Do Contingencies Require Necessities?

This is a sore point for me as I've had trouble with atheists on this point lo these many years of internet apologetics. Over this last week end I had an argument with three atheists at once over the Cosmological argument (comment section of this blog). My argument asserts that all natural things are contingent because they require causes, At least we have no examples of things that don't require causes,

IMS (I am Skeptic): " I do not accept this. Contingent things (if defined as things whose existence has a beginning in time) have a cause (by premise 1), but that cause could be anything. I do not grant that it must be a necessary thing."

Meta*: this is a deductive argument man. We are going to deduce something we do that by arguing premises, p2 doesn't to embody the conclusion of the argument it only has to be true in itself, saying it could be anything is BS because by the end of the argument it will be apparent not true.

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/n.htm#nec

*for those who don't know I am Meta (aka Metacrock) ,my old screen name  

necessary / contingent

Distinction between kinds of truth. Necessary truth is a feature of any statement that it would be contradictory to deny. (Contradictions themselves are necessarily false.) Contingent truths (or falsehoods) happen to be true (or false), but might have been otherwise. Thus, for example: "Squares have four sides." is necessary. "Stop signs are hexagonal." is contingent. "Pentagons are round." is contradictory. This distinction was traditionally associated (before Kant and Kripke) with the distinctions between a priori and a posteriori knowledge and the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgment. Necessity may also be defined de dicto in terms of the formal logical property of tautology. Recommended Reading: Jules Vuillemin, Necessity or Contingency? (C S L I, 1995); Colin McGinn, Logical Properties (Oxford, 2001); Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Clarendon, 1989); and Margaret Dauler Wilson, Leibniz' Doctrine of Necessary Truth (Harvard, 1984).

necessary / sufficient

Distinction between logical or causal conditions. In logic, one proposition is a necessary condition of another when the second cannot be true while the first is false, and one proposition is a sufficient condition for another when the first cannot be true while the second is false. Thus, for example: "I have a dog" is a necessary condition for "My dog has fleas," and "You scored ninety-five percent" is a sufficient condition for "You received an A." In causal relations, a necessary condition for the occurence of an event is a state of affairs without which the event cannot happen, while a sufficient condition is a state of affairs that guarantees that it will happen. Thus, for example: the presence of oxygen is a necessary condition for combustion, and the flow of electrical current is a sufficient condition for the induction of a magnetic field. Recommended Reading: Brian McLaughlin, On the Logic of Ordinary Conditionals (SUNY, 1990); Conditionals, ed. by Michael Woods, David Wiggins, and Dorothy Edgington (Clarendon, 1997); and David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Blackwell, 2000). Also see SEP, Norman Swartz, and CE. [1]

 

 

Rather than sufficient I used contingent but the word has a causal dimension it is not a misue of the term. In the quotation abovevthe relivant part is:

 In causal relations, a necessary condition for the occurence of an event is a state of affairs without which the event cannot happen, while a sufficient condition is a state of affairs that guarantees that it will happen. Thus, for example: the presence of oxygen is a necessary condition for combustion, and the flow of electrical current is a sufficient condition for the induction of a magnetic field. Recommended Reading: Brian McLaughlin, On the Logic of Ordinary Conditionals (SUNY, 1990); Conditionals, ed. by Michael Woods, David Wiggins, and Dorothy Edgington

Tim Holt.

Something is “necessary” if it could not possibly have failed to exist. The laws of mathematics are often thought to be necessary. It is plausible to say that mathematical truths such as two and two making four hold irrespective of the way that the world is. Even if the world were radically different, it seems, two and two would still make four. God, too, is often thought to be a necessary being, i.e. a being that logically could not have failed to exist.
Something is “contingent” if it is not necessary, i.e. if it could have failed to exist. Most things seem to exist contingently. All of the human artefacts around us might not have existed; for each one of them, whoever made it might have decided not to do so. Their existence, therefore, is contingent. You and I, too, might not have existed; our respective parents might never have met, or might have decided not to have children, or might have decided to have children at a different time. Our existence, therefore, is contingent. Even the world around us seems to be contingent; the universe might have developed in such a way that none of the observable stars and planets existed at all.
The argument from contingency rests on the claim that the universe, as a whole, is contingent. It is not only the case, the argument suggests, that each of the things around is us contingent; it is also the case that the whole, all of those things taken together, is contingent. It might have been the case that nothing existed at all. The state of affairs in which nothing existed at all is a logically possible state of affairs, even though it is not the actual state of affairs.

