“One of the principal reasons many philosophers (and theologians) have argued for the reality of God1 is what I think we should call the argument from contingency. The argument from contingency is related to, or indeed may be a version of, the cosmological argument(s).2 It goes like this:

“When we look at our world, we find it inhabited by all kinds of things: grass, houses, the sky, other human beings, etc. Early in life, these things may seem eternal and automatically present, but with the passage of time, we find that at least some of them are not. Winter comes and the grass withers. A storm comes and our house’s roof is shattered.

“We come to realize that many of the things we took for granted aren’t eternal or guaranteed. As time goes by, we find that more and more things are impermanent: our beloved grandparents die, and we see them no longer. Stores we went to every week go out of business. Some of us even live through the dissolution of entire states and empires. We come to see that more and more things are utterly impermanent: they appear and then, in time, they fade away.”

Continue reading on my substack: https://phenomenologyeastandwest.substack.com/p/the-argument-from-contingency