Source: Contingency

Date
Author
EricSaumur
Comment
(no comment)
Size
4122 bytes
Delta
[[File:TrappedInMachine.jpg|thumb|right|500px]]

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 many variations on the basic possibilities with contingency of existence.   You may posit that cause and effect are illusory; maybe things just happen; such a structure would be  equivalent to considering every truth an axiom.  Or maybe time is an illusion; maybe things don't happen; this is equivalent to nihilism where nothing is true .  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; this structure's truth equivalent is every truth having its own line of logical support which is hidden from us.   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.

Occam's razor prevents us from applying these strange hybrid models to contingency of truth.  But history has taught us that the common sense of ideas like Occam's razor rarely apply to reality.  When applied to reality, Occam's razor is only useful  in keeping us from going too far down the wrong assumption-path only to find new evidence smashes our earliest unnecessary assumptions.

So, although Occam's razor prevents us from choosing one particular strange hybrid model for contingency of existence, history nevertheless teaches us that any simple model of contingency of existence is probably wrong. We are left with uncertainty as the best response.

But uncertainty doesn't help us live in right relationship with reality.  Instead we are forced, where questions of right relationship are dependent on the nature of the contingency of existence, to choose an answer, that seems likely, to live by; lets, for the purooses of this essay, call this "having faith".

Some have posited that there is a prime cause which is a person.  They may put this person inside the universe or they may put this person outside the universe.   They may call this person God.  And they may argue that the other position as to the location of God (inside or outside the universe) is laughably simplistic.   

To me both positions are complex strange hybrid models of contingency of existence.   To me it is fine to have faith that one or the other is true but it is not justifiable to call the other position laughable or simplistic.   From my epistemological frame of reference both are equally valid.

From my faith frame of reference, the idea that there is a person involved in the model of contingency of existence is incomprehensibly alien.  Not laughable.   Not simplistic.   Just based on axioms that are not familiar and believable to me.  (Any point of view about the contingency of existence is necessarily based on the person's point of view about the contingency of truth.) 

In my faith frame of reference, persons are recent, unlikely, accidental rarities in the universe, existing only in a layer much less than 100 m thick on a single rock which is only about 10 million meters across in a universe which is much more than a septillion meters across. In such a faith frame of reference, a person in the model of contingency of existence just doesn't fit.