I have made the argument in causal terms and I chose to use the e\term "contingent," I could tweak the argument and use another term, I may do that, it doesn't matter. IMS has nothing to say so he refuses to accept the definition but the truth is her can't me a single example of some aspect of nature that doesn't have a cause. We trace those causes to the big bang and can trace o further but we have no proof of what caused the big bang.

Moreover I will make a sub argument here to the effect that materialism itself depends upon  accepting the notion that all natural things have causes.

1) The notion of something from nothing voilates basic assumptions of materialism

a. Materailism based upon cause and effect

Dictonary of Philosphy Anthony Flew, article on "Materialism" [3]
"...the belief that everything that exists is ethier matter or entirely dependent upon matter for its existence."

Backing up Flew's assumption is Christepherv Southgate"

"...Beyond the Christian community there was even greater unease. One of the fundamental assumptions of modern science is that every physical event can be sufficiently explained solely in terms of preceding physical causes. Quite apart from its possible status as the moment of creation, the Big Bang singularity is an offence to this basic assumption. Thus some philosophers of science have opposed the very idea of the Big Bang as irrational and untestable." [4]

b) Something from nothing contraidicts materialism

The great philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, also mathematician who wrote Principia Mathematica with Bergrand Russell, stated:

 "We are content with superficial orderings form diverse arbitrary starting points. ... sciene which is employed in their deveopment [modern thought] is based upon a philosophy which asserts that physical casation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the final end. It is not popular to dwell upon the absolute contradiction here involved."[Whitehead was an atheist]  [5]

c) Causality was the basis upon which God was expelled from Modern Science

It was La Plase's famous line "I have no need of that Hypothesis" [meaning God] Which turned the scientific world form believing (along with Newton and assuming that order in nature proved design) to unbelief on the principle that we don't' need God to explain the universe because we have independent naturalistic cause and effect. [Numbers, God and Nature] [6]

2) Materilism Undermines Itself

a) Big Bang contradicts causality (see quotation above)

b) QM theory seems to contradict cause/effect relationship.

c) Rejection of final cause

3) Probabalistic Justification for assumption of Cause

We still have a huge justification for assuming causes inductively, since nothing in our experince is ever uncaused. The mere fact that we can't see or find a cause isn't a proof that there isn't one.

4) Therefore, we have probabalistic justification for assuming Final cause

Thus, the basis upon which God was dismissed from scientific thought has been abandoned;the door to consideration of God is open again. The reliance upon naturalistic cause and effect in consideration of ultimate origins is shattered, but this does not make it rational to just assume that the universe opoped into existence with no cause. Since we have vast precident for assuming cause and effect, we should continue to do so. But since naturalistic cause and effect seems unnecessary at the cosmic level, we should consider the probablity of an ultimate necessary final cause.

Sources


[1] Garth Kemerling, The Philosophy Pages  (websiter   are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 ) URL:
http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/index.htm
accessed 5/5/16

This is a concise guide to technical terms and personal names often encountered in the study of philosophy. What you will find here naturally reflects my own philosophical interests and convictions, but everything is meant to be clear, accurate, and fair, a reliable source of information on Western philosophy for a broad audience. The curriculum vitae elsewhere on this site describes my experience in academic life.

