How do you know that either Dr Bonnette or Joseph Noonan exist to decide which one might be playing with words?

Because being is on the side of reality; non-being is not.

The coming-to-be and continuance of being needs a positive sufficient reason.

Non-being does not even, properly speaking, "come to be."

So the PhD in Thomist Philosophy doesn't have a better understanding of Thomist Philosophy vs an ignorant pleb who clearly never studied classic Philosophy or Metaphysics?

Seriously dude? Ask a sensible question next time.

How do you know you are not the one just playing with words?

Joseph Noonan

Again, you are exposing yourself to the accusation that ontologically and epistemologically you are not a well-placed speaker when you table:

...the power required to create something out of nothing would be undefined, not infinite.

You are WRONG (again)

A zeroth length spring's "power" is well defined: it has zero potential energy.

Both you and Bonnette are lost-in-the-woods. (this is obvious).

Hi Joseph Noonan, existential inertia is true only if it is re-defined in an unusual way as “something that existing will continue to exist only if the conditions sustaining its existence continue to be present/fulfilled”. For example, think of the case of an observer observing your reflected image “in” the mirror. Your mirror image’s observed existence is partly dependent on the continuous presence of you in front of the mirror. That image’s existence is CONTINUOUSLY sustained by your presence in front of the mirror. When you are gone from the mirror, your image in that mirror would also be gone (it can no longer be observed by that observer). Other than God, the existence of everything else that exists needs to to CONTINUOUSLY SUSTAINED. In this sense everything else other than God lacks existential existence as defined in the usual way.

>You are really just playing with words, not realities.

Joseph is doing that shamelessly.

I admire yer passion Dr B to try to educate the willfully ignorant.

But I am afraid Joseph's kneejerk response will be to repeat van Inwagen and Bennett's criticism of the Rationalist version of the PSR and keep pretending it applies to the Neo Scholastic One.

I don't know how a thinking being can conclude any Necessary Being can be anything but the sole reason for itself? That is what it is by definition.
If Necessary being A is the reason for being B then by definition being B much be contingent. If B where necessary then A and B are the same being otherwise it is incoherent.

He is in effect arguing we can have a married bachelor by saying take a bachelor and marry him to somebody and BAM he is a married bachelor. No he is an ex-bachelor.

He doesn't know Intelligibility vs Logical entailment from a hole in the head. Why? Because he cannot accept his "killer" argument is a non-starter.

Cheers Doc.

Since you don't seem to grasp the point of the examples I gave to you, let me put this in terms of being.

You should at least be able to understand that to take some being B (a being with certain qualities) and make it into a greater being A (a being with those qualities plus some more) requires some power, defined as the ability to make or do something.

The comparison of one "amount" of power to another can be seen if we hypothesize taking an even lesser being C (a being with even fewer qualities than being B) and make it into a greater being A, since the "distance" from C to A is "greater" than the distance from B to A, that is, the power needed to account for more new qualities of existence would be greater than the power needed to account for fewer new qualities of existence.

You can see that this line of reasoning can be extended back to beings D, E, F, G, etc., where each lesser being is such because it has even fewer qualities of existence compared to being A. By this means we can speak of greater power being needed as the being which is being made into being A becomes less and less in possession of the qualities of existence.

Then, we may ask, what power would be required if we had no lesser being at all to work with in order to make being A? Since non-being has no relation whatever to being A, there would be no limiting principle against which to measure the power required to produce being A. And yet, real causal power would be required, since being A does not explain itself, that is, it is not its own sufficient reason for existing.

Since there is no limit against which to measure this active power needed to produce any being when there is no presupposed "something" from which to produce it, the power needed to explain its existence cannot be measured at all, that is, it has no limiting principle.

This means that the power needed to act as the sufficient reason for the whole existence of any being must be infinite. If it is its own sufficient reason, then it must itself be the all-powerful God. If it is not its own sufficient reason for being, then it takes the all-powerful God to create it and to sustain it in existence.

>The problem here is that I could just as easily say that the sufficient reason of a being's continuing to exist is the lack of a sufficient reason for its ceasing to exist.

Which would make sense if Dr. B was advocating for the Rationalist PSR but he is presupposing the Scholastic version and that claim above is not intelligible. The PSR we accept again states "“there is a sufficient reason or adequate necessary objective explanation for the being of whatever is and for all attributes of any being”. A lack of existence is a lack of being and needs no explanation because there is nothing to explain. You are treating "non-existence" as some "anti-Being" substance here and it is comically wrong.

>You are instead trying to argue that the sufficient reason for a being's ceasing to exist is the lack of a sufficient reason for its continued existence.

Contingent being needs something to continue its existence by definition. Necessary being not at all by definition. To claim otherwise is not intelligible. Creation is a set of things that are contingent that by definition at the bottom need something necessary. Which we take to be God. Not some overly anthropomorphic magic being you imagine. The God of Natural Theology is more like the Form of the Good not the Theistic Personalist "deity" you disbelieve in. We are also Atheists toward that god.

>But how do you determine which is correct? The PSR gives you no reason to pick one over the other.

It is not intelligible to claim. the PSR in any form applies to non-being.

>On the contrary, I think existential inertia does a much better job capturing the intuition that positive causes give rise to positive effects.

Rather they render all reality unintelligible.

>Under existential inertia, any change requires a positive cause, while a lack of change (the negation of an effect) simply requires the lack of any cause for change.

Sorry but a lack of change is not real change at best it is Cambridge change. A lack of change is an example of stasis and doesn't require change.

> Under your view, however, it is the lack of change (continued existence) that requires a cause and a change (ceasing to exist) which does not.

Nope that is not our view at all. Try again.