Do you mind linking to this site? This ex-apologist isn't Loftus, is it?

 It seems like this the writer in question is trying to reject contingency itself. This seems like a very dubious position, and we'd have to see in depth the grounds he gives for this. Besides, theists give reasons why necessary being - which he appears to accept - must be God. Pat empiricism (the talk about science implying the multiverse) is not an adequate response to such arguments. But we'd have to see the actual argument to properly comment.

First of all terms like 'universe' 'cosmos' or 'multiverse' are collectives. The universe is not a thing in and above the substances which make it up any more than a pair of cows is anything above the two individual cows.  The entities that form its Parts are contingent*; with that in mind I don't think it would be unfair riposte that a necessary Whole cannot be made up of solely contingent Parts. The atheist must recognise thus and try to get round it by claiming that certain base particles are in fact Necessary.
 
Why should this be so though: why is it that these parts of which we know nothing have the characteristic of Necessity? One cannot make a being e.g. an island or a unicorn into a necessary being just by claiming it falls into that Modal class - one must show why that is so. What is the mechanism which explains this necessity? For God we have at least several i.e. Perfection and Simplicity.

And now a gentle plea to all theists interested in atheist objections: please, please get your atheism from accredited and fully licensed sources. In the end the positive arguments for atheism given by the likes of Q Smith, Tooley and Oppy might not be that much better than those found from random bloggers such as this but at least they have more academic kudus and at least attempt to phrase things in a coherent way.
 

Last edited by DanielCC (8/08/2015 6:13 am)

Hi AKG, 

The blogger you link isn't commenting on the Third Way. If he were, replies to the only possible interesting interpretations can be found in my comments here. 

What this blogger seems to be trying to do is answer some newer formulation of the argument from contingency with a refitted version of David Lewis's principle of recombination[1] (which is a refitted version of Spinoza's principle of plenitude). The principle states, in slightly more detail, that every possible world exists. So, according to the blogger, the explanation for our world existing is that, necessarily, every possible world had to exist[2]. In other words, it's an implicit necessary universe defense[3] backed up by a metaphysical principle—essentially, the principle of plenitude carried to its logical conclusion.  

Given something like Everett's interpretation, I'm pretty sure the blogger is going to run into identity problems unless he posits a four-dimensionalist perdurantism—that we're time worms that split along a temporal axis or fourth-dimension. In any case, given something like Brian Davies's formulation of the contingency argument, the second part of the Third Way's strategy can be used to argue the necessary worlds have their necessity through another in defense of this contingency argument, too.  


[1]Principle of recombination: shape and size permitting, any number of duplicates of any number of possible things can co-exist or fail to co-exist. (and, Lewis goes on to claim, everything that can exist does exist).
[2]Except David Lewis would never make the mistake of conflating a universe in a multiverse with a possible world. One Lewis-world could contain a multiverse, but another Lewis-world could have only one universe. So, the blogger is either not consistently applying the principle of recombination, or needs to define his principle, or needs to admit that he's positing the multiverse of all possible universes as a brute fact.
[3]If it's not, we can just ask, "Why does the multiverse exist?"

Last edited by John West (8/08/2015 12:36 pm)

AKG wrote:

I've been browsing the web and I came across this website calles ex-apologist which claims to have refuted the argument from contingency.

His attempted refutation, as John West has noted, has nothing to do with Aquinas's Third Way*. For Aquinas, a substance is "contingent" if it has a tendency toward corruption, and "necessary" if it doesn't.

Matter is contingent in this sense. But even if it were necessary, it would still have its necessity from God rather than in itself. (Aquinas thinks rational souls are necessary too, but he doesn't think they're therefore self-existent.)

At bottom this point is a variation of the one I made just above, but I thought it called for separate comment/elaboration. (John alludes to it briefly as well.)

----

*And John's reply to the argument the poster does offer seems entirely cogent to me.

Last edited by Scott (8/08/2015 11:06 am)

AKG wrote:

Thanks for your replies, but this classical theism philosophy is really intellectually challenging.

It is indeed, and in large measure for the very reason you give: it does take an effort to shake off modern presumptions and see what the Scholastics and other classical theists were really getting at. One of the hardest to shake off is the very one you're having trouble with here, namely that once something exists, its continued existence doesn't require any explanation. But once you get your mind around the idea that the existence of anything requires explanation at every moment of its existence (no matter how long it's already existed), you'll be immune to all these other "counterexamples."

If that's G.H. Joyce's Principles of Natural Theology you're reading, then that's excellent. And he's quite good on the topic of the preceding paragraph. <salespitch>Ed's latest includes some excellent on-point essays as well, and it's a steal at the current price.</salespitch>

Last edited by Scott (8/08/2015 12:00 pm)