Tag Archives: Thomas Aquinas

The Argument from Contingency

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“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

Talking About God

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Last time, we encountered a curious conundrum: when we try to talk about God, our words shift around on us, and we find that we can’t really talk about God the way we talk about basically everything else. (This post is Part 2 in a 3-part series; if you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you do before continuing!) When we say that God is the creator or that God is good, we saw that we don’t really quite mean creating or being good in the way that humans might create things or be good. (And the same limitation applies to things like calling God a father, or mother, or a castle, or anything else: for God to do the basic things we think God does, God can’t actually be a father or mother or a castle.)

In other words, we discovered that one way we might talk about God—univocal or unequivocal language—probably won’t work. When we use words that we use to describe things other than God to talk about God, our words will mean something different from what we mean when we talk about that non-God stuff. That’s confusing—and annoying—but I hope that in my last post, I showed that it is nevertheless the case.

Today, though, we get to move on to some good news. Though we probably shouldn’t ever talk about God unequivocally, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about God at all. But we will need to figure out how we can use language to refer to something (or someone) who seems to defy normal description.

Read the rest of the article on my new substack, Phenomenology, East & West