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

[Thumpalumpacus]

Thump:

1 is a basic Truth observed in Nature. You are contingent upon your parents, they on theirs, and this is true for animals, birds, and even other beings that are contingent upon the Planet's Existence in the first place. Therefore, that every contingent being is dependent on a prior being's existence is absolutely true and does not assume anything other than the stated premise itself. "beings of some sort" do cause other beings.

As soon as you see that every contingent being is dependent on another prior being, you should be able to see clearly that every being in existence cannot possibly be contingent being. In other words, at least One Being in Existence exists non-contingently.

The argument does not necessarily have to prove more than that. But it is successful in showing that much, unless either 1 or 2 can be refuted.

If you want to refute 1, give some examples of contingent beings that are not dependent on the existence of prior beings. 2 or 3 will suffice.

If you want to refute 2, you can try, but how would you even begin to do that? 2 is a logical and mathematical Truth. 3 follows from 1 and 2.

Regards,
Xavier.

I needn't refute anything. You, on the other hand, need to justify your special pleading here.

Also, you're obviously ignoring my obvious point. Perhaps you might take a swing at it once you've given it some thought.

[Belacqua]

Implicit in your argument is that a "being" of some sort or other caused anything.

No, that's not what the argument says. 

It sounds as if you are anthropomorphizing the First Cause by calling it a being, with the indefinite article. The First Cause is not a being, it is being. 

Too many people think of the First Cause like a big guy who decides to pull the levers to start things going. It's nothing like that. It is the thing which must be the case in order for anything else to be the case. There must be being in order for any contingent thing to be. There can be nothing essentially prior to being, because that thing would require being to be, and that's a paradox. 

The word "cause," in these arguments, is not the same as the modern English word. It is the translation of the Greek αἰτία. The αἰτία of X includes all the things which must be the case in order for X to be the case. 

Demonstrate that 

1) this creator exists, 

2) that he wasn't created by another something, and 

3) and that this creator must have been a conscious being.

The argument in the OP is intended to show that a non-contingent First Cause must exist in order for there to be contingent things. A First Cause, by definition, cannot be created by something else. The argument does not attempt to show that it was a conscious being; that requires a number of separate arguments. So you're running together separate issues and fuzzing up the topic. 

The First Cause is about essential priority, not temporal. It does not address conscious decisions in time to make things go.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure, it's atheists fuzzing up the topics, certainly not theists..why would we ever presume that they're arguing for their silly god.

Stupid..stupid atheists, lol.

[Fake Messiah]

No, that's not what the argument says. 

It sounds as if you are anthropomorphizing the First Cause by calling it a being, with the indefinite article.

Thumpalumpacus is not trying to anthropomorphize the first cause but the OP is because he is trying to prove that god exists.

But the so-called first cause, if it exists, could be natural. The discovery of the quantum nature of subatomic reality shows us that no particular prior condition is either necessary or sufficient for some physical events such as radioactive decay, the behavior of electrons and photons, and potentially for the appearance of the physical universe itself out of a background of quantum fluctuations.

[Angrboda]

Implicit in your argument is that a "being" of some sort or other caused anything.

No, that's not what the argument says. 

It sounds as if you are anthropomorphizing the First Cause by calling it a being, with the indefinite article. The First Cause is not a being, it is being. 

Too many people think of the First Cause like a big guy who decides to pull the levers to start things going. It's nothing like that. It is the thing which must be the case in order for anything else to be the case. There must be being in order for any contingent thing to be. There can be nothing essentially prior to being, because that thing would require being to be, and that's a paradox. 

The word "cause," in these arguments, is not the same as the modern English word. It is the translation of the Greek αἰτία. The αἰτία of X includes all the things which must be the case in order for X to be the case. 

Demonstrate that 

1) this creator exists, 

2) that he wasn't created by another something, and 

3) and that this creator must have been a conscious being.

The argument in the OP is intended to show that a non-contingent First Cause must exist in order for there to be contingent things. A First Cause, by definition, cannot be created by something else. The argument does not attempt to show that it was a conscious being; that requires a number of separate arguments. So you're running together separate issues and fuzzing up the topic. 

The First Cause is about essential priority, not temporal. It does not address conscious decisions in time to make things go.

If Nishant had presented the argument correctly, your observations would be true. But as Nudger observed, he twisted the argument for reasons that are obvious. This makes your observations incorrect as they are the erection of a straw man, albeit one designed to rescue a bad example of apologetics. You can't make a silk purse out of this sow's ear.

[no one]

Using the word "erection" when speaking with a dick, clever.

[Deesse23]

2. But it is impossible for this series of contingent causation to go on until infinity.

Why?

[Belacqua]

For absolute beginners, who aren't familiar with Aristotelian or Thomist thinking, probably the best modern introduction to the Five Ways is in Edward Feser's book Thomas Aquinas. He is aware of the common misunderstandings and addresses them in non-technical language.

[The Grand Nudger]

Our very specific type of semantic organization seeks to avoid infinite regress not because any argument or evidence actually does or can demonstrate some first mover or that infinite regress is impoosible, but because in a case of infinite regress a question becomes -literally- unanswerable within that system which purports to reach terminus in such questions. In this, all arguments to first causes are thinly veiled arguments to consequence.

There cannot be an infinite regress...because that would be bad. For classical western logic, ofc. The universe remains completely unmoved by our discomfort and ignorance.

[The Grand Nudger]

Meh, may as well have fun.

Failing to demonstrate that there are any first causes, we proceed breathlessly into the notion that there could only be one first cause. Good luck with that. Skipping many tiresome pages ahead or many thousands of years into the past - if we assume that this god thing z is, as classically contended, entirely unlike any and all other things a-y, then no observation of the states of affairs of things a-y would be demonstrative or even informative with respect to thing z. So it doesn't really matter whether or not kids have parents or whether any thing a-y has or does not have a cause. This will tell us nothing about a thing z wholly unlike all those things no matter what we assert about those things a-y.

It's an interesting setup in all of the ideas people have ever had about gods, where we posit that there is simply nothing we can say about a god that is true. This is why saint tommy threw his hands in the air and started babbling about a magic book and it's special revelations, among a great many other hilarious things.

...and the entire time, as a scholar of this system, he knew that the system was premised on an eternal universe with no room for creator, a system that designated any creative entity or force as something well below the "god" in this formulation. St Tommy was a holy horseshitter peddling garbage to illiterates in a pre-scientific world that he'd stolen from the pagans they'd only recently eradicated.