The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument for God (Page 4)

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The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument for God

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From Before

Some forms the LCA can take:

1. The argument that asks, “Why does the physical universe exist?” and offers theism as an explanation.
2. The argument that asks “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and offers theism as an explanation. One weakness: Platonists believe that abstract objects (like numbers) exist independently of the mind and have necessary existence, and so Platonists won’t see the need for God as an explanation because Platonic abstract objects exist by the necessity of their own nature. If you’re not a Platonist though, this is potentially a good argument because “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is an excellent question and it seems to be the sort of thing that we should look for an explanation for.
3. The argument that asks, “Why do contingent things exist?” and offers theism as an explanation. This bypasses the problem of Platonism because abstract objects (like the number six) can’t cause anything, including contingent objects. This type of argument is also called “the argument from contingency.”

Let’s label the above three LCA arguments LCA 1, LCA 2, and LCA 3, respectively. In part 1 of the series I argued for a few versions of LCA 1, and in so doing I also argued for a form of the principle of sufficient reason (viz. “Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or an external cause”), an important and controversial part of the LCA. In this blog entry I’ll deal with the other two LCA varieties.

LCA 3

Yeah, I’m going kind of out of order, but that’s what you get when you read an article written by a maverick Christian (sometimes). For LCA 3 we can use the same sort of reasoning as LCA 1 except we replace the “physical universe” with the “totality of contingent things,” where we can call the “totality of contingent things” the “contingent universe” (if you’re wondering what the difference is between the contingent universe and the physical universe, the contingent universe would include contingent nonphysical entities like angels and souls if they exist). LCA 3 suggests that it’s possible for the contingent universe to not exist, i.e. that there is a possible worlds where no contingent thing exists. Thus, the contingent universe does not exist by the necessity of its own nature. We could justify that assertion with an argument from subtraction; upon reflection it seems there is a possible world where only a thousand contingent things exist, and it seems there is a possible world where only fifty contingent things exist etc. all the way down to zero contingent things existing. If nothing else, we can point out that it’s possible for the contingent universe to have had a different collection of contingent things it now has, similar to how our own physical universe could have had a different collection of fundamental physical units.

Beyond the argument from subtraction, there is one other thing to consider. It seems clear that there is no physical thing that exists necessarily, but one could propose that while there is no creative force that exists necessarily (like God), in all possible worlds there is a contingent thing. That is, it is necessary that some contingent thing or other exists, but there is no physical (or contingent) thing in particular that exists necessarily. One problem with this view: why is it that a contingent thing exists in every possible world? After all, on this view there’s no necessarily existing creative force to bring them about in every possible world. The proponent of this view would have to say that it’s inexplicable; it just happens to be the case that in every possible world there is a contingent thing. But the number of possible worlds is quite literally infinite; the odds that by chance there just happens to be a contingent thing in every possible world is infinitesimally small. That there is a possible world in which there is no contingent thing seems much more plausible than its denial.

Bringing out the whole argument more explicitly:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or an external cause.
2. The contingent universe exists.
3. If the contingent universe has an explanation for its existence, that explanation is God.
4. Therefore, the contingent universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1 and 2).
5. Therefore, the explanation of the contingent universe is God (from 3 and 4).

The physical universe (all of physical reality) is contingent, and since the physical universe is a subset of the contingent universe, the external cause of the contingent universe would have to be nonphysical. We can then employ the same sort of reasoning in LCA 1 to conclude that the nonphysical external cause of the contingent universe is a transcendent personal cause.

