The Principle of Contingent Causation: The Impossibility of Infinite Regress.

[polymath257]

Ok.

So since most of the objections from our Atheist Friends come down to the Infinite Regress issue, let's illustrate with a simple example: Your friend, let's call him Friend 1, wants to borrow something from you, it can be a ball or a loan or anything, that's not important. Now, he says he will give it to you, but there's a condition; he himself will borrow it from Friend 2, to give it to you. Friend 2 in turn does so from Friend 3, and so on and on and on. Now, Three Conclusions follow:

Step 1: If in fact this goes on till infinity, you will never get the ball/money.
Step 2: If in fact you ever got the money, the series did not go on forever.
Step 3: Indeed, it would have terminated with someone who had the money without having to borrow it.

All three are wrong conclusions. The correct conclusion is that if you get the money, and if the sequence goes back infinitely, then there was always someone giving money to the next person. In other words, that the chain of giving never started.

I trust the analogy is clear: He who gave being to you, if he received it from someone else, cannot be the Ultimate Cause of All Being. Thus, if every being who gave being to another were itself contingent on another being, the series would go forever, and thus no being at all would ever exist (just like you would never get the money in the above example); but granted that contingent beings exist, dependent on other prior beings, it clearly follows (similar to step 2 in the above example), that the series of contingent beings did not go on forever. Rather, it terminated with a Supreme Being, who had Being in Himself, without having to receive it from another. And this, as the Angelic Doctor of Theology (St. Thomas) says, is whom everyone calls Almighty God.

[Please note, we don't believe St. Augustine, or St. Thomas, or any Saint, except only Lord Jesus and Mother Mary, to be Inerrant, Impeccable or Infallible; we do however believe St. Augustine and St. Thomas were Deep Thinkers, Great Philosophers, and Beautiful Theologians, as they clearly were; but more important than either of them personally is the certain knowledge of Almighty God, from logic and reason, to which they lead the sincere seeker of Truth; something St. Paul also mentions in Romans 1, God has revealed His attributes in Creation and Nature: "20 For since the Creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." (Rom 1:20)].

If anyone wants to challenge 1 or more of the above 3 steps, pls explain which and why with reasons of your own.

OK, just did.

Now, to address Polymath:

So you are assuming that the set of causes is indexed by the natural numbers? What supports that assumption?

Yes, I am assuming that. Natural Numbers are Numbers that exist in Nature. How can there be being -3 (the -3rd being in existence) for e.g? There can be First Being in existence, 2nd Being in existence, and so on. And also, regarding 0, unless you want to say "there are 0 Elephants in the locker" is a meaningful statement, 0 would not be a natural number; certainly there is no such thing as a "zeroth being". 

Are you claiming a zeroth being could exist in Nature? A -10th being could naturally exist? I trust not. But pls explain if you are. You said: "if, for example, the index set is the set of integers, the 'proof' you have given fails", hence I said the above.

I am saying that if you label any current being, it is quite possible that you need to order a previous being with a negative number. And, if the integers are a valid model, there was no 'first', simply a sequence going back infinitely into the past.

So, for example, if you assign a cause today as cause number 100, there may well be more than 100 previous causes, and so some causes will have to be labeled with negative numbers. once this is allowed, you can see that having every negative number associated with some label is completely possible. The label at this time is completely arbitrary since there is no first cause (in this case).

My proof is valid for all Natural Numbers N, no matter whether N is 2 or 100 TN. Granted that N is Finite, a First Being exists, a zeroth being does not exist, and the First Being therefore is not contingent or dependent on a prior being but exists necessarily, without beginning or end.

From several sources, it is clear that complex numbers exist in nature as much as the natural numbers do. And yes, we can talk negative numbers in many contexts (charge, for example).

Your 'proof' artificially relies on the use of natural numbers and fails for other systems. It is not required that the numbers actually count, but simply that they order the causes. Also, it fails if you have a tree-like structure of causes (again assuming some infinite sequence of causes).

Then there is  the ambiguity of the term 'dependent'. Typically, it is equivalent to 'caused by', which assumes some sort of natural law. But it can also mean 'logically follows from', which is a very different thing.

Dependent here includes any kind of dependence, but mainly your first category of causal dependence. I am including both personal and impersonal causes. Whatever caused contingent beings, even if it was entirely impersonal, but contingent, was dependent upon other things. And so on and so forth, till infinity. Which is another way of saying, that's not how things actually came about.

How, specifically, does that follow? It seems like it allows for the possibility of no first cause at all: no start.

Now, i will agree that *if* there is a start and if causes take at least a certain amount of time to produce their effects, then an infinite amount of time would be required and that is problematic.

But, it is quite possible for an infinite sequence of smaller and smaller time intervals add to be only a finite time interval (imagine  each is half the length of the previous one).

From what i can see, you are relying on a very old and outmoded conception of the infinite that was full of confusion and falsehoods.

Let me give an example: an increasing number of Atheists (more than 55% according to a recent poll) believe in Aliens, and some even hold to the hypothesis that Aliens created life on Earth; while Christians could be open to the possibility that God created intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, we deny absolutely that any supposed "alien creator" could be the Absolute First Cause of anything. Why? Because this alien, by definition, is contingent upon the alien planet it exists in; and thus would require another alien creator, contingent upon another alien planet; and so on and so forth forever; which is another way of saying, that's not how things actually came about.

Again, that only follows under very specific assumptions that you have  not verified. The most basic one is that an infinite regress of causes implies none of them occur.

And the same applies to the other Atheist Sophism alleged earlier in this thread; let's assume our universe came into being from alleged other universes, and that said other universes came into being from others; now these other universes, being contingent, because they begin and cease to exist, came into being in turn from others, and so on and so forth forever. Which means, that's not how things actually came about.

Thus, even postulating trillions of unseen universes, which seems to blatantly violate Ockham's Razor, does not suffice to avoid the logically inescapable conclusion of the Necessarily Existent Non-Contingent First Cause. Only such a Being can explain why anything exists at all.

On the contrary, it only shows that taking 'existence' (in other words, the universe as a whole) as the only uncaused entity is completely reasonable.

Wait a minute. You only showed that there exists a non-contingent entity (the term 'being' usually implies that it is alive). You did NOT show that it is unique. How do you know that there are not multiple non-contingent entities? How do you know that there are not multiple such that appear every second?

Yes. To answer that, I would have to establish Property IV of the First Cause, namely Divine Simplicity, another distinct Augustino-Thomistic Doctrine. I will do that in the subsequent post. Once we understand what God really is, we will understand why there can be only One God. 

God Bless.

OK, so at this point, the issue has not been addressed. Correct?