Yes infinite material regress is nonsense because it is trapped within the law of identity. It requires eternal binary distinction.
Christianity and science both start with a singular nature . The unmoved mover that can create binary but is not ontologically binary.
As far empirical explanation goes that stops when all matter energy and physics is unified into a spaceless timeless Infinite One.
All I’m suggesting is that any speculation past that point is unknowable by definition. The Singularity is the unmoved mover epistemologically speaking.
I'm happy to see that my comment inspired an infinite chain of chickens.
On the topic of infinite regress in explanations, I'd love to see you interact with Pavel Florensky, specifically Letter Two: Doubt in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth.
I’d love to see whether you think some of this logic could be applied to the sharp distinction one might make between a necessary foundation and the contingent things built from it.
Suppose there is a necessary foundation (perhaps something like your energy field example), together with necessary laws governing its behavior. In that case, what appears contingent at higher levels (chickens, planets, people) might instead be entailed by the interaction of more fundamental necessities, much as the properties of a triangle follow necessarily from non-triangular things once the relevant structure is in place.
On that picture, the explanatory work is done neither by a circular regress nor by the chicken itself, but by a necessary underlying reality whose nature entails increasingly complex structures. The key question would then seem to be whether the distinction between the necessary foundation and the apparently contingent world is as sharp as it first appears
We do have that unexplainable thing. The BB singularity.
And that would be more expected than a self-explained singularity, right?
Yes infinite material regress is nonsense because it is trapped within the law of identity. It requires eternal binary distinction.
Christianity and science both start with a singular nature . The unmoved mover that can create binary but is not ontologically binary.
As far empirical explanation goes that stops when all matter energy and physics is unified into a spaceless timeless Infinite One.
All I’m suggesting is that any speculation past that point is unknowable by definition. The Singularity is the unmoved mover epistemologically speaking.
I'm happy to see that my comment inspired an infinite chain of chickens.
On the topic of infinite regress in explanations, I'd love to see you interact with Pavel Florensky, specifically Letter Two: Doubt in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth.
I’d love to see whether you think some of this logic could be applied to the sharp distinction one might make between a necessary foundation and the contingent things built from it.
Suppose there is a necessary foundation (perhaps something like your energy field example), together with necessary laws governing its behavior. In that case, what appears contingent at higher levels (chickens, planets, people) might instead be entailed by the interaction of more fundamental necessities, much as the properties of a triangle follow necessarily from non-triangular things once the relevant structure is in place.
On that picture, the explanatory work is done neither by a circular regress nor by the chicken itself, but by a necessary underlying reality whose nature entails increasingly complex structures. The key question would then seem to be whether the distinction between the necessary foundation and the apparently contingent world is as sharp as it first appears