Further reasoning shows that the transcendent personal cause of the contingent universe is also metaphysically necessary (it exists in all possible worlds and cannot fail to exist) and eternal. If it’s possible that no contingent thing exist, you can’t sensibly appeal to a contingent thing to explain the contingent universe, because any contingent thing is part of the contingent universe, so it wouldn’t be an explanation for why the contingent universe exists as opposed to no contingent things existing. Similarly, one can’t say that the physical universe causing itself (as if by time travel) gives us an adequate explanation, because the entire causal-loop universe would (as a contingent thing) require explanation for its existence. But if no contingent thing can explain the existence of the contingent universe, the only hope left is to appeal to a necessarily existing entity. But then the explanation for the universe’s existence is also eternal, since at no time and in no circumstances can necessarily existing entities fail to exist. So we have an eternal, transcendent, metaphysically necessary, personal entity that is the external cause of the contingent universe. This sounds even more like God. Similar to the case of LCA 1, if the atheist insists that we can’t use God as any type of explanation (for whatever reason) or does not like God being a part of the third premise etc., we can tone down the argument a bit as follows:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or an external cause.
2. The contingent universe exists.
3. If the contingent universe has an explanation for its existence, that explanation is is an eternal, transcendent, metaphysically necessary, personal entity.
4. Therefore, the contingent universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1 and 2).
5. Therefore, the explanation of the contingent universe is an eternal, transcendent, metaphysically necessary, personal entity (from 3 and 4).

Once one grants the existence of an eternal, transcendent, metaphysically necessary personal entity as the cause of the universe, atheism becomes much less plausible to say the least. Arguably, any atheism that accepts the existence of an eternal, transcendent, metaphysically necessary personal entity that is the cause of the universe would not be worthy of the name “atheism.”

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The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument for God (Page 3)

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The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument for God

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The Argument (LCA 1A)

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or an external cause.
2. The universe exists.
3. If the universe does have an explanation for its existence, that explanation is God.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1 and 2).
5. Therefore, the explanation for the existence of the universe is God (from 3 and 4).

Justifying Premise 1: the PSR

This brings us to the premise that’s the most controversial: premise 1. Why think that “Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or an external cause”? Here I’ll borrow a bit from philosopher Richard Taylor’s illustration of finding a translucent ball in the woods. “How did it get there?” you ask. I reply, “There is no explanation for it being in the woods; the ball just exists inexplicably.” My response seems less plausible than the idea that there is some explanation for the ball’s existence. What if we enlarged the ball to the size of a car? Same problem: some explanation seems to be needed. How about a city? Same problem. A planet? Same problem. A galaxy? Same problem; increasing the size does nothing to remove the need for an explanation. How about if the ball were as big as the universe? Same problem. All things considered, it seems intuitively plausible that if a contingent thing exists, there is some reason why it exists, since it could have failed to exist.

One way a thing can have an explanation for its existence is to exist by the necessity of its own nature, but that isn’t an option for contingent things. The other way to explain why something exists is by reference to an external cause. But as far as the PSR is concerned, a thing that has an external cause as its explanation need not have begun to exist. For example, one idea is that the universe’s existence is being eternally sustained by God, similar to an eternal flutist eternally sustaining a note of music; God is the ground of all being and if God were to cease existing so would the universe. So the PSR does not require that contingent things begin to exist. That said, with the finite age of the known physical universe (among other considerations) it seems more likely to me that God created the universe as opposed to (merely) sustaining it in being.

Why do we need an external cause? Why not have an explanation from within, especially if the universe is infinitely old? While I think the universe is most likely of a finite age, not everybody agrees, especially atheists. With an infinitely old universe, we could conceive of each part of an infinitely long causal chain having an explanation for its existence, and one idea is that if we explain each individual element in the physical universe, then we explain the whole.