Garth Kemerling Ph.D. In Philosophy from University of Iowa


[2] Tim Holt, "Philoso[hy of Reliogion,"  www.philosophyofreligion.info website. URL:
http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/theistic-proofs/the-cosmological-argument/the-argument-from-contingency/
accessed 5/5/16

rom one of his sites: Tim has Bachelor's and Master's degrees in philosophy from the University of Sheffield, and a Diploma in Theology from the University of Oxford. From September 2005, he has been teaching philosophy, religious studies, and critical thinking at Cirencester College.


[3]   Anthony Flew, "Materialism,"   Dictionary of Philosophy,  New York: Macmillon  press limited, 1979, second revision 1984, 222
[4]  Christopher Southgate and Lawrence Osborn, God, Humanity and the Cosmos. T&T Clark:  Edinburgh , 1999 quoted on website:
Center For Theology and the Natural Sciences URL:
http://www.ctns.org/Information/information.html Is the Big Bang a Moment of Creation?(this source is already linked above)
accessed 2001. This site no longer exists. Dr. Sothgate was head of the institute.

this material is now availed on the counter balance website: URL:

http://www.counterbalance.org/ghc-bb/creat-frame.html
access 5/5/16

[5] Alfred North Whitehead, Science and The Modern World, .NY: free Press, 1925, 1953. 76
[6]  Roger Hahn, God And Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. Los Angeles:University of California Press, David C. Lindberg (Editor), Ronald L. Numbers (Editor). 1986, 256-277

 

Debate challenege to atheists: Cosmological argument

(1) All contingent things have causes
(2) All contingencies require necessities to ground them.
(3) All natural things are contingent
(4) the universe is natural, therefore, the universe is contingent
(5) the universe requires a necessity upon which its existence is grounded, Therefore, the origin of the universe must be necessary.
(6)Since the origin of the universe must be necessary (from 2,4 and 5) and not contingent the origin cannot have a cause.
(7)The origin of universe is necessary and must be eternal and first cause, since this is the definition of God (see Rational Warrant page) then the origin of the universe must be God.

This version understands Necessity and contingency largely in causal terms. The necessity that creates the universe must be understood as eternal and uncaused for two reasons: (1) The impossibility of ICR, there has to be a final cause or nothing would ever come to be, (2) empirically we know the universe is not eternal. See the supporting material. Atheists will often argue that this kind of argument doesn't prove that God is the necessity that causes the universe. but being necessary and creator and primary cause makes it the sources of all thins we can rationally construe that as God.
I do not claim to "prove the existence of God." God is not just another thing in the cosmos. God is being itself, the basis upon which reality coheres. This is beyond our understanding so it is beyond empirical proof. I argue that God arguments prove that belief is rationally warranted, The do not prove that God exists nor do they have to. ultimately belief will not be decided based upon such matters but they may help to clear away the clutter.


Below are links to essays showing the Christian nature of this idea of being itself.


Please join me in the comment section


Being itself source of consciousness
http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2009/01/ground-of-being-as-source-of.html


Bible God and the Depth of Being
http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2009/01/the-bible-god-depth-of-being.html

  (1) All contingent things have causes
(2) All contingencies require necessities to ground them.
(3) All natural things are contingent
(4) the universe is natural, therefore, the universe is contingent
(5) the universe requires a necessity upon which its existence is grounded, Therefore, the origin of the universe must be necessary.
(6)Since the origin of the universe must be necessary (from 2,4 and 5) and not contingent the origin cannot have a cause.
(7)The origin of universe is necessary and must be eternal and first cause, since this is the definition of God (see Rational Warrant page) then the origin of the universe must be God.

This version understands Necessity and contingency largely in causal terms. The necessity that creates the universe must be understood as eternal and uncaused for two reasons: (1) The impossibility of ICR, there has to be a final cause or nothing would ever come to be, (2) empirically we know the universe is not eternal. See the supporting material. Atheists will often argue that this kind of argument doesn't prove that God is the necessity that causes the universe. but being necessary and creator and primary cause makes it the sources of all thins we can rationally construe that as God.
I do not claim to "prove the existence of God." God is not just another thing in the cosmos. God is being itself, the basis upon which reality coheres. This is beyond our understanding so it is beyond empirical proof. I argue that God arguments prove that belief is rationally warranted, The do not prove that God exists nor do they have to. ultimately belief will not be decided based upon such matters but they may help to clear away the clutter.

