Michael, I think to be fair there are misunderstandings on both sides. I think that, very early on, someone (freezetar or modest maybe?) suggested that the specific feature of your ontology of simultaneous "now" in some way contradicts the speed of light (its buried with all the arguments about photons without time and triangles, etc).
I do not know if this is a true assertion BUT if it can be proven that a simultaneous now DOES contradict a constant speed of light, then we are forced to conclude that no ontology with a simultaneous "now" can be correct. Does that make sense? Could one of our resident math/physics types weigh in on this?
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Seems to me that "first cause" is misconception of the limits of linear thinking. It always begs the question.... "So what before that?" Also, "something out of nothing" is exactly like belief in magic.
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A first cause, would (by definition) have nothing before it. You cannot logically ask "what came before time."
We have two choices- either we have an eternal universe or a first cause "something out of nothing." BOTH choices contradict our everyday experience (where nothing is eternal, and yet nothing is uncaused), neither contradict logic. I suggest the entropy argument I made earlier is the resolution as to which we should prefer. Also, you should read Hume on cause and effect.
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What would you call the relative lack of 'stuff' we call "space"
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The point, I think, is that we don't KNOW its an actual lack of stuff. The medieval scholastics, following Aristotle, endowed it with properties. It is logically consistent to denote matter as "matter stuff" and the lack of matter as "void stuff" which has different properties to matter, but is just as material.
Scholastics actually believed that particles were just condensed space. So planets and the sun where just regions where "void stuff" was denser.
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I contrast the lack of manifest stuff/objects (space) with the "occupied space" wherever any manifest object exists.
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This isn't enough for your argument. You have stated explicitly that "space" cannot have properties- for that to be true space must literally be nothing. If space is the quintessence of the scholastics, then it can certainly have properties.
Edit: a friend has informed that pre-Einstein scientists viewed space as filled with a quintessence or aether. This aether was the "sea" through which Maxwell's electricity and magnetism flowed. The logic was that all waves need a sea, so light waves must propagate on the aether sea.
