We need to be able to say more about Steve Jobs than the circular, "He's the creator of laptops."

Asking what made Steve Jobs is a very different question than asking what made your laptop. But asking "where did everything come from?" is the same as asking "where did everything come from?"

Ah, I think that clears up my confusion. Thanks.

In my case, it's the kids. One day my nephews and nieces spent an hour asking me "Why?" I kept giving them answers. Eventually they gave up.

It was awesome. :D

"pushing back the issue"

The Steve Jobs analogy doesn't really hold. Asking what made Steve Jobs is a very different question than asking what made your laptop. But asking "where did everything come from?" is the same as asking "where did everything come from?" Unless you grant that god(s) is transcendant; i.e. not part of the world, and therefore not "everything" or even bound by causality.

Of course, the correct answer to a god who is not part of reality is "Who cares?"

Essentially, what I've always understood to be pushing back the issue, is where you give an answer that provides nothing new. The question(s) that arise from the answer are fundamentally the same, but have a slightly different wording.

In your example, if Demea is really ignorant of what a "Steve Jobs" is, then, yes, Philo is merely pushing back the issue (Note that this means Demea needs more than an illusion of knowlege; when Steve Jobs in invoked, the two are thinking of the same thing whether they know it or not.). We need to be able to say more about Steve Jobs than the circular, "He's the creator of laptops."

One cannot 'push back an issue' with a 'rich physical structure'.

I don't see that. Consider the following:

Demea: Where did your laptop come from? What is the ultimate origin of your laptop?
Philo: Well, Steve Jobs made it.
Demea: That's all well and good, but where did Steve Jobs come from? You're just pushing back the issue.
Philo: You've got me there.

One can argue that Demea isn't really raising a particularly interesting point, but I don't think it's the case that 'pushing back the issue' is impossible whether or not either the laptop or Steve Jobs have an intricate physical structure. Are we working with different understandings of what it means to 'push back the issue'?

There's another thing in the OP which I think deserves some attention.

Craig says:

"The quantum vacuum ... has a rich physical structure and can be described by physical laws."

"And then we have to ask, well, what is the origin of the whole quantum vacuum itself? Where does it come from? ...You've simply pushed back the issue of creation."

One cannot 'push back an issue' with a 'rich physical structure'. The two are, by definition, mutually exclusive.

I'm concerned about that as well, and I think it works against Craig. His argument that nothing happens without a cause is based on observation of things within the material universe. To extend that to the universe itself seems to be a fallacy of composition. In other instances, Craig has no difficulty imagining things which have never been observed within this universe (e.g. a mind with no material instantiation). He seems to be very selective in extending physical observation to unknown realms.

BTW: Thank you for your remarkable site (I've been lurking since April). Reading the excellent posts & subsequent comments has helped me to clarify why I am an Atheist.

For example, if I knock over a vase and it falls to the floor and breaks, you could say that the cause of the vase falling was the fact that I knocked it over. But you could also say that 'gravity' was the cause of the fall. I'm inclined to think that when we say that things are 'caused' by physical laws, this can be different to what we mean when we say that things are 'caused' by a previous event.

You are right. The use of ill-defined or even undefined terms and sloppy language in precise logical arguments is plaguing philosophy from time immemorial. I think that in ordinary use, anything without which the vase wouldn't fall can be called a cause of the fall. Both gravity and the fact that you knocked it over fit the definition, which may be not so bad, since there is no need for an event to have only a single cause. The problem comes, however, when one starts to think about meaning of "cause" intuitively, combine and conflate different meanings and derive "logical" conclusions. One can then dig a lot of paradoxes from such thinking, and people like Craig are very good in this ignoble discipline. The word "cause" is very useful in ordinary language, but I think it is a bit overrated in philosophy.

This is a debate over semantics. If you take "universe" to mean "everything that exists", then no, the vacuum doesn't exist outside the universe, by definition. If you take "universe" to mean "our locally observable slice of reality", then yes, the vacuum does exist outside the universe.

Well, yes, but when speaking about such things, it's quite hard to avoid debates over semantics. It is surprisingly difficult to discuss non-familiar concepts because different people often interpret the same statements differently, and worse, usually you don't notice when they do it. More specifically, I think that the theists who use the kalam argument use the word "universe" in the sense "everything which exists" rather than "locally observable stuff", if they think about the distinction at all. Of course, everything which exists except God. God has always exceptions in theist logic.

By the way, Ebon, what you say about random fluctuations reminds me of Boltzmann brains. What do you think about that? To be clear on this, I don't take the possibility that we are Boltzmann brains much seriously, but after all, I don't believe that our observable universe is a random fluctuation, whatever it means.

This should be shouted from the mountaintops! So often one hears creationists misstating the claim of science that 'existence came from absolute nothingness'. I've never seen one scientific statement to support that idea. It's just a way to make their claim- God created existence out of nothing- seem relatively less ridiculous.

First, for prase:

First of all, as understood in quantum field theory, vacuum is the lowest energy state of the system, which here is the whole universe, so it is somehow strange to say that it continually spawns new universes through random statistical fluctuation. Quantum vacuum doesn't exist outside a universe.

This is a debate over semantics. If you take "universe" to mean "everything that exists", then no, the vacuum doesn't exist outside the universe, by definition. If you take "universe" to mean "our locally observable slice of reality", then yes, the vacuum does exist outside the universe.

If we suppose that it has some sense to speak about time before the universe came into being (I believe it has no sense), then we can perhaps have the idea of some eternal entirely chaotic state of things, from which, by complete random, the universe emerged at some moment.

Yes, that's the kind of explanation I was driving at. I had in mind something like Andrei Linde's theory of chaotic eternal inflation while writing this post, though of course the details may well prove to be different from those in his specific model. I also agree that the vacuum is the lowest energy state of the universe, but that doesn't mean it won't occasionally tunnel to a different state, if you have an eternity to work with. If the net energy of the universe is zero, due to the negative contributions of the gravitational field, even better.

First, let me congratulate you for what (I think) is a reference to Terry Pratchett in your title.

Well spotted, Timothy. :)

But you know what I mean: if there is an infinite regression of causes, then we'll never have to "weep that there are no new lands (of knowledge) to conquer."

I suppose that's true. But if we could somehow know that there was an infinite regress, we'd also know that the question of ultimate origins - "why is there something rather than nothing?" - would be an ill-formed question with no answer. I think many people, including myself, would find that to be frustrating, even if we'd have little choice but to accept it.

If an atheist posits that there is no god (often this part is even unnecessary), her theistic (or deistic) friend will assert that one needs to search the entire universe, and sometimes beyond, in order to know that. I've never seen someone call Craig out on similar grounds for declaring that all things with beginnings need causes. Has he gone out and cataloged every object in the universe with a beginning, just as is demanded from my hypothetical atheist?

Superbly argued, 2-D Man! I have to admit, that argument never occurred to me. Of course, Craig would probably resort to some handwaving about "metaphysical necessity" if called out on it.