This line of argument is absolutely pointless. You guys see the universe as the be all and end all. You can't even rhetorically consider anything outside of the universe. Your version of imagining something 'outside' the universe is to say that it has physical properties, which would place it squarely 'within' our universe.

I think we've reached a stand still because this is one area science can't directly touch, and it comes down to our worldview. I say that there's something universally incomprehensible as an outside cause to our universe. You apparently can't even imagine this concept, and instead keep trying to throw physical properties on something upon which physical properties cannot be thrown.

Look at what you're doing. When you try to consider a God, who is physical in no way. You start adding physical properties to him. You can't look beyond the shroud of our existence, and I think that explains your worldview a bit (for better or worse, I don't know). To you, even hypothetically there cannot be anything except what's in our universe.

However, you can't escape that matter must have a cause. Reality doesn't just pop out of thin air. If you follow this to its obvious conclusion, then you might understand something about the nature of God. But you mentally cannot. What is blocking you from doing this, even from within the safe confines of rhetoric (which means considering alien ideas doesn't have to offend your beliefs), I don't know. Its almost as if you've purposefully cut yourself off from a certain line of thinking. Although, perhaps some of it has to do with the fact that you're more interested in proving me wrong, than considering other viewpoints.

I have no problem looking at things from your viewpoint. I used to agree with you, there was a time I said to myself, "We're alone in the universe." That was when I became an atheist after being a 'christian' (I put it in quotes because I believed in God, but I didn't really have a reason to care that he existed so I just smoked weed and had sex all the time). Its easy for me to consider the universe as being all there as (although I don't see it that way generally), and I can grasp the way you look at the world. But you guys seem to be unable to do the opposite. It would be the equivelant of you saying that God doesn't exist because matter can create itself out of absolute nothingness. And my counterargument being, "What, is matter sitting off in heaven somewhere? Is it incomprehensible?" I couldn't possibly argue your point that way, because all I'm doing is creating a strawman by not looking at things other than from within my static worldview. Obviously I'm not even talking about the same matter you are, because I'm putting your matter within my worldview, and it conflicts.