But this thinking commits the fallacy of composition, unjustifiably asserting something is true for the whole because it is true for the parts, e.g. because each part of an elephant is light in weight, therefore the whole elephant is light in weight. The fallacy in the case of explaining the universe reveals itself by considering the following scenario, borrowing largely from Leibniz’s illustration of copied geometry books. Suppose there have always been geometry books and that each geometry book has been copied from a previous book. So throughout the infinite past, there have been an infinite series of geometry books, each one copied from its predecessor. Although this is an explanation for each geometry book, it does not explain why we have an infinite series of geometry books rather than e.g. an infinite series of books on propositional logic, since that series of books could have been copied from eternity past as well, if geometry books could have. Nor does it explain why there is an infinite series of geometry books rather than no infinite series of books at all. Consequently, it does not explain the existence of the infinite series as a whole, even though it explains the existence of each individual book. That sort of thinking behind the infinite series of geometry books also applies to a physical universe with an infinitely long causal chain. Even though we have an explanation for each link in the chain, we can still ask why this infinite series exists rather than some other infinite series, and we can still ask why there exists an infinite series rather than no series at all. Explaining each part does not entail explaining the whole, and to think otherwise commits the fallacy of composition.

What about a causal-loop universe? One could argue that the universe has an internal cause of its existence in the sense of the universe causing itself, but that idea is metaphysically incoherent; for the universe to cause itself it would have to already exist. I know, time travel is a time-honored tradition of science fiction, but in the real world an agent going back in time to affect its own existence (say, a robot named Bob existing because it goes back in time to create itself) faces severe if not fatal problems (e.g. if such a thing were possible, it seems the aforementioned Bob the robot could also have gone back in time to destroy its younger self, thereby entailing that it doesn’t go back in time to destroy its younger self, thereby producing a self-contradictory state of affairs).

Still, suppose we believe that a causal-loop universe is metaphysically coherent. The causal-loop universe would itself be contingent and could have failed to exist, and the sort of problems affecting the infinitely causal chain afflict the causal-loop universe, in part because a causal-loop universe just is a specialized instance of an infinite past (albeit one that loops forever rather than a more linear infinite past). We can still ask why this particular circular causal chain exists rather than some other circular chain, and we can still ask why a circular causal chain exists rather than there being no such chain. Pointing to any component of the causal-loop universe (say, a time-travelling cause) won’t work to explain the universe’s existence because any such component is part of the very thing to be explained. It would be like trying to explain the existence of a circularly moving river (if such a thing were possible) by pointing to one half of the river in which water flows from that half to the other half of the river; this would do nothing to explain why the river as a whole exists rather than not (e.g. it wouldn’t explain why the river as a whole has water rather than there being no water to circulate). Similarly, pointing to any causal-flowing segment of a circularly-causal universe wouldn’t explain why the causal-loop universe as a whole exists rather than not.

Another way to look at premise 1 is that it’s the nature of rational inquiry to look for explanations for why things exist. We seek explanations for the existence of humans, of planets, of stars, and of galaxies. Avoiding all that and saying, “It all just exists inexplicably” would cripple science.

Challenging the PSR

Even if it is the nature of rational inquiry to look for explanations, a critic could say that this methodological aim to look for explanations doesn’t entail that explanations will always be found. A gold prospector might have the attitude of “Always look for gold” but that method doesn’t entail she will always find gold. So maybe not everything that exists has an explanation for its existence.

Maybe that’s true. In fact, maybe some things we think have explanations don’t have explanations at all. It’s logically possible (in the sense of not being self-contradictory) that the big bang theory is false and that the things that the big bang theory explains, like the cosmic microwave background radiation, simply exist with no explanation for their existence.

Still, that doesn’t seem to be the most rational way to go. The same holds true for a giant translucent ball (no matter how large it is). We should not exempt the universe from requiring an explanation if we have no good reason to do so, since it seems more rational to accept that there are explanations for the existence of things if we don’t have good reason to believe otherwise, especially if we have an explanation readily available and no evidence for the explanation being false. In regards to finding an explanation for the universe’s existence, if the only reason one rejects the proposed explanation in favor of “there is no explanation” is that one just doesn’t like the proposed explanation very much, it doesn’t seem like such a person has a good enough reason (imagine if someone rejected the big bang theory for that reason!). One could argue that, all things considered (the nature of rational inquiry etc.) we should accept PSR unless we have good reason to believe that it is false, including when it comes to the existence of the physical universe.

