence, by definition, cannot do anything, cannot be affected, and cannot be acted upon. It is logically incoherent because it ascribes an identity of something to nothing.
Some theists who try to act arrogantly clever will attempt to avoid the problem by saying that God neither acts on something or acts on nothing to make a universe. Rather, they claim that God simply just produces a universe from himself in the same way that the brain produces thoughts. But every notion of the term 'produced' that we as humans are aware of utilizes pre-existing materials to make something else. As much as theists hate the idea, I see no reason to think that the brain doesn't produce its thoughts from the pre-existing energy that already exists within it (though dualists would adamantly disagree with this). This is a deceptive way of arguing because it tries to conceal the mechanism of how God manufactures the universe and limits the argument to vague and general terms of how God "just produces the universe from himself". If a theist wishes to argue in such a vague fashion then I will simply appeal to noncognitivism, namely that their statement of God producing the universe is meaningless and consequently invalid.
But regardless of how vague they try to be, no theist can deny that God caused the universe go from a state of non-existence to existence, that point is irrefutably clear. And going from a state of non-existence to existence is equivalent to saying that the universe went from nothing to something. The theist would still be left with God creating the universe out of or from nothing. Again, to do this, God has to cause the non-existent universe (nothingness) to become something. But the concept of God acting upon nothingness to produce something imposes an identity upon nothingness that is logically inconsistent. Nothingness lacks potentiality and actuality which makes it impossible to act upon it. I do not mean to be redundant but the overall point here is that the theist at this point is merely just playing word games to conceal the fact that his/her worldview has God creating the universe out of nothing.
For the sake of those who still might lack understanding as to how creation out of nothing is a logical incoherence, let's word it this way. As we said in the beginning, we have God who is causing the universe to go from non-existence to existence. Theists at times appeal to cause and effect to try to prove that God is the creator of the universe. In this case, the cause is God, or his word, and then you have the recipient of that cause, which is what leads to the final product (the universe). So God, by his word, causes the non-existent universe/nothingness (which is the recipient of God's creative power), to become an existent universe. In order for something to be the recipient of something, that something HAS to first be something. How can nothing receive anything? There's nothing there to do the receiving. The very act of receiving something, by definition, requires that there is SOMETHING there on the other end to do the receiving. When theists invoke the law of cause and effect to prove divine creation, they are claiming utter nonsense.
The second problem of divine creation deals with the 2 possible states that God existed in before creating. Theists are divided on which state God existed in but both positions do not allow for a God to divinely create. The states are:
(a) temporal eternal
and
(b) atemporal eternal
Temporal eternality says that before God created the universe he existed for an infinite amount of time fellowshipping with other members of the Trinity or (whatever else he was doing depending on your theistic viewpoint). The question to be asked is how long did God wait before he decided to create? If God is eternal then he waited an infinite amount of time before deciding to create. This cannot work because if your waiting for an infinite amount of time then you would never stop waiting.
The second position, which is favored by William Lane Craig, states that God did not exist in time but was timeless. In a timeless state, there are no causal chain of events, there is essentially no movement at all, everything is held in its place without any movement. In this viewpoint, God did not all of a sudden come to a point where he said "I am going to create the universe" and then he creates it and the universe comes into existence. This is a casual chain of events that requires time. Instead, people like Craig argue that God's act of creating and the effect (which is the universe coming into existence) is simultaneous, which eliminates the need for time. But this can't be because the universe would come into existence at the same exact time with when it does not exist -- a logical contradiction.
As much as how most theist's are convinced by cosmological arguments, I contend that the fallacious nature of them provides evidence that the theistic god does not exist and is a logically incoherent concept.
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