RE: The Principle of Contingent Causation: The Impossibility of Infinite Regress.
August 13, 2023 at 7:33 am
(August 13, 2023 at 6:44 am)Belacqua Wrote:(August 13, 2023 at 6:00 am)GrandizerII Wrote: if anything could have been different in the universe, the universe (being the superset) could have been different, therefore the universe is contingent. You don't have to agree with this point, if you're a necessitarian or modal realist or whatever, but this is the common-sense view (whether you like it or not).
What you're talking about here isn't even a religious idea. This type of contingency doesn't address the whole universe being contingent on a single cause (which people might conclude is God), but that everything in the universe is contingent on other things, and could have been different.
There doesn't have to be a cause even, at least strictly logically speaking. The universe could simply be a contingent brute fact, and that's that (as Bertrand Russell would say)
Even if it was made clear there is no God, no first cause, no anything of that sort, it would still be bizarre to think of the universe as necessary (in the sense of it couldn't have been otherwise). Although I'm happy to grant that this would be a logical view, and in fact I hold (provisionally) to an extreme view on modality myself.
So it's not that I have a problem with an atheist saying the universe is not contingent, I just want to be clear there are implications to consider if an atheist does think that way, and so one shouldn't just say "well, the universe is necessary, so there" just simply as a throwaway response to a contingency argument for God. Be aware of the implications of your view, and own it.
Quote:And it's not just socks, it's much smaller things than that, including observed quantum events. This is from the Wikipedia page on the "Many worlds interpretation."
Quote:every observation can be thought of as causing the combined observer–object's wavefunction to change into a quantum superposition of two or more non-interacting branches, or split into many "worlds". Since many observation-like events have happened and are constantly happening, there are an enormous and growing number of simultaneously existing states.
...which is way over my head, science-wise, but seems to say that not only are there a hell of a lot of states of the universe, but that each of them is contingent on "observation-like events."
So lots and lots of contingency there, and no God-talk at all.
I think a better example would be the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum events. Under that interpretation, things certainly could have happened differently but didn't (which is very in line with the idea that the universe is contingent). Many-worlds interpretation appears to be some metaphysical form of modal realism (all possible worlds are real, although you only experience one of them), and therefore is more of a necessitarian view than otherwise. But I get what you mean here. At least relative to the universe that we're in, things could be said to be contingent.