What makes people irrational thinkers?

[LadyForCamus]

Hart makes the claim about physical reality being contingent multiple times, but thus far I haven’t come across any specific support for that assertion other than “something can’t come from nothing,” which is problematic for reasons i mentioned earlier. O
Also, there’s this:

“If it is one’s sordid fate to be an academic philosopher, one might even try to con- vince oneself that the question of existence is an inept or false query generated by the seductions of imprecise grammar, or one might simply adopt the analytic philosopher’s classic gesture of flinging one’s hands haplessly in the air and proclaiming that one simply finds the question entirely unintelligible. All of this, how- ever, is an abdication of the responsibility to think..”

On the contrary, that is a perfectly rational conclusion reached via intellectual honesty and humility regarding the limits of our own capabilities; the possibility that we simply don’t know, and may never know. This uncertainty seems profoundly uncomfortable for Hart as he mentions it as a reason to believe in the supernatural more than a few times in the first hundred pages. Uncomfortable and frustrating though it may be, the unknown does not give us intellectual license to simply make something up simply for the fact that it soothes our curiosity and agitation.

Is properly basic to consider physical reality non-contingent? I am okay with that but IMHO that also is an unsupported opinion. I wonder. How would you falsify this physicalist position?

I mean, it’s not any less supported than a non-contingent god. I think the pathway to falsifying the physicalist position is by demonstrating, or at the very least, soundly arguing for a possible alternative to existence. In order for physical reality to possibly be contingent there would have to have been an alternative state of affairs to existence that could have been instead. What is the alternative state of affairs to existence? Nothing? Nothing can’t be an alternative state. By its definition, nothing can’t be. The very notion is self-refuting. Hart talks about the infinite distance between being and non-being, as though either could potentially have been. I don’t see a way around this apparent logical paradox, but I’m open to ideas.

To be clear, I’m not asserting that physical reality exists necessarily (though it seems to me to be a rational metaphysical position) I’m only pointing out that Hart asserts that can’t be the case because his argument relies on that assumption being true, and so he’ll need to support it.