(February 6, 2022 at 2:20 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: And an atheist critic will say, that inserting the contingent/non-contingent qualifier up front allows the theist to conclude that there is at least one non-contingent cause. Maybe. What is the alterative? Everything is contingent on everyting else in a circular reference? Or nothing at all is contingent? Those who object to that distinction seem not to object to the notion that some things supervene on an ultimate physical ground that is fundamental. Sound the same conceptually.
They are similar conceptually, but my issue is that though both propose a fundamental ground, theism makes much more speculative assumptions to do so, and seems to end up proposing a much more complicated fundamental ground than that which it is attempting to replace in the known universe. Ie in a nutshell, theism seems to look at the circular contigency evident in the universe, unable to accept that any part of it could be fundamental, even in principle, and instead asks 'how did any of this come to be, from nothing?', then with complicated logic (eg the Five Ways etc) it proposes a solution that by the nature of parts of its definition, entails that the solution is exempt from those sorts of questions (ie via the concepts of necessary/non-contingent), but does so at the expense of proposing a new fundamental thing of the universe/reality... a complex/multi-faceted all-powerful being... that is far more complicated than that which it was invoked to explain, and thus far less likely to just happen to exist for all eternity 'just because' or as Belacqua said Aquinas would put it '[for] no reason'.
So from my point of view, all it does is replace one (or many) plausible and scientifically addressable fundamentals, as yet discovered or not, in the known universe, with one speculative and unfalsifiable centralised fundamental, at the gain of some mental reassurance/i's dotted and t's crossed in the form of the theological logic, but without ultimately addressing the underlying question of how something rather than nothing exists or comes to be, because it cannot answer the question as pertaining to itself. And to the extent that it is claimed that it doesn't need to (ie by definition of necessary/non-contigent) that's ultimately what I was asking you about... whether a) that truly closes the book for you on that question, in the case that you accept that the definition is a complete answer to God's existence requiring no further explanation, or to put it as boldly as Aquinas would (to again quote Belacqua surmising Aquinas) 'there is no reason for God's existence, because God is not contingent', or b) that you still have such questions but out of necessity/practicality accept you can't answer them. But in either case seemingly accepting God as a brute fact/fundamental. I'm not asking for an answer again if you don't want to give it... I appreciate your answer from before, which seemed to be neither of these... but just restating/clarifying my thinking around this in the context of this new post of yours.
