The eternity of contingency?

[thinkandmull]

I don’t see how you can hold the contingency argument and still believe in a possible eternal world as a valid stance in defense of belief in God. How does the fact that things change and randomness exist in the universe prove there is a God? When someone is really feeling time, I think it is impossible to believe it could be eternal, just as it is impossible not to believe in cause in effect while lifting weights

 

[thinkandmull]

Take the example of a vase. It’s the vase that exist, not the elements, otherwise you run into the whirlpool of Zeno’s paradox. So there is nothing to prevent an eternity of contingent objects coming and going out of existence, if the time could be eternal, which I think is scientifically unsound.

I also wonder how to interpret Vatican I when it says that the world didn’t “emanate” from God. Aquinas uses the word emanate by the way. I think Vatican I was contradicting the idea that the world was part of God. But God must have used something spiritual in the making of the world, and that coming out of him. Otherwise, nothing would come from nothing, if even by almighty power. Therefore what would prevent someone from arguing that the world just sprang into existence from nothing?

 

[Linusthe2nd]

I don’t see how you can hold the contingency argument and still believe in a possible eternal world as a valid stance in defense of belief in God. How does the fact that things change and randomness exist in the universe prove there is a God? When someone is really feeling time, I think it is impossible to believe it could be eternal, just as it is impossible not to believe in cause in effect while lifting weights

From a purely speculative point of view, Thomas Aquinas believed that an eternal contingent world was possible but that it would have to have been eternally created. However, he believed on faith, that our contingent world was in fact created in time out of nothing.

Linus2nd

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Take the example of a vase. It’s the vase that exist, not the elements, otherwise you run into the whirlpool of Zeno’s paradox. So there is nothing to prevent an eternity of contingent objects coming and going out of existence, if the time could be eternal, which I think is scientifically unsound.

I also wonder how to interpret Vatican I when it says that the world didn’t “emanate” from God. Aquinas uses the word emanate by the way. I think Vatican I was contradicting the idea that the world was part of God. But God must have used something spiritual in the making of the world, and that coming out of him. Otherwise, nothing would come from nothing, if even by almighty power. Therefore what would prevent someone from arguing that the world just sprang into existence from nothing?

I don’t know whether or not Vatican 1 was trying to counter the idea that the world emanated from God or not. However it did teach that God created the world out of nothing and this excluded any secondary causes. The phrase " nothing comes from nothing " refers to the contingent world already created by God. As I have explained many times, as Thomas Aquinas has explained, when the Church teaches the God created the world from nothing, it means " nothing " in the sense of non-being or no prior existing substance of any kind - not even gravity, energy, waves, etc. In other words, prior to the world’s existence there was only God.

We can’t help what skeptics think, we hold to the Truth because it was revealed by God.

Linus2nd