Hi folks,

I'm a big fan of Thomistic cosmological arguments as laid out by Feser and others, but recently two potential problems with these arguments have been percolating in my mind:

1) What are the 'things' in the arguments? Thomistic arguments begin with the observation that there are some 'things' which have a dependent existence. For example, Norman Kretzmann says that "=11ptWe regularly observe the more impermanent things around us being generated and being destroyed, and we have good reasons to think that all the less impermanent things we see, such as mountains and planets and stars, have been generated and will be destroyed…a contingent being's present existence is dependent in two respects: first, it has been generated, and so depends on something else for having come into existence; second, it depends on something else for existing, because it has =11ptno intrinsic tendency to continue to exist=11pt…" (The Metaphysics of Theism, pp. 97-98)

The problem I see here is that some of these things (mountains, planets, even perhaps those stars) are just 'piles' whose 'generation' involves nothing more than clumps of 'stuff' coming together and sticking together via physical interactions. True, they are ephemeral and have no 'intrinsic tendency to continue to exist', but it doesn't seem like their persistence requires any special explanation. More plausibly, the 'things' in these arguments should only be substances proper, about which we may reasonably wonder what brings them into existence and what maintains them in existence, but even there we have to wonder whether substances have only a superficial contingency as opposed to radical contingency, since someone might argue that the generation and corruption of substances involves substances emerging from, and dissolving into, the same fundamental stuff which is necessarily existent.

2) Are there hierarchical (essentially ordered) series of causes in nature? I totally get the distinction bet

Scott, you are the first person to get the reference. Yep, it's from Die Hard 3!

This is great! There's real value and interest in trying to distill what are the deepest metaphysical disagreements between naturalism and religious worldviews, so that they can be clearly and succinctly stated. If it weren't already taken as a title, I'd love to see a book called "Where the conflict really lies" that does just that, show where naturalism and religious worldviews really conflict.