Quick administrative note: If you haven’t guessed by now, I’ve abandoned the 50 movies thing.  The motivation just wasn’t there.  Hopefully there will be a lot more content on the blog once I finish the whole grad-school thing in June.  At least that’s the plan.  /administrative note

I can’t vouch for the awesomness (or the comprehensibility) of the following, as I came up with most of it around 2 am after reading a whole bunch of Bonaventure.  Feel free to critique at will and extensively.

I think we can all admit that the vast majority of the things we encounter on a day to day basis are contingent.  That is, the chair I’m sitting in (for example) did not necessarily have to exist.  Nor, one could argue, did I have to exist.  The universe (and here I’m defining “the universe” as what we perceive as reality to avoid the whole messy “what is reality as it truly is” issue and also because I’m primarily operating within a medieval frame, which predicates that our sense perception is in fact providing a reasonable approximation of “actual” reality)  could putter along nicely without both me and the chair, thus we are contingent.

Moving beyond this, one could claim (I’d imagine that almost everyone would accept this) that the entire universe itself is, in fact, contingent.  However, at some point do we need to posit some necessary thing (be it event, object, universal constant, etc.) upon which the existence of the universe rests?  More clearly, was the Big Bang a necessary event?  Or are the various physical laws which led to the Big Bang necessary? It seems the answer should be “yes” to at least one of these questions.

However, the existence of a necessary thing implies the coherency of the idea of a necessary being.  If we accept Hartshorne’s formulation of the ontological argument (which is logically valid ) than this coherency implies that God exists, and indeed must exist.  That’s a troubling notion for this little conflicted atheist.

So where does the argument break down?  Possible objections that I can see:

  • One could claim that no thing is non-contingent.  Of course, this leads to some questions regarding how exactly the universe came to exist.  I guess the question is: Is there a need for an ultimate necessary cause for the existence of contingent things?
  • The universe is, in fact, not contingent, but necessary.  Of course, this doesn’t really solve the issue at all, as it still supposes a necessary thing.
  • The existence of a necessary thing does not imply that the idea of a necessary being is coherent
  • The ontological argument is not logically valid.  <–I don’t see how this is an argument anyone could make, as it’s entirely valid as far as anyone can tell.

Of these, the first seems most satisfying to me, however I can’t really come up with a good argument for how an entirely contingent existence can, in fact, exist.  Anyone got any ideas?

That’s all I got, I apologize for any difficulties in understanding that my surely crappy prose/analysis creates.