Arguments for God's Existence from Contingency

[Neo-Scholastic]

Your just pushing the problem back a step each time. You can't have an infinite regress, so it has to stop somewhere. For the sake of argument, "the universe" is used to hold the place of some point in the past.

The difference is you think you can deduce your way to knowledge of the unknown based on what?  Your assumption that the natural world owes us an adequate explanation?  

I cannot tell if you and SteveII are debating the necessity of an accidental or essential series. I do believe that distinction should be made explicit but since I do not know which it is I will not comment other that to say it is an important one.

That said, Whateverist, you raise two worthy points: 1) can people deduce knowledge of the unknown based on natural reason alone? & 2) why do people need an explanation?

Something, like the 2W in the Summa Theologica, is a cosmological argument that has as its starting point the common observation that when a change occurs some agent of that that change is always present and that at some prior point some agent had to be first. My favorite example is this: Adam buys a candy bar using a dollar he got from Bill but Bill got the dollar from Charlie who got it from Darrell who got it from...etc. In this example, Adam cannot buy the candy bar unless at some prior point, someone had the first dollar, like say the mint that printed it. The question, with regards to infinite regress then, is whether of not you can have infinite series of essentially contingent relationships such as a dollar that came from nowhere.

Why do people need an explanation. As Aristotle said, "Man by his nature desires to know." And it this case, the Principle of Sufficient Reason applies. When asking why there is something rather than nothing, people look at the physical universe and see that to all appearances is must be a contingent being; it changes and has features that seem like they could be otherwise (4 fundamental forces but not just 3 or 5 & constants that are neither more nor less that what they are). Interestingly, the multiverse theory makes the case even more poignantly since it posits that things actually could be otherwise! Now one rather incurious position is to just take all that as a brute fact. One could live life that way, and when it comes to philosophy, most people do but when the question arises some of us try to see how far we can get before reaching some kind of intellectual limit. IMHO think atheists stop short, perhaps because they fear where that next step might lead.