God Exists (Contingency Argument)

My opponent has asked why an infinite regress of contingency is impossible. He said, "to ask what caused the infinite series of causes assumes that there IS something before the chain"[the chain is] a self contained process." He asked why the series of contingent objects can"t be mutually contingent, a process, "in which one or more links is contingent on the other...a self contained process." He uses my chandelier analogy and imagines the chain looped around on itself. This is exactly the point of the analogy. If the chain was not fixed to anything outside of itself, would it hold up the chandelier or any of the links? The entire apparatus would not be held up precisely because a self-contained array of contingent objects is impossible. There *must* be a fixed point. Now if I were to say, "In order to have B, I need to have A" and "In order to have A, I need to have B" then the result would be that I have neither A nor B. It doesn"t improve the matter if I were to instead say, "In order to have C, I need B, and in order to have B, I need A, and in order to have A, I need C." No matter how many "links" I might add to the chain, there must be some starting point where we find something that does not owe its existence to anything else. There must be something that I can have without having to already have something else. If the array of contingent objects that make up our universe were mutually contingent without an external "fixed point", then we would have no universe at all. My opponent uses the example of autopoiesis, the ability of things like living cells to reproduce themselves, as an example of his point. When a parent cell divides it creates two daughter cells. Is it in any way possible that that the parent cell should come from the daughter cells? If you needed the daughter cells in order to have the parent cell, then you wouldn"t have any cells. Again, it wouldn"t do any good to instead say that the parent cell comes from the granddaughter cells, or the great granddaughter cells, or any of its progeny no matter how far down the line. In the same way, if all contingent objects were mutually contingent without any necessary object to ground them, then we would have no contingent objects at all. Finally my opponent asks why the universe itself can"t exist by necessity. The universe isn"t so much an object as a vast series of objects. Each object, of course, is comprised of trillions of objects, atoms and the quarks that make up the atoms. Are we to believe that every quark in the universe exists by the necessity of its own nature? It is really logically impossible that any quark in the whole universe should fail to exist or to have been a different quark? This would be the case if the universe existed by the necessity of its own nature. However, we needn"t bother ourselves with such a strange notion. We know scientifically that the universe came into existence by virtue of things like the second law of thermodynamics, the red shift, and general relativity. You may know of this model as the "Big Bang" theory. If the universe existed by the necessity of its own nature, it would be logically impossible that it fail to exist. If it isn"t contingent on anything for its existence, then there would be no state of affairs where the sufficient conditions for its existence were not met. This would entail that it could never have come into existence, however, as that would entail that it could have failed to exist. For this reason, if no other, the universe itself cannot exist by the necessity of its own nature. My opponent has suggested two possibilities to defeat my argument, that the universe is contingent on itself (that is to say that the contingent objects within the universe are mutually contingent) and he has suggested that the universe itself might exist as a necessary being. I have shown why neither of these options is viable. The universe must be contingent on some necessary being outside of itself. As I demonstrated in my opening arguments, there must exist a being which exists by the necessity of its own nature. This being must be immaterial, which entails that it is either a number or an unembodied mind. Since it can"t be a number, it must be an unembodied mind. The obvious term for a transcendent unembodied mind who exists as the grounds for everything in our spacetime reality is "God".