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VI - Ultimate Reasons: Proofs a contingentia mundi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Jordan Howard Sobel
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Summary

First sustaining-cause arguments are ‘nonstarters.’ The most serious problems with first-cause arguments, for example, generating-cause and moving-cause arguments, are (i) the apparent possibility that first generating and moving causes should no longer exist and (ii) the apparent possibility, conceded by Aquinas and believed in by many, of infinite regresses of generating and moving causes. Cosmological arguments could come from first-cause arguments by adjustments designed to deal with these difficulties while reinterpreting and deepening the insight that inspires first-cause thinking. Suppose one allows that it is possible that there should have been sensible generating causes of causes of causes ad infinitum, without beginnings or first sensible generating causes. Suppose, that is, that one rejects the words that head the previous chapter, it is not conceivable that successions of causes and effects leading to now should have sprung from nowhere, under one interpretation. Suppose one allows that there can be infinite beginningless series of generating and moving causes. One may still accept these words under another interpretation. For one may feel that, even if generating and moving causes can ‘go to infinity’ in beginningless regressive series, these series themselves need to have, if not causes, then reasons and grounds of some sort for being and that they, the several beginningless infinite series, cannot simply be, so that to, “Why all of this?”, the answer is, “For no reason, for no reason at all.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Logic and Theism
Arguments for and against Beliefs in God
, pp. 200 - 237
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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