Our world need not be contingent on a necessary cause. The cause itself could be contingent on a necessary cause. There could be a list of contingent causes between us and the first cause, or the list could be empty, including no supposed first cause.
If you have a proposed model for how contingent things could exist without a first, uncaused cause, I’m all ears, but philosophers generally admit that this is impossible.
As for a chain of causes, the problem with this is that the universe -is already- all of physical space and time. Therefore, any further contingent causes would need to be nonspacial and nontemporal, and there are no good reasons for thinking that a nontemporal thing would be contingent.
However, even supposing there -were- a chain of causes before the first cause, the fact remains that a first, uncaused cause -must- exist, in order to provide an adequate explanation for contingent things.
Also isn’t a necessary cause incompatible with free will, since it necessarily has to act as it does, whereas if it has a choice then the choice is contingent on something?
“Cause,” in this case, refers to a being which is causally-related to the universe, but it doesn’t imply that the -act- of causing the universe to exist is necessary, or else the universe -itself- would have a necessary existence.
As far as I can see, there’s no contradiction in positing a necessary being, which is capable of making choices on a non-necessary basis.
Which is fine, the world could have cycled through a series of incarnations of which we are unaware.
Sure, that could happen, but that’s not the point. The point is that unless the First Cause had the freedom to make non-necessary decisions, no contingent things could ever come into existence.
Don’t see that you’re proved anything at all. Three philosophers, an Eastern, a Western and a Post Enlightenment, walk into a bar and still disagree.
That’s because you’re still committing the fallacy of Argumentum ad Populum; appealing to what people believe for truth, rather than to the evidence. Please look over the evidence again. Remember this is a deductive argument, so unless one of the premises is false, or the logic unsound, its conclusion is inescapable.
If you want to know what the truth is, you can’t fall into the lie that because people disagree, no one is right. People used to disagree about whether the Earth was flat too. Yet, one group of people was right and the other wasn’t. The same is true here. A number of those people you mention are incorrect.
Don’t see how, for instance a cyclic world could necessarily cycle, have no choice but to cycle, yet go through every possible internal composition in successive cycles. Or, a Star Wars Force could be necessary yet blindly produce contingent effects.
All viable cyclic world models were disproven decades ago, and “the Force” isn’t even a viable theory, because it doesn’t have any propositional content. I think we should confine our discussion to theories that are actually meaningful.
Then that would be the scientific method.
No. Science is restricted in its ability to explain existence by the fact that it must do so through experimentation and measurement. Generally-speaking, if something can’t be measured in a physical way, it doesn’t fall within the field of science. For example, science would be incapable of studying the nature of ideas. What do ideas consist of, and where do they originate? What is a man? What is man’s purpose? Does man have a non-physical mind? What is the real nature of a phantasm? Is it different from perception, and if so, how? These are questions that science simply ignores, as well it should.
This is why, in the past, it’s been rightly said that philosophy is an utterly different form of knowledge from science.
Not sure what your argument is here. People debate free will vs. fatalism, whether the physical law could have been otherwise, why there is something rather than nothing, etc.
People debate it because we don’t know. What we do know, on the basis of experience, is that given certain conditions within a system, what happens next could not happen otherwise. We also know that in a real system it can be impossible, even in principle, to predict what happens next due to the butterfly effect etc.
Imho it’s better to form our beliefs on the basis of what we know rather than what we don’t know.
Argumentum ad populum again. It sounds like you’re saying that because people debate something; therefore, their conclusions must all be wrong/questionable.
The fact is, as I said, that we have good evidence that cause and effect really exist, and no evidence that they do not. Therefore, it’s less rational to believe in a necessary universe on this basis alone. If you want to argue against this, you have to start by presenting some good evidence that cause and effect do not exist.
For the record, the real reason that people debate things is that humans are not perfect, and make frequent mistakes. When someone becomes convinced that their mistake is correct, then the debate begins. Often, it’s the result of some logical fallacy, like this one.