Another consideration is to imagine the shoe being on the other foot; if the best known explanation for the existence of the physical universe were devastating to theism instead of devastating to atheism, I suspect atheists would criticize a theist’s “the universe has no explanation” response, and they would be right to do so. The rational thing to do is to accept that there is an explanation for the existence of the universe if we don’t have good reason to think otherwise.

Do we have such a reason? Here’s the best atheist position I can think of. While contingent things that begin to exist require an explanation of their existence via an external cause, contingent things that exist eternally don’t necessarily have external causes and thus don’t necessarily require an explanation of their existence. Such contingent things exist eternally and inexplicably. The atheist can argue that the physical universe fits this category: it is contingent but eternal and doesn’t have an explanation of its existence.

The first thing to say is that it isn’t necessarily the case that if a contingent thing exists eternally that no explanation for its existence is needed. For example, suppose we humans learned of an eternally existing monument at the center of the universe that says, “I, the Lord thy God, am the sustainer of the universe and have sustained it throughout all eternity” (if questions of different languages bother you, imagine further that it displays this message through a kind of mechanical telepathy such that anybody who looks at the monument sees the message in her own language). A response like, “Well, the monument existed eternally, so no explanation is needed for why this monument exists” doesn’t seem convincing. Or to use a more decidedly nontheistic example, imagine a three-dimensional hologram projection that exists eternally and is also eternally sustained by a hologram projector. Even though the hologram exists eternally, we have an explanation for the hologram’s eternal existence. The hologram is contingent and it could have failed to exist, and there is an explanation readily available for why it exists rather than it not existing. With that in mind, suppose some contingent thing X meets the following conditions:

1. X is eternal but contingent (it could have failed to exist).
2. There is an explanation for why X exists .
3. It is the only explanation of X’s existence that is a live option.
4. There is no reason to believe that this explanation for X’s existence is false.

I think that if we know that all four conditions are met for thing X, then we should accept that explanation for X if we have no good reason not to. In considering these conditions it might also help to envisage the shoe being on the other foot. Suppose we had an explanation for the physical universe’s existence that was devastating to theism and the explanation met conditions 1 through 4 (it explains why the universe exists, there is no other viable explanation etc.). I have a hard time believing that atheists wouldn’t use this devastating-to-theism explanation as evidence against theism. Moreover, it seems they would be right to do so if their explanation for why the universe exists rather than not is the only viable explanation, there is no evidence against the explanation etc. But then rationality dictates we be consistent and recognize that a transcendent personal cause meeting these conditions poses a serious intellectual problem for atheism.

It’s possible that the atheist thinks there is a good reason to believe the transcendent personal cause explanation is false and thus that condition 4 is not met, though I have yet to see such a reason. In any case, it seems clear that for the atheist to rationally reject the explanation, some good reason will need to be given, i.e. the ball is in the atheist’s court. Such atheists don’t have to swing at the ball, but if they don’t, they’ll lose the game.

At the end of the day, the theist can grant for sake of argument that maybe some eternal contingent things don’t require explanations for their existence and still argue that all things considered (e.g. the four conditions mentioned earlier regarding eternal contingent things, and what would be rational to do if the shoe were on the other foot) we are rational to accept that the universe has an explanation of its existence, giving us this version of the LCA (call it LCA 1C):

1. If the universe exists it has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or an external cause.
2. The universe exists.
3. If the universe does have an explanation for its existence, that explanation is a transcendent personal cause.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1 and 2).
5. Therefore, the explanation for the existence of the universe is a transcendent personal cause (from 3 and 4).

If all three premises are rational and justified, we still have a conclusion that makes atheism considerably less plausible even with the weakened version of premise 1.

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The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument for God (Page 2)

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The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument for God

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The Argument (LCA 1A)

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or an external cause.
2. The universe exists.
3. If the universe does have an explanation for its existence, that explanation is God.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1 and 2).
5. Therefore, the explanation for the existence of the universe is God (from 3 and 4).

