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    Carmelics

    A reasoning platform. Break down any belief into clear reasons, explore both sides, and weigh the evidence honestly.

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The cause of the aggregate of all contingent things must be a necessarily existing thing.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.The aggregate of all contingent things need not have a cause, since causal principles apply to members within sets, not to sets themselves.
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    • 2.David Hume argued in the Dialogues that explaining each member of a collection explains the collection, making a further cause of the whole explanatorily redundant.
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    • 3.Bertrand Russell defended this 'Fallacy of Composition' diagnosis: what is true of parts need not be true of wholes, so causal dependency does not transfer from members to the aggregate.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Necessary existence may be an incoherent or meaningless predicate when applied to concrete beings, as Kant argued in the Critique of Pure Reason against the ontological proof.
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    • 2.If 'necessary existence' means only that we cannot conceive the being's non-existence, this is a merely epistemic fact that establishes no ontological conclusion about what must exist outside the aggregate.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.The existence of the aggregate of all contingent things requires a cause external to the aggregate.
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    • 2.All contingently existing things are members of the aggregate.
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    • 3.Therefore, the external cause cannot itself be contingent, since all contingent things are already within the aggregate.
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