RE: The Principle of Contingent Causation: The Impossibility of Infinite Regress.
July 7, 2023 at 11:27 am
(July 7, 2023 at 10:54 am)Nishant Xavier Wrote: Just passing through.
@LadyForCamus said:
"Let’s concede, just for fun, that the universe had a ‘First Cause’. What is it, and how do you know?"
Ok. So if we concede that, even jff, the next step is to deduce the Necessary Properties of this First Cause.
So that's why I mentioned Properties I-IV of the First Cause. Because B1 is not contingent on a Prior Being, He/It exists non-contingently, i.e. necessarily.
Can we agree on that much? That would be the first step. And subsequent premises, just like we do in mathematic theorems, would build on those foundational axioms. That a First Cause exists, then that He/It exists necessarily, i.e. without beginning or end, eternally, then in the next steps, that He is a Personal Being, Supremely Good, Perfectly Simple, Actus Purus (Pure Actuality), without Potentiality, etc etc.
That is not what she asked. She was interested in discussion of the mechanism or relationship between the cause/ necessary being and the caused contingent universe. It would be legitimate to demand an answer to the question, 'How does god cause the universe?' If we are to accept this extraordinary explanation, we are within our rights to request more detail.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
