lg,
In the usual order if they are the same entity, but in your analogy you are making them seperate, i.e. eternal fire with eternal smoke being contingent on the fire. What I am saying is that is impossible. Rather, the smoke is merely a product of the fire, contingent yes, but not a separate eternal entity.
huh?
feel free to indicate anything that doesn't possess a relationship of oneness and difference with its potencies/characteristics ...
(of course you can't since the very act of identifying anything is the act of attributing significance to its potencies/characteristics)
Gee, I cannot understand how you repeatedly twist everything I say into something entirely different. I have not said anything like that at all. It is given that something eternal must exist otherwise we could not be here. If something is the effect of a cause then the cause must precede the effect. In our discussion the contingent entity is the effect. We agreed that something eternal cannot have a cause/beginning and in this example clearly cannot be an effect.
Its quite simple
If you are saying that the possession of (any) characteristics/potencies disqualifies a given thing from being eternal, you are effectively saying that nothing can be eternal since
all things possess characteristics/potencies.
IOW if an eternal thing didn't have some sort of potency, it could not even be identified ... much less assume a role at the top of a chain of cause and effect (after all, in the absence of potencies, what could possibly cause an effect?)
Following from that we can see that a contingent entity cannot be eternal.
Following this, you are stating that an eternal thing cannot have any constant contingent potencies ... which makes it a non-object
I really don't care and it is not relevant to the issue. The issue is the relationship between two eternal entities and my assertion that one of them cannot be contingent on the other.
Its
completely relevant to the topic. I am genuinely surprised that you can't comprehend that the identification of any object/entity requires that there be some contingent potency ..... what to speak of your claiming that such a relationship of contingency is impossible, it is
integral to the act of
any object/entity being identified. The fact that an object is given or claimed to be eternal doesn't change this absolute requirement of identification/existence.
Not surprising since that isn't the issue in hand.
its precisely what you are trying to clarify a few posts down
Or put another way any dependent/contingent condition requires at least a moment of time to propagate, i.e. there is a start point which excludes the classification of eternal.
:shrug:
You are way off the point again. The properties and characteristics of the entity are what comprise the entity, and the entity we are discussing is eternal, a black box concept. I am not discussing the inside of the black box. Seperate to this black box we can consider other enternal black boxes.
fine
let's talk of an eternal black box
would you expect blackness and being box shaped to be eternal contingent qualities of it?
In your analogy eternal fire is an eternal black box and smoke is another eternal black box. My entire point is to show that that is incorrect. The smoke is merely a characteristic/property of the fire black box and not a seperate entity, and in this case the smoke is contingent on the fire.
If you had a fire that didn't emanate smoke heat and light you wouldn't have a fire to begin with (Maybe it would be an eternal fire like visualization or something) ... much like if you had an eternal black box that was yellow and circular shaped, you would have something other than an eternal black box.
No most definitely NOT. There is very clearly a cause and effect relationship between the effects, i.e. there is dictinct moments between cause and effects ensuring that the effects cannot be considered eternal, they are merely resultant attributes of the phenomenon.
Returning to your original statement:
Here the smoke cannot be eternal since it is an effect of the fire or a characteristc of the fire, it is clearly contingent but not seperate.
the very act of labeling something "contingent" means it doesn't enjoy a relationship of separation
If the universe is eternal, and we have nothing to indicate it is not since we are here, then it cannot be the effect of another eternal entity or contingent upon it since an effect cannot be eternal.
this paragraph doesn't even begin to make sense.
Its not clear how calling upon the yard stick of our own existence (at least from the reductionist school that you no doubt champion the cause for) is sufficient to indicate that there is nothing to indicate that the universe is not eternal ..... and even less how this rules out the universe being contingent on any greater cause
But what is the "other eternal element" that you have not described and why is it necessary if the universe is already eternal?
In the same way that an analysis of smoke is not sufficient to draw all the parralells met by the existence of fire (IOW an analysis of smoke indicates that it is contingent on a greater cause .... even though both the smoke and the greater cause participate in an identical temporal sphere - ie where one exists, you find the other)
