Yarr! – The Weblog of Bob Heffernan

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking recently about one of my favourite arguments in favour of the existence of God. It’s called the Argument from Dependency. In a certain sense it’s a refinement of the often cited Argument from Causality (sometimes called the Kalem Argument). The Argument from Dependency may be stated as follows:

• Premises
  • If something exists it must be dependent or independent.
  • It is impossible for everything to be dependent.
  • Therefore, if something exists there must exist an independent thing.
  • Something exists.
• Conclusion
  • If all four premises are true then there exists an independent thing.

I’ll leave it at that for the time being. I’ll discuss the argument over the next few days, try and justify the premises and my conclusion and, more importantly, talk about the nature of this ‘independent thing’.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2004 at 23:27 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.