Contingency and Explanatory Termination

Argument

A distinct and complementary line concerns contingency: even if the universe had no temporal beginning, it could still be metaphysically dependent and therefore intelligibly require an explanation. The core intuition is not “everything has a cause,” but “contingent reality requires a sufficient reason.”

If each entity in the natural order is contingent (capable of not existing) then the entire collection remains contingent. Aggregation does not transmute contingency into necessity.

Atheistic naturalism often halts explanation at the universe or at fundamental laws. But if laws and initial conditions are contingent then the explanatory demand remains.

Theism (or at minimum theism-adjacent metaphysics) supplies a candidate end point: a necessary being whose existence is not contingent and therefore can serve as a non-arbitrary stopping point. This does not yet specify a full doctrine of God, but it establishes that “the universe just exists” is explanatorily weaker than a necessary ground of being.

Formal Argument

P1. Contingent reality is reality that could have failed to exist.

P2. If every concrete reality is contingent, then the existence of the totality of concrete reality remains contingent; listing contingent members does not supply a sufficient explanation for the whole.

P3. A contingent totality cannot be its own sufficient reason, because any “explanation” that is contingent inherits the same explanatory vulnerability (it too could have failed to exist).

P4. Explanatory regresses of contingent explanations do not remove the need for a non-contingent terminus; they merely postpone it.

C1. Therefore, contingent reality requires an ultimate non-contingent (necessary) ground or else reality is brute and unintelligible at the deepest level.

P5. Treating the existence of all contingent reality as a brute fact undermines the metaphysical intelligibility presupposed by rational inquiry (the idea that reality is explainable in principle).

P6. Theism posits a necessary ground whose existence is not contingent and is therefore suited to terminate explanation non-arbitrarily.

C2. Therefore, theism provides a superior explanatory termination to atheistic naturalism, which must either accept brute contingency or fail to account for why anything exists.

Analogy

Suppose you enter a building and find every room lit, and every occupant tells you: “My room is lit because the room next to mine supplies power.” You can keep walking and hearing the same answer indefinitely.

Even if the chain extends without end, you have not explained why there is power at all. The explanatory question is not answered by an endless series of dependent transfers; it is answered only when you identify something that supplies power without receiving it from another such as an independent generator, a connection to a grid, or a source not itself dependent in the same way. Contingent beings are like those rooms: each may “pass on” explanation, but the entire system still calls for a ground that does not merely borrow existence.