They don’t repudiate the concept. Read the quotes I provided.

Hume has this to say:

But further, why may not the material universe be the necessarily existent Being, according to this pretended explication of necessity? We dare not affirm that we know all the qualities of matter; and for aught we can determine, it may contain some qualities, which, were they known, would make its non-existence appear as great a contradiction as that twice two is five. I find only one argument employed to prove, that the material world is not the necessarily existent Being: and this argument is derived from the contingency both of the matter and the form of the world. "Any particle of matter," it is said Dr. Clarke, "may be conceived to be annihilated; and any form may be conceived to be altered. Such an annihilation or alteration, therefore, is not impossible." But it seems a great partiality not to perceive, that the same argument extends equally to the Deity, so far as we have any conception of him; and that the mind can at least imagine him to be non-existent, or his attributes to be altered. It must be some unknown, inconceivable qualities, which can make his non-existence appear impossible, or his attributes unalterable: And no reason can be assigned, why these qualities may not belong to matter. As they are altogether unknown and inconceivable, they can never be proved incompatible with it. — Hume

Both Kant and Hume are in agreement with what I’ve said: necessity can be asserted about things; the assertion may not be right, but there isn’t a logical problem with making it.

Temporality and causality... interaction.

Transcendence: you can’t find God as an object in the world.

Immanence: he’s that which gives everything its being.

The concepts are clear.

Necessary means can’t not exist. If an object such as a pen exists you can make it so it no longer exists, i.e. it isn’t necessary.

Possibility, existence, and necessity nobody has ever yet been able to explain without being guilty of manifest tautology, when the definition has been drawn entirely from the pure understanding. For the substitution of the logical possibility of the conception—the condition of which is that it be not self-contradictory, for the transcendental possibility of things—the condition of which is that there be an object corresponding to the conception, is a trick which can only deceive the inexperienced. — Kant

He explicitly says above that necessity is a logical possibility; his problem is that it can’t be found in experience (and so can’t really be known), but then, as he also says, neither can contingency.

(happy to provide references, if you're genuinely interested). — Seppo

Please actually, if you’re willing.

You mentioned temporality in respect to interaction. It wasn’t hand-waving; the concepts are clear.

Necessary means can’t not exist. It doesn’t follow from something existing that it’s necessary.

You didn’t mention any other issues, just the one about interaction.

“It is in the nature of a triangle to have 3 sides. Given that a triangle exists, it necessarily has 3 sides.”

“It is in the nature of God to exist. Given that he exists, he exists necessarily.”

You didn’t mention any other issues.

Necessity is something you can assert about things. To say something is necessary is just to say it can’t not exist; you might be wrong in making that assertion, but it isn’t nonsense.

The Christian story and other accounts of gods becoming human draw some of their relevance from this. It’s fair to think that God would be impersonal and incomplete if not for experiencing creation from a human perspective.

The idea is that he’s transcendent and immanent, as in beyond any instance of a particular thing, while being that which gives everything its being; in that sense he’s always interacting with everything.

Necessity isn’t nonsensical; it just means can’t not exist. Omnipotence understood as every power that exists - like the power heat has to boil water - coming from God also seems reasonable.

If you like Edward Feser he has a blog post about this: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2016/04/craig-on-divine-simplicity-and-theistic.html?m=1

And the aspect of classical theism that Davies emphasizes throughout the book is its commitment to the doctrine of divine simplicity, together with such implications of that doctrine as the theses that God is immutable, that he is timeless, that he is not a particular instance of some general kind of thing, and so forth.

What makes someone a “theistic personalist” as opposed to a classical theist, then (as I read Davies), is essentially that he either explicitly denies the doctrine of divine simplicity, or that he at least implicitly denies it by virtue of denying God’s immutability, or claiming that God is an instance of a kind, etc.

As I remember, a criticism Hart makes of the theistic personalist view is essentially that on those terms God’s existence relies on some undefined absolute, which would on examination be the God of classical theism.

I haven’t read that book, but my thinking is influenced by the kinds of things I’ve heard him say in the discussions I’ve listened to, which fit with what you’ve described in your quoted response there.

And it’s actually from what Oppy has to say about chance that I don’t think something from nothing is necessarily impossible. He calls chance a brute contingency: A and B are possibilities, A happens instead of B and there’s no explanation why (because if there was it wouldn’t be a chance occurrence). So it strikes me that if chance is real then it’s an example of something coming from nothing, and it’s happening all the time.

Is it? They don’t go in circles like a clock does; they keep ascending from 0 and left alone they never go back to the beginning.

You’re right, but does the contradiction make impossible an infinite past or just an infinite stopwatch? I’d say the latter, since a stopwatch doesn’t run in cycles so its count necessarily has a beginning.

