A Christmas Gift from William Lane Craig: 5 Lumps of Coal

William Lane Craig has written a short piece, A Christmas Gift for Atheists -- Five Reasons Why God Exists, for Fox News in which he suggests that atheists wish nothing more than to believe in his morally stunted magical sky-man. So he offers a Christmas Miracle, evidence that the magical sky-man exists.

For atheists, Christmas is a religious sham. For if God does not exist, then obviously Jesus’ birth cannot represent the incarnation of God in human history, which Christians celebrate at this time of year.

If there is one thing that distinguishes Craig from other Christian apologists, it is his intellectual fraudulence. OK, so that doesn’t really distinguish him from lots of others, but he is a fraud. He’s smart enough to know exactly why what he’s saying is dishonest, but he says it anyway. First, Craig knows that most atheists don’t think of Christmas as having any religious significance whatsoever and, a fortiori, do not see it as a religious sham. In this atheists are like 100% of the people I saw at the Wal-Mart Tuesday night, Christmas Eve, stripping the shelves to keep their toy-hungry kids satiated for a few weeks. Wal-Mart shoppers are fairly religious as Americans go; they just don’t see any connection between the secular celebration of Christmas and the supposed birth of the incarnation of their magical sky-man. Second, Craig knows that there is no evidence that Jesus was born in late December. He knows that Christmas is just a pagan holiday, Saturnalia, adapted by the Christians so that Romans would feel comfortable joining their religion. And if the story of divine incarnation in the gospels is inaccurate, then we have no reason to trust that there even was a divine incarnation at all (especially given the more extreme nature of the claim). The only religious sham here, then, is that perpetrated by religious cognoscenti who know better but let those Christians innocently believe that their savior was actually born on December 25th. Instead he pretends that the Christians are just reasonably choosing this arbitrary time to celebrate the purported event. Of course, there is no legitimate historical evidence for the birth of their savior at all, at any time, but that won’t stop Craig. In short, atheists do not see Christmas as a religious event, sham or not, but Craig is perfectly willing to let Christians have false, or unjustified, beliefs about Christmas if it keeps them safely in the Christian fold.

However, most atheists, in my experience, have no good reasons for their disbelief. Rather they’ve learned to simply repeat the slogan, “There’s no good evidence for God’s existence!”

“Most atheists.” I see. Does Craig have statistics on atheists’ lack of reasons? Obviously not. But even if they have reasons, no doubt Craig would not count these as good reasons. Still, Craig only makes the claim about most atheists in Craig’s experience. Who could doubt what his experiences have been? Maybe the only atheists he meets are squirrels in the park and voices in his head, and they certainly have no good reasons for their beliefs. If you qualify something in just the right way, it’s almost as though you haven’t said anything at all.

In any event, Craig pretends that atheists need to have just as good reason to disbelieve in God as Christians need to believe in God. Presumably Craig remains doubtful about the existence of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and a teacup floating in space around the sun on an orbit directly opposite the earth. No one can have reasons to think that these things don’t exist either, so it only makes sense to place the burden of proof equally on those making the claim that something does not exist and on those making the claim that something does exist. Craig is subtly, but illegitimately, trying to shift the burden of proof onto the atheist.

In the case of a Christian who has no good reasons for what he believes, this slogan serves as an effective conversation-stopper. But if we have good reasons for our beliefs, then this slogan serves rather as a conversation-starter.
The good thing is that atheists tend to be very passionate people and want to believe in something.
The atheist who merely repeats this slogan after having been presented with arguments for God’s existence makes an empty assertion.

Not necessarily. The atheist might fairly think the reasons are not good ones. Still, if Craig purports to have evidence for the existence of God, we should examine it. What, pray tell, are these reasons that should satisfy the world’s atheists? Please explain them in 100 words or so each so as not to test the intellects of Fox’s audience of mouth-breathing morons.

So what reasons might be given in defense of Christian theism? In my publications and oral debates with some of the world’s most notable atheists, I’ve defended the following five reasons why God exists:

Look! Pointless chest-thumping! He has publications! And has debated some of the world’s most notable atheists! Perhaps he mentions this because Richard Dawkins refuses to debate him given his rather morally monstrous defense of God’s commands in the Old Testament. Dawkins’s refusal to debate Craig shows why my assertion that Craig believes in a magical sky-man is accurate. He really believes the crazy stuff described in a millennia-old book of myth and fantasy. No ‘metaphysical ground of being’ for Craig; there literally is a person who commands people to kill innocent children, and that’s not only okay with Craig but something any atheist should want to believe as well.