Below are links to essays showing the Christian nature of this idea of being itself.


Please join me in the comment section


Being itself source of consciousness
http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2009/01/ground-of-being-as-source-of.html


Bible God and the Depth of Being
Bible God and the Depth of Being
http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2009/01/the-bible-god-depth-of-being.html

more about the Big bang.

this is the graphic Craig used for this article


On his most recent Q/A William Lane Craig deals with the Question about is the standard model (Big Bang singularity) still the prevailing model. Here's what he says:

Question from reader:

I recently was told by some physicists whom I had the chance to interview for a paper that the standard big bang model of the universe does not include a singularity anymore. That may have been the case twenty five years ago, they said, but nowadays physicists say that the big bang extends only back to Planck time. Can you PLEASE clarify the confusion I’m having on this?
God bless,
Glenn

Dr. Craig responds:

I’m just in the process of wrapping up an article on the kalam cosmological argument co-authored with James Sinclair for a forthcoming volume with Blackwell entitled Companion to Natural Theology. Jim is writing the section on the empirical evidence of astrophysical cosmology for the beginning of the universe. He does a marvelous job of summarizing the current state of the field, a preview of which I’ll give you here.
First, though, in answer to your question, the standard Big Bang model includes an initial singularity. The model cannot lose that feature and remain the same model. So there’s no question of the standard model’s not including a singularity anymore. Rather what the physicists you interviewed meant is that the standard model is no longer the prevailing view today. Their claim is that while the standard model was the accepted view 25 years ago, that is no longer the case today.

Now in one sense that’s true. The standard Big Bang model needs to be modified in various ways. For example, the model is based on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. But Einstein’s theory breaks down when space is shrunk down to sub-atomic proportions. We’ll need to introduce quantum physics at that point, and no one is sure how this is to be done. That’s what your physicists meant when they said that the Big Bang extends back only as far as the Planck time. (That, by the way, is no new realization; everyone always knew that General Relativity breaks down by that point.) Moreover, the expansion of the universe is probably not constant, as in the standard model. It’s probably accelerating and may have had a brief moment of super-rapid, or inflationary, expansion in the past.

But none of these adjustments need affect the fundamental prediction of the standard model of the absolute beginning of the universe.
Indeed, Jim’s survey of contemporary cosmology reinforces just how robust the standard model’s prediction of an absolute beginning continues to be. He considers three broad research programs being currently pursued based on possible exceptions to the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems, which support the standard model’s prediction of an initial cosmological singularity. These are (1) Closed Timelike Curves, (2) Violation of the Strong Energy Condition (Eternal Inflation), and (3) Falsity of General Relativity (Quantum Gravity). The first of these postulates an exotic spacetime which features circular time in the past and so is not taken very seriously by the vast majority of cosmologists. The real work has been on the other two alternatives.
With respect to the alternative of Eternal Inflation, it was suggested by some theorists during the 1980s that perhaps the inflationary expansion of the universe was not confined to a brief period early in the history of the universe but is eternal in the past, each inflating region being the product of a prior inflating region. Although such models were hotly debated, something of a watershed appears to have been reached in 2003, when three leading cosmologists, Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.
What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds regardless of the physical description of the universe prior to the Planck time. Because we can’t yet provide a physical description of the very early universe, this brief moment has been fertile ground for speculations. (One scientist has compared it to the regions on ancient maps labeled “Here there be dragons!”—it can be filled with all sorts of fantasies.) But the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is independent of any physical description of that moment. Their theorem implies that even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called “multiverse” composed of many universes, the multiverse must have an absolute beginning.

For whatever its worth.