Justifying Premise 3

What about premise 3? That looks like it would be controversial, but it’s not as controversial as one might think. If the atheist believes the PSR is false with respect to the universe and that the universe has no explanation of its existence (which is perhaps the most popular atheist response to the LCA) then justifying premise 3 is relatively easy. Such an atheist believes the universe has no explanation of its existence, and thus believes that “If God does not exist then the universe has no explanation of its existence” is true. But “If God does not exist, then the universe has no explanation of its existence” is logically equivalent (to the point where one could prove it is so equivalent using symbolic logic) to “If the universe has an explanation of its existence, then God exists.” So if “If God does not exist, then the universe has no explanation of its existence” is true, then so is “If the universe has an explanation of its existence, then God exists,” which is almost synonymous with premise 3. In traditional theism, God is the external cause of the universe.

What if the atheist believes the PSR is true with respect to the universe and that the universe has an explanation of its existence? Beyond “there is no explanation for why the universe exists” being a very popular atheist response, there is good independent reason for thinking that “If God does not exist, then the universe has no explanation of its existence” is true. Why? Since the universe is all of physical reality, what explanation could there be for it if the PSR (premise 1) applies to the universe? We have two options: (1) the explanation of the universe lies in the necessity of its own nature; or (2) the universe has an external cause of its existence. First let’s examine option (1).

Physical reality doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that exists necessarily. There doesn’t appear to be any physical part of physical reality that is metaphysically necessary (e.g. stars and planets are contingent and indeed at one point they failed to exist; there are also no molecules that couldn’t fail to exist) and with that in mind consider the following argument from subtraction. Is a universe with only a thousand physical things possible? It seems so. How about a hundred? Sure. How about ten? How about five, four, three, two, and one? How about none? It seems like there is some possible world where no physical reality at all exists. (Notably, if nothing existed at all, this would fit in with the PSR since if literally nothing exists then there isn’t anything to explain.) The subtraction pattern, followed to its logical end, suggests that physical reality didn’t have to exist. One could claim that the subtraction pattern works all the way down to one physical thing existing (let’s label that one physical thing item #1) at which point no further subtraction is metaphysically possible. But since every physical thing is contingent including item #1, some justification is required to prevent this claim from being a mere ad hoc maneuver. If there is a possible world where no physical reality at all exists, then a fortiori there is a possible world where our own physical universe does not exist, in which case the explanation of the universe’s existence cannot lie in the necessity of its own nature because the universe does not have necessary existence.

Suppose though we grant that some type of physical reality or other must exist. There’s still the problem of explaining why this physical universe exists. Before explaining how that works, first some preliminaries. Let’s call the most basic, elementary stuff of physical reality (whether it be strings, quarks, some additional particles etc.) “fundamental units.” Let the Alice universe consist of only the fundamental units of Alice’s body and the Bob universe consist only of the fundamental units of Bob’s body. Both the Alice universe and the Bob universe seem to be possible worlds (think of the argument from subtraction; we could subtract everything but the fundamental units of Alice’s body etc.). The Alice universe consists of an entirely different set of fundamental units than the Bob universe; thus these are two different universes, just as two wooden sculptures would be different sculptures by each being made from a different tree. But then couldn’t the physical universe we live in (call it Kronos) similarly have had at least some of its fundamental units be different units? Couldn’t the universe have had a different set of such units? We can even conceive of a physical universe that has an entirely different set of fundamental units than Kronos (call this universe Rhea). The Alice and Bob universes have entirely different sets of fundamental units making them different universes, likewise Kronos and Rhea are different universes due to being composed of different fundamental units. So even if it were true by metaphysical necessity that some physical reality or other exist, it would still be the case that the Kronos universe is contingent (since the Rhea universe is also possible; indeed there even seem to be possible worlds with very different physical laws that don’t even have quarks, photons, etc.), in which case the PSR demands that the Kronos universe, being contingent, has an explanation of its existence that isn’t the necessity of its own nature.