1. God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe. Given the scientific evidence we have about our universe and its origins, and bolstered by arguments presented by philosophers for centuries, it is highly probable that the universe had an absolute beginning. Since the universe, like everything else, could not have merely popped into being without a cause, there must exist a transcendent reality beyond time and space that brought the universe into existence. This entity must therefore be enormously powerful. Only a transcendent, unembodied mind suitably fits that description.

Theists tend to avoid, not embrace, this way of presenting the cosmological argument because to evaluate an inference to the best explanation, we have to consider simplicity, proportionality, and even the possibility of causal mechanisms. He wants us to believe in a supreme, infinitely good, wise, powerful, and intelligent being who exists outside time and space but created the universe. Since Craig’s hypothesis does not assert merely a cause but an intelligent being with several other qualities unrelated to the causation of the universe, the hypothesis is clearly not the simplest possible. Since nothing about our finite universe requires an explanation in terms of an infinite cause, his hypothesis is infinitely out of proportion to the evidence. Since we literally can have no conception of what it would mean for a mind, or anything else, to exist outside space, and especially time, Craig’s explanatory hypothesis is not even conceivable, let alone the strongest one possible. The God hypothesis is extravagant and apparently inconceivable. Finally, we have no idea how a being outside time and space could create a universe. Thus, the divine explanation is anything but the best possible one.

What other explanation could compete with the divine creation hypothesis? One possibility is that the universe (or the multiverse) has simply always existed and thus does not need an explanation. Craig claims the scientific and philosophical reasons show that the universe had a beginning. The evidence that our universe had a beginning in a singularity in space-time that expanded as a Big Bang is strong, but that does not mean that there is no alternative dimensional multi-verse in which our universe is only one part. Another possibility is that space-time itself began to exist with the singularity itself and so it makes no sense to ask for a cause (causation being a spatio-temporal notion) for the universe. Another view is that we should reserve judgment on the best explanation for the existence of the space-time singularity. Perhaps some string theory or theory of everything will ultimately provide an explanation superior to the magical sky-man hypothesis. Certainly any of these is more plausible--more conceivable and less extravagant--than the God hypothesis. Even the most extravagant physical theories, the multi-dimensional string theories, do not have the unnecessary additional properties such as being outside space and time, being personal, and having the properties of infinite intelligence, wisdom, and beneficence.

2. God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe. Contemporary physics has established that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent, interactive life. That is to say, in order for intelligent, interactive life to exist, the fundamental constants and quantities of nature must fall into an incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range. There are three competing explanations of this remarkable fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. The first two are highly implausible, given the independence of the fundamental constants and quantities from nature's laws and the desperate maneuvers needed to save the hypothesis of chance. That leaves design as the best explanation.

This hoary old argument, in a fancy new lab coat, is easily dismissed. No one has established that the mere logical possibility of different values for these fundamental constants and laws implies anything about their actual probability. Is it a miracle that I have not turned into a chicken in the last second? Clearly my turning into a chicken is logically possible, but highly improbable. Until the Fine-Tuning aficionados can offer a probability estimate (based on anything other than logical possibility) for the range of these values, they are offering a mathematical argument with undefined variables. The argument only works if we think that the values our universe has are unlikely compared to other possible values but all the argument establishes is that different values are logically possible. The probability of a conjunction of variables is multiplicative, so the more such conjuncts you add, the less probable the conjunction is. However, to get the probability of the conjunction, you have to have defined values for the probability of each conjunct. Without that probability, there can be no resultant probability for the conjunction. You cannot multiply an undefined value by an undefined value and get a defined value. It’s a little like arguing that there must be a designer that caused you to have brown hair and blue eyes (given the nearly infinite shades of different colors they could be) without providing any probability estimate for your hair being brown or your eyes being blue. If it turns out the probability of each of these is high, then the probability of the conjunction would also be high. But, most importantly, the probability of the conjunction (for example, having brown hair and blue eyes) is undefined if the probabilities of the conjuncts (the individual facts, for example, having brown hair) are also undefined. The Fine-Tuning aficionados have left out the probability values necessary for their argument to work; instead, they substitute mere logical possibility. The unknown probability of variable one being as it is times the unknown probability of variable two. . . does not result in an infinitesimal probability but an unknown probability.

