The traditional reply by atheist philosophers, is that you are applying the parts to the whole (all parts need a cause, so the whole thing needs a cause), in case of infinite regression.
The fallacy is to assume that what is true of the parts is true of the whole (and vice versa). This is easily demonstrated to be untrue (see emergent phenomena, see fallacy of composition). The smallest parts of a living cell are not alive, but the organized collection of parts has that quality.
another way to think of it, is not in this way (parts to the whole) but through induction.
Surely you are aware of the limitations of induction. No number of consecutive heads from the flip of a fair coin tells you what the next flip will be.
the cosmological arguments argues for why the cosmos needs a cause and why God doesn't.
No it doesn't. It assumes that the universe needs a cause, and in the case of Craig's version, assumes a whole host of features about this cause. Look at line 4. This may be the most extreme non sequitur I've seen. Suddenly, the cause is a person with just the characteristics his religion gives this god:
1. “Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.”
2. “The universe began to exist.”
3. “Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.”
4. “If the universe has a cause of its existence, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans creation is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful and intelligent.”
5. “Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans creation is “beginningless,” changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful and intelligent.”
This is just faith speaking. He's telling you what he believes by faith, and trying to make it seem like the inevitable conclusion of rigorous logic.
Incidentally, nothing can be said to exist outside of time if it persists or changes. Existence means the persistence in time through a continuous set of moments, and is only relevant to our world if it is causally connected to it, meaning can change it and/or be changed by it. If a god exists, it exists in time, and if it can affect our world, it is a part of our reality, not outside of it. This also eliminates the need of the term supernatural if all that exists is causally connected to nature. It's all nature. And if we can speak of a reality disconnected from ours such that neither can modify the other, then we are discussing something that has the same features as the nonexistent, and can be treated as such.
You have to make an exception. There has to be one cause that is not an effect.
Disagree, but even if so, let that cause be the multiverse. If we're just going to pick one of multiple logical naturalistic or supernaturalistic possibilities for no sound reason, just that we like it better, we'll be making the non sequitur fallacy considered next. There is no more reason to pick the conscious cause, a god, over the unconscious one, and if you're a fan of parsimony in hypotheses, you'll prefer the multiverse, since it doesn't require mind, thought, memory, or volition.
to say that something came from nothing is simply absurd.
Here's the problem - something absurd seems to be the case. Either something has always existed, or something came into being uncaused from nothing. They both seem impossible and counterintuitive, and though we need to be careful saying what must be true or cannot be true, it seems to me that one of these two unfathomable possibilities is correct. The error is to find only one of these two possibilities absurd and exclude the other without noticing that it is just as absurd. Eliminating either possibility is a leap of faith, and doing so results in a non sequitur - your conclusion doesn't follow logically from what preceded it. Only the introduction of an appeal to faith fallacy gets you to that conclusion, which makes the conclusion invalid.
You can’t have married bachelors in any universe, you can’t have triangles with 4 corners in any universe
Yes, thanks to the Law of Contradiction, which says that something can't be both of two mutually exclusive things at the same time. Of course, these aren't empiric truths. They're pure reason based on definitions.
But that law has dire implications for the god of the Christian Bible, who is said to be perfect, yet makes errors that it regrets and attempts to correct. No married bachelors you say? No imperfect perfect gods, either, by the same argument.
Notice also that the perfect cannot change (even its mind) and remain perfect. You can't move even one point on a perfect circle without it becoming imperfect.
