The A-Unicornist

The modal cosmological argument, or MCA, deals with the concepts of necessity and contingency. I'll leave more formalized versions for your reference here and here. For this post, it'll be sufficient to summarize it as follows:

Something that could exist in a different state or fail to exist at all is contingent, in that its state of existence must be explained by something else, such as another contingent thing. For example, a chair is a contingent object. It could have different properties (i.e., be a different type of chair) or not exist at all. It was brought into existence by something else, such as a carpenter. There can't be an infinite regress of contingent things, otherwise the existence of the contingent set is not explained.Therefore, the existence of the contingent set must be explained an entity whose existence is explained by its own necessity.  There's a lot of nuance in these arguments that is beyond the depth of this post — the semantics of 'necessa…

Friendly Atheist has had some coverage of Ken Ham (of Answers in Genesis and Creation Museum fame) and his organization's new Young-Earth Creationism monstrosity, the $100-million+ Ark Encounter. They took quite a few pics from inside the 'replica', but these in particular caught my attention:


Basically this is saying that prior to the Flood, God didn't 'permit' humans or animals to eat meat. Let's set aside for a moment the oddity of suggesting that animals had the ability to understand and violate divine moral commandments and think instead about their anatomy. Essentially this implies that God either a) changed animals' anatomy while they were on the Ark, or b) changed it after the Flood. Because as any trivially educated person knows, animals aren't carnivorous (or not) because they decide to be, but because their biology mandates it to be.

Here's what gets me: if you're just going to say that God magically changes animals' anatomy a…