Earlier in the thread I gave this response to the clock example:

It’s necessarily impossible to say what time it would show, precisely because it’s an infinite clock. If you saw it and it read 12 o’clock then the explanation for that would be that it said 11 o’clock an hour ago and 10 o’clock the hour before that, and there would be nothing more to it. — AJJ

It strikes me that in neither case (the planets and the clock) is there a logical problem. It’s just that there are things missing or that you can’t do given the nature of infinity.

I’m not sure I’d call it absurd, because what you’re identifying again is simply that there isn’t a total to be added to, which given an infinite past is necessarily so. We can still say that one planet does so many orbits per year and the other does this many; in this light the lack of a grand total for each seems something to be accepted as necessary and unimportant.

Speed one up all you like. I’m saying talk of them doing the same number of orbits assumes finitude - if they’ve been going forever there is no total number of orbits to compare. The most you could say is that, given any stretch of time within that infinity, one planet has invariably done more orbits than the other.

Talk of totals assumes finitude - to say the planets total the same number of orbits you need finite numbers to compare; instead it seems right to say that one planet has always done more orbits than the other; it’s only if they were finite that at any point they could have done the same number.

Sure

Necessity is an explanation you can assert for an infinite universe.

Brute contingency is something you can assert for a universe from nothing.

Both explanations preclude any further explanation.

I’ve taken infinite to mean it’s always existed.

Always existed goes with necessity.
Came from nothing goes with brute contingency.

It isn’t the workings of the universe I’m talking about, but the possible reasons why it exists (which encompass the two possibilities mentioned in the OP).

Dissatisfaction

I don’t mind those explanations; I was just preempting others’ feelings towards them.

I called the hard rock either necessity (something that can’t not exist) or a brute contingency (something that might not have existed but it does and there’s no further explanation). They might not seem like satisfying explanations, but in neither case is there a gap.

I’m not sure where we’re disagreeing now. I don’t particularly think that there’s a reality we can’t “reach”.

Yeah, that’s what happens when something is referred to as necessary. It can’t not exist and the explanation stops there; if you give any further explanation then the thing is no longer necessary, but contingent upon the explanation being given. “It’s necessary” or “it’s a brute contingency” is the rock bottom.

at some point you just don't wanna go deeper because hard rock has been hit. — Raymond

This is basically what I’m getting at, except that at some point you just can’t go any further, and if you did you’d be going forever. For what it’s worth I’m not an atheist either.

To say something is necessary (it can’t not exist) is an explanation - it’s the same one that gets applied to God.

Concerning just the foundation of being I agree with Oppy that God isn’t any more illuminating as an explanation than asserting that there’s some necessary aspect of the universe.

This infinite series of universes would still have no reason or explanation for its existence. — Down The Rabbit Hole

Graham Oppy (philosopher of religion) makes the point that whatever world view you hold you always wind up with something brute at the foundation of it all. The 3 explanations you have are a necessary God, a necessary universe, or a universe that is a brute contingency. I don’t think any of those options are absurd; they just make it clear that whatever explanations you choose they terminate somewhere.

It’s necessarily impossible to say what time it would show, precisely because it’s an infinite clock. If you saw it and it read 12 o’clock then the explanation for that would be that it said 11 o’clock an hour ago and 10 o’clock the hour before that, and there would be nothing more to it.

To say existence is necessary rules out any further explanation—if something can’t not exist then that just is the explanation for its existence. Once explanation runs out in this way you can just as well posit brute contingency: existence might not have been but it just is and there’s no explanation.

I expect desire is going to be characterised as being itself a kind of thought. Perhaps it’s right to say that all thoughts generate actions unless prevented by another thought; an action happens when a thought generates no opposing thoughts.

This actually lends itself to another conception of free will that I’m sympathetic to: freedom isn’t found in the ability to make choices, but in making the *right* choices. On this account we’re free when those thoughts that generate our actions are the “right thoughts”, but this assumes other stuff. On a materialist account of things what you say might be right.

What would you say accounts for some thoughts generating actions and others not?

Your thoughts initiate your deliberate actions, whether the thoughts be fully conscious or subconscious. — Paul Michael

I think this is the problem, and it’s even in the language you’ve used: our thoughts might be given to us, but our “deliberate actions” come from us. We have a thought to do one thing and a thought to do another; options and a choice.

You be you.

You’re agreeing with and providing support for rhetoric spoken by Mussolini.

Liberty and individual growth in behalf of the state. Freedom a concession of the state. A “Fascist concept of liberty”. It isn’t that broad.

It’s not that broad.

The Mussolini quote describes your own view. Paxton’s book emphasises a feature of fascism that we’re finding in rhetoric such as yours.