With option (1) being untenable, let’s consider explanatory option (2): the universe having an external cause of its existence. If we go the explanatory route of some external cause of the universe, an external cause of all physical reality would have to be nonphysical, and there are only two sorts of things we know of that could fit requirement: abstract objects (like numbers) and unembodied minds (e.g. God, if he exists). But abstract objects can’t cause anything. So the only viable candidate for a nonphysical cause seems to be a personal cause. Among the pool of explanatory options considered (the universe existing by the necessity of its own nature, physical things causing the universe, abstract objects causing the universe, and a transcendent personal cause of the universe) a transcendent personal cause is by far the best explanation; indeed it is the only viable explanation among the entire pool. Thus we’re left with a transcendent personal cause of the universe if the universe has an explanation of its existence.

It bears remembering that if we grant that the universe has an explanation of its existence, the external cause of the universe cannot be a physical cause and must be nonphysical. This is quite notable, because if the correct explanation isn’t God creating the universe, it would have to be something no less strange than that (e.g. another sort of unembodied mind or a quartet of unembodied minds). But when discussing a nonphysical external cause, the only live options for nonphysical entities were abstract objects and unembodied minds, and the critic could say maybe there’s a third sort of nonphysical thing that nobody has ever even thought of (the critic gives no details as to what this cryptic nonphysical thing could be apart from it being neither an abstract object nor a mind and it somehow causing the physical universe) and perhaps this sort of unknown nonphysical thing being the external cause of the universe is an even better explanation of the universe’s existence than a transcendent personal cause. One problem with that response: the bare possibility of an unknown alternate explanation seems insufficient. Suppose for example I meet an evolutionary biologist and I say we should not accept evolution as an explanation. The biologist asks me for a better causal explanation for the diversity of life we see, and I reply maybe there’s a possible cause that nobody’s ever thought of (I give no details beyond this cause being physical and not evolution) that is both the actual cause and a better explanation than evolution. The evolutionist will rightly see this as insufficient grounds for rejecting the evolutionary explanation. Similarly, the bare possibility of some unknown alternative is insufficient for rejecting the explanation of a transcendent personal cause. The idea that there is some other sort of nonphysical entity that nobody’s ever thought of that can create universes is not a viable option if the only thing one can describe of it is that it’s not an unembodied mind nor an abstract object. If that were enough to qualify for a viable explanation, then we have also have a viable alternative explanation to evolution (an unknown physical cause that is not evolution causing various data that evolution explains). All things considered, “If the universe does have an explanation for its existence, that explanation is a transcendent personal cause” is more plausible than its denial.

If I were an atheist, I would believe “If the universe does have an explanation for its existence, that explanation is a transcendent personal cause” is true and to avoid the conclusion I would instead believe that the universe just exists inexplicably and eternally with no external cause of its existence. Would a transcendent personal cause of the universe prove theism true with absolute certainty? No, but knowing that there is a transcendent personal cause of the physical universe would make atheism much less plausible. All things considered then, “If God does not exist, then the universe has no explanation of its existence” seems very likely true, which thus gives us very strong grounds for accepting premise 3.

Still, if the atheist insists that God is not a legitimate explanation (for whatever reason) or that the justification still isn’t good enough for the third premise (despite “If God does not exist, then the universe has no explanation of its existence” apparently giving us such justification to believe premise 3) we can bypass these concerns and construct the following argument instead (call it LCA 1B).

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or an external cause.
2. The universe exists.
3. If the universe does have an explanation for its existence, that explanation is a transcendent personal cause.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1 and 2).
5. Therefore, the explanation for the existence of the universe is a transcendent personal cause (from 3 and 4).

The conclusion isn’t “God exists,” but as I noted earlier, that there is a transcendent personal cause of the physical universe would still make atheism considerably less plausible.

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