Estranged Notions: Can We Actually Know Anything About God?

Today's post:

Can We Actually Know Anything About God?

I need a stronger tag than “drivel”.

This one bases its argument primarily on the Aristotelian ‘principle of proportionate causation’, which Heschmeyer seems to think is “so basic that [it] ought to be uncontroversial”. But on the contrary, like many aspects of Aristotelian metaphysics, it's either vacuous or false, and arguments that make use of it rely on equivocating between the vacuous sense and the false sense.

Similarly, it's a fallacy of composition to assume that because something is present in the effect it must therefore be present in the cause, or that the cause must be ‘greater’ than the effect.

Estranged Notions: Why Something Rather than Nothing?

Today's post:

Why Something Rather than Nothing?

Drivel recycled to shill another book, using the same argument regarding the fallacy of composition that we saw from Feser and refuted long ago.

Contingency and the Fallacy of Composition

(Intended to be part 1 of a short series on contingency arguments)

The Argument from Contingency

Sketched out, the Argument from Contingency is along these lines:

1. Things are either logically necessary or contingent.
2. Contingent things require an explanation, which must ultimately lead to a necessary thing (rather than a loop of contingent things or an infinite regress).
3. Contingent things exist.
4. Therefore at least one necessary thing exists.
5. Everything in the physical universe is contingent.
6. Therefore the physical universe itself is also contingent.
7. Therefore the necessary thing is separate from the physical universe, and the theist then asserts it to be God.

Every step of this argument is open to serious criticism, but for the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on steps 5 and 6.