A Necessary Being?

[wiploc]

What makes an uncaused first member more possible than an infinite regress?

My initial response to the question was to consider it a schoolboy objection, but on second thought decided that you may actually be curious about why the demonstration of the 3rd Way excludes infinite regress as a viable option.

Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt.  

Keep in mind that proper interpretation of this demonstration only works for an essentially ordered series in which the existence of a thing depends on something essential to its existence. For example, human beings could not exist apart from some material composition. That is part of our essence. The existence of a human being depends, necessarily, on the existence of molecules and atoms that in turn depend on subatomic particles and so on down the line toward more fundamental levels of existence perhaps terminating in the quantum vacuum.  But if there is an infinite regress then it's turtles all the way down below the quantum level. Seems absurd, but let’s just go with it anyway because lots of things appear absurd at the quantum level (at least in traditional modern mechanistic terms). So if we allow infinite regress then the chain of existence extends from human beings all the way down through an infinite series of turtles. Doesn’t that mean that at least one thing inside that infinite chain must exist?

You lost me.  The whole chain exists, not just one thing. 

The no-infinite-regress argument seems to me to be based on establishing an equivalence between truth and palatability.   It's something like, "I don't like chocolate, so the carton of ice cream in the freezer must be strawberry." 

As in, "I don't see how infinite regress would work, so there must be an uncaused first cause."  Or, "I don't see how a cause can be uncaused, so infinite regress must be what's true." 

Myself, I don't see how either can work, so that doesn't seem to prove anything.  I don't jump to either conclusion.

And while Hawking's third option, "finite but unbounded," has no appeal to this layman's mind, that doesn't make it wrong.  So I have to wonder whether there aren't other alternatives I haven't thought of, perhaps also revolting to me, that might also be true.