So a few months ago, I released an episode on the best argument for God's existence from the

perspective of 50 Catholic apologists. This was a follow-up to evangelical Sean McDowell,

who asked 100 Christian apologists the same question. My results were somewhat different than

Sean's. So he had me on his show recently to talk about it, and I thought it'd be fun for

today's Free For All Friday to share that conversation with you because I try to find as many ways as I can to have

a good dialogue with our non-Catholic brothers and sisters. So I hope that this edifies you. And

yeah, I just hope you have a really great weekend. Well, I want to get into

some of what you found in your survey, but let me just pause right here. Given that you're the

only one who said contingency and you're one of five Catholics that I interviewed for my survey,

I suspect that maybe a good chunk of my audience is not familiar with the contingency argument.

So maybe just kind of sum up what it is and maybe why you chose that one.

Sure.

So I think when many Christians think of the cosmological argument for the existence of God.

Now, we should also preface here, cosmological means universe or creation.

Really, we should say the cosmological arguments for the existence of God, because there's a whole

family of arguments that are focused on the universe as a whole as being evidence for God's existence.

And I think many Christians, when they think of the cosmological argument, they think of the question, okay, well, where did the universe come from? What explains the beginning of the universe? And so that's a very common way for a layperson to approach the argument. And that's summarized well in the Kalam cosmological argument. But the contingency argument says, look, even if the universe had no

beginning, even if it had always existed, we would still ask the question, why is there a universe

instead of nothing at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? And there are many

different forms of the contingency argument, but I think one that works well, it just starts with saying, because some versions say, well, the universe could not have existed. So what explains it? And people might say, well, maybe the universe is necessary. Well, you know, I don't, I don't buy that, that it has to exist. But you can start by saying, look, there are at least contingent objects. There are things around here that, you know, did not have to exist.

We can, there are a few collection of contingent objects. Well, why do they exist? Well, you could go back

there. You go back with a chain that goes back. And from there, you either get an infinite regress

...