What's Wrong with the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God

The Kalam Cosmological Argument goes something like this:

(1) Everything that has a beginning must have a cause.
(2) The universe had a beginning.
(3) Therefore, the universe had a cause.
(4) That cause (i) must transcend space and time (because space and time began with the Big Bang), and (ii) could not have had a beginning itself (since unless you want to resort to infinite regress, the buck has to stop somewhere. See here for a refutation of the logical possibility of infinite regress). Starting to sound an awful lot like God?

Proponents note that several decades ago, the Big Bang Theory competed with the Steady State Theory of the origins of the universe. The Steady State Theory proposed that the universe is eternally old, and that matter and energy are continuously created and destroyed, thereby eliminating the need for a creator. Many atheists didn't like the Big Bang theory because it sounded a lot like creation ex nihilo -- creation out of nothing, which was exactly what theologians had been asserting for thousands of years. But the Big Bang won out on solid scientific evidence.

A close examination of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, however, calls into question premises (1) and (2).

Premise (1): Everything that has a beginning must have a cause.

Normally, when we say that x causes y, we mean that x happened first, and if x hadn't happened, y wouldn't have happened either. But if x is God and y is the universe, it doesn't make any sense to say that God happened first, because time itself began with the Big Bang. Asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking "What is south of the South Pole?"

You might assert some sort of non-temporal causation, but since we have no previous examples of non-temporal causation, relying on non-temporal causation to support the proposition that God exists is using speculation to support speculation.

Premise (2) The universe had a beginning.

Saying that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe is like saying the Earth begins at the South Pole (and that the existence of the South Pole implies that the Earth must have a creator). The Earth is spherical and there is no "beginning" location, and likewise the universe has no "beginning" time. Even the vaunted Singularity is merely a mathematical abstraction, not a physical reality of the history of the universe.

For a contra argument, check out this post by William Lane Craig:

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/in-defense-of-the-kalam-cosmological-argument