Necessary Thing

[Whateverist]

If something stops or starts existing, that would by definition be contingent.  I'm not familiar enough with QM to suggest we have any examples of such, but it is commonly claimed that we do have such examples.   Stating whether ordinary matter ever stopped or started existing is above my paygrade.

Also fair enough. I am not asking which thing is necessary or if ordinary matter is contingent. I am asking if you think that any thing is necessary. The question might be put: Does it make more sense to you that every thing is contingent, OR does it make more sense to you that at least one thing is non-contingent? If you simply don't have enough information to form a judgment, that is also fair.

If something starts or stops existing, that is the same as it being contingent or conditioned upon some other thing. However, "starting" or "stopping" places, for me, an undue temporal boundary on contingency. My immediate and present existence is still contingent on the existence of other things (like organs, cells, tissue, molecules, atoms, etc.) even though it started long ago and has yet to stop. Conditions must be met here in the present for my existence to be real, which means I am also contingent without respect to my beginning to exist or my stopping to exist. At least that's how I see it.

Read the previous few pages and you will see that I have no intention of evolving this into an argument, much less an argument for the existence of a god. I am honestly interested in how different people approach an answer to this question.

As to that, I find it much more intuitively appealing to suppose that contingent things which begin to exist owe that existence to the interaction of pre-existing things.  I believe that is true far beyond the range of our ability to ever verify.  For example, my hunch is that what we understand as our universe is but one of many such greatly dispersed phenomena.  We will likely never know whether the 'verse is uni or multi for there is no way to peak behind that curtain.  It doesn't mean that there isn't an answer.  It just means we're not privileged to it.  I suspect that at some very grand (and unverifiable) level of description, the emergence of big bangs makes perfect sense .. just not to us.  That, it seems to me, is more likely than that a unitary, eternal, non contingent, non-caused cause arbitrarily decides one day that it is bored with nothing so let there be everything.  (That doesn't mean I think anyone who thinks otherwise is a moron however.)

And that brings me to the end of page 6 and a well deserved break from propositional thinking.