Set of Contingent Beings Need Not Be Contingent: Please Disprove

[Wesrock]

I feel like the First and Second Ways are getting muddled here.

Could the universe have been made up of different matter/energy? Or is it absolutely necessary that the same matter/energy in the universe exist? That there is no possibility that different matter/energy exist instead? Is such a thing impossible? Is it necessary that any particular quark exist and not some other quark in its place?

Does the universe require explanation? Or is no explanation necessary?

 

[Gorgias]

You short-circuited the entire argument of this thread with your first statement here.

That’s the whole point, ethereality – the argument doesn’t hold up, since its premises are false. Therefore, there’s no reason to go through the exercise of walking through the argument: it’s null by virtue of having an invalid foundation.

The universe, by definition, is not “the set of all contingent things”. It is the set of all physical things. The argument in this thread is that there may exist a collection of physical things whose collection together necessarily exists.

Yes; and the argument from contingency isn’t an argument about the properties of the elements of a set; rather, it’s an argument about the universe considered as a whole. Therefore, your discussion doesn’t really address the merits of the argument from contingency.

Again, if you have A and B and one of them will always exist when the other is absent, such as matter turning into energy which turns into matter, such that matter or energy will always exist, then the universe necessarily exists unless something else renders it finite.

This, I think, is the reason for the invalidity of the argument. You’re presuming that “infinite” implies “necessary”, and that isn’t necessarily the case. However, you presume that, if we demonstrate that either energy or matter always existed, then therefore, contingency no longer applies. In fact, one of the strengths of the argument from contingency is that it does not require a finite universe; it applies whether the universe has a beginning or not.