[quote]forlife wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]forlife wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]forlife wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]forlife wrote:
How can something be contingent in existence then, if it can’t be created? If it was never created, how can it depend on anything to be brought into existence? It was never created, so it was never brought into existence.[/quote]
There are two way to look at it. If something is contingent on something else, then the something is dependent on something else. Even if it has always existed.
And technically if it happens extra temporally, then it’s always eternal. So by that thought process it can be both created and eternal because it happened out side of time.
Both are possible, one is true. I just don’t know which is which.
Gotta run…[/quote]
You keep bringing time into it, and time is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if it has always existed, that says nothing about whether or not it was created.
Again, please be very clear that we are talking about contingent existence, not contingent interaction. And by contingent existence, I’m specifically talking about original existence, not ongoing existence. I’m not even getting into the possible destruction of matter/energy at this point. I’m talking very specifically about the noncontingency of matter/energy in its original existence.
If something was not created, how can its original existence be contingent? It’s not, because nothing created it. If nothing created it, it is definitionally noncontingent.
Can you at least acknowledge that this is a real possibility?[/quote]
That something came from nothing? No that is not a possibility at all. Everything exists because of something else, except for that which is uncaused. Regression necessitates that it can only be one thing.
If you take away a piece from a puzzle it ceases to be a completed puzzle. Whether or not that puzzle exited forever, it requires that piece to be what it is. Probably not the best analogy. But if you picture our movement in time as a journey across a large straw or tube, you step out of the tube and look at it from one end or another, everything happens simultaneously there.
However, if something wasn’t created or contingent, then something from nothing would be proven.[/quote]
No. I’m asking you to acknowledge the possibility that matter/energy is noncontingent. This is exactly what the laws of conservation assert, since once again we are talking about contingent original creation, which is impossible for matter/energy,
You’re arguing that matter can’t be noncontingent because if you removed one of its properties, like spin or charge, it would no longer be matter.
What you’re missing is that the identical criticism applies to god. You could similarly argue that god can’t be noncontingent, because if you removed one of his properties, like omnipotence or benevolence, he would no longer be god.
God is as dependent on his defining properties as matter is dependent on its defining properties. The existence of properties doesn’t imply something cannot be noncontingent.
[/quote]
No it is impossible for matter and energy to be non-contingent. Mainly because it is contingent. Again, always existing does not matter, lot’s of things can fit the definition on being eternal, but none of them are none contingent. Matter and energy do not have that property uniquely. Further, as discussed, matter and energy do not exist independently and can do nothing on their own. Something must act on them for them to do anything at all. That’s a huge problem for claiming non-contingency.
Benevolence or omniscience isn’t properties of the uncaused-cause, it’s the result of being. But even if you removed that, you still have an uncaused-cause. The only way to disassemble that is to remove existence, then it would just be an uncaused thing, not an uncaused-causer.
[/quote]
Pat, I’m getting the feeling that either you’re not reading my replies closely, or I’m doing a bad job of making my point. I’ll try again 
As I said earlier, I’m not claiming that matter/energy (ME) is noncontingent because it has always existed.
Please read the above, because you keep arguing against a point I’m not making.
I’m suggesting that ME is noncontingent because it cannot be created.
It doesn’t matter that ME can interact causally with ME. The ongoing interactions of ME are irrelevant to my point, which has to do with the actual creation of ME. God can interact with men as well, but that says nothing about whether or not God was created.
If something was created, it must be contingent in its existence. If something was not created, it must be noncontingent in its existence.
Please specifically address the above sentence. If you disagree, please explain why.[/quote]
Dependency or contingency isn’t necessarily a temporally creative force though it can be.
So creation of matter and energy
‘Always existing’ is a temporal condition, which is a single dimension. With out the universe as we know it, there ain’t no time. That doesn’t mean there isn’t time outside of it, but time requires one thing to move and another to stand still, OR two things moving at different rates. Or one thing moving through space.
The first we cannot verify because every thing we know of moves, the second is akin to our model and the third requires other matter to exist for space, so it cannot be just one thing. For time and space to exist matter and energy must not only exist, but move.
There are two timeless states. One where nothing moves and the speed of light.
In this scenario it is both possible for matter and energy to be created and still be timeless or eternal. Because if time and space are the result or at least a symptom of matter and energy moving, it could not exist before there was matter and energy, so however matter and energy came in to being, it came into existence sans time and hence eternal.
Where there is no time, all things are eternal, whether created or not.
Was there any time before there was a universe? Was there anything, we cannot know empirically. Deduction can give clues, but nothing necessarily tangible beyond theories. We can know that if everything suddenly stopped moving from the smallest bit of energy to the largest black hole, we’d be in a timeless state.
Now non-created matter and energy theory still has the problem being composed of things that define them and not the other way around. Also, more recently it has been believed that matter and energy can be broken down in to what they now call ‘information’. This is a way to preserve conservation beyond the event horizon in a black hole. Because we know with pretty good certainty that at the very least light, can be destroyed in a black hole, so it stands to reason that energy itself can suffer. Well how can you theoretically recover something from a black hole? By reassembling the ‘information’. What ‘information’ is nobody knows.
Again, feel free not to trust me, I am going from memory, but look it up, I didn’t make any of this up. I wish I did.
Then matter and energy have the basic problems of if not created then how did it get there, why does it do what it does, what moves it, etc.
Uncaused-causer does not suffer from these problems. The only thing you can technically do, is remove the causer part, but for that existence has to disappear. All the uncaused part has to do is exist and do nothing, if it does ‘something’ then it’s a causer too.
You’re one of the few I would go into so much detail for…