In order to provide a handy topical overview and linkset to the ongoing series of progressing metaphysical argument (which in my own past experience establishes the foundation of Christian universalism via orthodox trinitarian theism), I have created this series of “Overview” threads. Each comment will link to a particular series of entries, and will provide a quick topical description of that series.
This thread topically summarizes and links to the series of entries for Section One: How Should I Be A Sceptic. In this Section, I cover a number of preliminary positions, presented as a set of field-leveling arguments to help forestall various objections before I begin my positive argument. A strong secondary goal is to find as many positions I can agree with, among as wide a field of thinkers as possible; so that at the end of the volume, as many people as possible (among atheists, agnostics, polytheists, pantheists, and supernaturalistic theists) will still be on board while yet holding to their own beliefs. This is the second-longest of the five Sections, by the way.
New entries and links will be added below with the establishment of each new series of entries. Summary topical descriptions of each series, however, will be withheld until that particular series is finished.
Each series of entries represents a chapter or (far more likely) part of a chapter from the original SttH text composition. Chapter designations will be provided as I go along.
(wave at Jeff!); even simple math statements would be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; reasons deploying or appealing to an infinite regression (such as against Christianity or atheism being true) would also be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; also, inf-reg proposals end up necessarily implying a final explanatory fact after all; turtles all the way down (for example) must be turtles all the way down and not even possibly explainable in terms of something else more fundamentally basic; an infinite regress must be self-existently what it is and there is an end to it; but that’s an Independent Fact, not an infinite regress; infinite regressors must make tacit exception against infinite regression being true, even to try to seriously propose or appeal to it as true; the IF (including any supposed ‘infinite regression’) cannot be explainable by further appeal to something else; a deployment of this concept by philosophical naturalists against a too-simple supernaturalistic argument; the too simple supernat argument tacitly assumes that anything we can ask the question of origin about, must have an origin instead of being self-existent; naturalists rightly complain that this leads to an infinite regression unless the too-simple supernaturalist cheats in his own favor; no escape for infinite regression by this route either: how did infinite regression “come to exist”?; we end up, whichever way we go, explicitly or implicitly requiring the existence of an ultimate Fact that is not dependent on anything else, and so is not caused by anything else; infinite regressor complains that uncaused cause is contradiction, thus no worse than his own position; uncaused causation may in fact be self-contradictory proposal; self-causing causation, however, is not; the principle difference between privative and positive aseity; at least one non-contradictory option, therefore; (but leaving aside final decision between privative and positive aseity until later); various ways different philosophies agree with existence of an Independent Fact; but how far can they be in agreement with each other?