Arguments for God's Existence from Contingency

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

In an infinite series of regress...nothing in series comes from nowhere.  It always comes from the prior x, ad infinitum.  That's what it means for something to be an infinite series of regress.  So no, that's not the question..it's not even in the ballpark of the question.

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.

Amusingly, infinite regress isn't a problem in any sense other than that it makes it impossible for a system designed around terminus to reach a conclusion.  If there were an infinite series of regress in the universe, there would be an infinite series of regress in the universe, we simply couldn't use reason to determine the terminus (  ) ...firstly because there isn't one, and secondly because reason as a system cannot reach conclusions from infinite regress.  

That's a limit of the system, and an expression of it's inability to fully satisfy mans desires.  The universe, however, is under no obligation to fully satisfy mans desires...and making some bninding assuption about the universe because our system is incapable of operating otherwise and it leaves us unfulfilled is...frankly, irrational by reference to that very same system.  

Say it with me.,...Neo.  "We don't know, we don't even know if we could know".  In your example of Adams dollar bill, we could stop at any possessor in the chain and declare it the First Possessor...doing so may satisfy our need for fullfilling terminus...and maybe we actually can;t discrn any previous possessor - for reasons™...but your example also shows hat doing so would not actually demonstrate that there is no previous possesser.  No Steve, behind Adam, no Bill..behind Steve..so on and so forth....ad infinitum.  This, in effect, is what we do when we propose a god or a first mover.  It does not answer the question..and if we invoke a rule requiring some previous x for no reason other than to solve it by saying "enough, no further, it must stop here or the system wont work!" all we've done is immediately contradict the assertion upon which our assumption is based.

We have produced a god  (or mover) from the machine.  An explanation of the universe that reduces to dues ex machina.  Now, how fulfilling is that?