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"The traditional procedure of inferring a necessary being fom contingent beings held to be in no way involved in the necessary being which was supposed to explain them was self-contradictory and a chief cause of skepticism and atheism. The absurdity of denying a first cause lies precisely in the implication that contingent predicates inhere only in contingent subjects, that accidents happen only to the accidental. The absurdity is avoided only by regarding accidents as contingent phases of the life of a Being as in essential reality not accidental but the necessary recipient of all accidents, the non-alternative medium of all open alternatives. To make the contingent being merely contingent, and the necessary being merely necessary, is to evade the essential question: how are they together one reality? 'The contingent-and-the-necessary' must form some sort of whole (all reality, all that is what it is whether human beings know what it is or not) and this whole cannot be exclusively contingent or exclusively necessary. Nor can it be less than God, the supreme cause, but, for that very reason, also the supreme effect; the one being who (in his essence) has always been and always will be involved in all causation, and equally the one being who (in his accidents) always has been and always will be enriched by every effect, garnered without loss in his loving omniscience" ("Cause," An Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Vergilius Ferm, pp. 134 f.). 

"...dollars, for example, are accidents in the world, not only because there was a time when there were none, but because it is in some sense the same world or the same 'existence,' which now contains and once did not contain dollars, and therefore the self-identity of existence or of the world-as-such is independent of dollars ...Contingency is that union of diversity and identity which is involved in the very idea of change or of succession.

"Now the above analysis also explains what necessary existence may be. The ultimate identity of existence, which contingently includes all things within itself, does not in this fashion include itself, the identity, as a contingent item. This identity is, and it 'is' in another fashion than ordinary things, for it alone is not contingent, --if contingency is what we have above supposed. Now you may assume that there is contingency in some entirely different sense back of the identity of existence, but what faintest reason is there for this verbal leap in the dark?" ("The Formal Validity and Real Significance of the Ontological Argument," pp.239 f.).