Some people think that it’s way more obvious that a contingent thing that has a beginning has to have a cause than that a contingent that has no beginning has to have a case.
Here’s one reason to be suspicious of this intuition. Whether something contingent needs to have a cause should not depend on its orientation. But whether something has a beginning is a function of its orientation in spacetime. Take an object that has extends backward in time to infinity but forwards only finitely, and hence has no beginning. Consider this as a four-dimensional object. You can then rotate it so it extends forwards in time to infinity but only a finite distance backward. You’ve merely changed its orientation, but now the object has a beginning.
This is very much a four-dimensionalist argument, of course.
What a provocative analysis! In general, I think contingency is probably the best marker that a thing/entity requires some sort of explanation (or, at the very least, it is metaphysically possible it could have some explanation). The only worry I would have is mereological. In your book, Necessary Existence, you and Joshua Rasmussen say that "an (adequate) explanation may be understood as a fact (or true proposition) that, at least to some extent, accounts for why another fact (or true proposition) obtains."
ReplyDeleteBut suppose there are three books or spheres on a table. An explanation, under that definition, could be something that partially explains why there is one book there. But we haven't thereby explained all the books, right? In any case, I noticed that the Modal Argument from Beginnings (MAB) fixes this issue, which honestly makes it impressive. Could one validly reformulate MAB this way?
1. For any positive state of affairs S that can/could fail to obtain, it's metaphysically possible for there to be something external to S that causes S to obtain.
2. It is possible for the positive state of affairs of its being the case that there exist contingent concrete things to fail to obtain.
From (1) and (2), per the definitions found and Necessary Existence, and given S5, we can conclude that:
3. There is a necessary concrete thing (S5).
(2) seems very plausible to me, unless one endorses Bede Rundle's thesis. What do you think?