Source: Contingency

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EricSaumur
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Created page with "Contingency of existence and truth have very similar structures. In contingency of truth the Munchausen trilema applies. If you ask how you know some statement to be true, you..."
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Contingency of existence and truth have very similar structures.   In contingency of truth the Munchausen trilema applies.  If you ask how you know some statement to be true, you can only support it with one or more other statements.  Those statements in turn require support.  Continuing onward like this you may realize you are headed for infinite regress.  But infinite regress is only one of three possible solutions to the Munchhausen trilema.  The other two are circular support and an unsupported base statement or axiom.

Similarly, in contingency of existence, if you ask how something or some event or some state came to be, you can take these same three paths.  You can assume an infinite regress of cause and effect, you can posit a circular temporal universe in which time wraps back on itself and future effects are also past causes, or you can posit a prime cause which existed without being caused to exist.

But there are other possibilities with contingency of existence.   You may posit that cause and effect are illusory; maybe things just happen.  Or maybe time is an illusion; maybe things don't happen.  Or maybe there is more than one dimension of time; maybe all events were caused from the side at the same point in the second dimension of time.   Maybe every event requires two causes, a sort of intersection between two oscillating prime causal fields, their oscillations partially affected by the events they cause.

The number of possible mechanisms of contingency of existence are probably infinite.  Whether you call some element of your posited mechanism God or not seems semantic to me.