In any case, whatever happened to the all-powerful creator? The divine Fine-Tuner cannot create a perfect universe full of life from near its moment of creation but has to monkey around with the parameters of the laws in order to produce a universe with only one (or a relative few) tiny, temporary islands of life? As David Hume noted, the hypothesis that the designer is perfect, or close to it, is unjustified. The designer could be a child with an extra-dimensional universe-making kit, a first-time designer of universes, a senile or even long dead designer, one in a line of rather uninspired designers, each borrowing from the ideas of others. Is our universe the best the Supreme Being can do? Conscious, intelligent, moral beings seem to have existed only on this tiny blue marble in an enormous expanse of space and time, for only 1/50,000 of its existence. Most of that universe is not even visible to us. About 68% of the mass/energy of the universe is dark energy and another 27% is dark matter. This matter/energy does not appear to interact with the rest of the universe except gravitationally, so the kinds of interactions necessary for life (especially of the conscious, rational kind) are apparently not even possible. At best 5% of the matter in the universe is even the right kind of stuff to have life occur in it. [These theories could be wrong, of course, but that doesn’t make the rest of the situation any better.] Worse, the only intelligent, conscious life with the possibility of divine reward has existed in the last 2,000 years (since Jesus) of life here on earth. So, God created a universe with the purpose of creating the last 2,000 years of human history (or 2/5,000,000,000 of earth’s history) in the hundreds of billions of stars in hundreds of billions of galaxies for nearly 14 billion years. If I were infinitely powerful, wise, good, and intelligent, I think I could make intelligent, conscious life a little more common, or at least make it appear a little more quickly, provided I wanted it in the first place. [And don’t tell me that God wouldn’t perform this sort of miracle since the argument at hand is that the creation of the universe is itself essentially a miracle.] On the other hand, perhaps conscious, intelligent life is spread throughout the universe despite the appearance of vast expanses of uninhabitable planets, stars, and vacuum? Perhaps that life is hidden away from our eyes in the 95% of the universe that is dark matter/energy? Presumably each such planet, and all the dark matter and energy, gets its own incarnation of God in order to provide them an opportunity for heaven. I suppose, however, that all the dark matter beings would be out of luck since, I have it on good authority, Jesus is white. I suppose the non-Earth cultures are no worse off than all those humans from non- and pre-Christian cultures who have never had a chance to learn of their sole chance at salvation. That is to say, God might just have doomed them to an eternity of suffering for no reason other than an accident of birth. That’s about right for Craig’s God. In short, the magical sky-man hypothesis does not seem the best explanation for our rather life-deficient universe.

3. God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective moral values and duties, but they do nothing to provide a basis for them. If human evolution had taken a different path, a very different set of moral feelings might have evolved. By contrast, God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness, and His commandments constitute our moral duties. Thus, theism provides a better explanation of objective moral values and duties.

Craig endorses, apparently, the divine command theory of morality, a theory rejected by philosophers and theologians since Socrates and the Euthyphro. Christian philosopher Gottfried Leibniz says it is a theory that makes God a bully or a tyrant. Here’s a nice article by Louise Antony on it. [Link to Antony article] Perhaps the simplest way to refute Craig is to ask how the existence of a divine lawgiver explains objective morality. Are there objective moral rules because God threatens us with eternal punishment for violating them and promises us eternal reward for adhering to them? If that is the sole basis for morality, then God is nothing but a tyrant as Leibniz noted. More reasonably, God has a reason (at least according to theism) to give the commands he did rather than others. These reasons are the basis of objective morality. So theist and atheist alike suppose there are objective moral values that exist independently of God. Craig’s questions about how, on the atheist’s view, we come to have these moral feelings are completely beside the point.

“God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness” Craig writes, and I am at a loss to know what this means. This statement is trivial if God defines morality in the way Craig appears to be suggesting. It would only be meaningful to say that God is a paradigm of goodness if goodness were logically independent of God. I assume that Craig thinks God is like the meter-rod in Paris; we measure whether and to what degree something is good or bad by comparing it to God just as we measure something’s length by comparing it to the meter rod. It’s obvious that God is not a standard we can carry about with us, unless we rely on some farcical ancient book. (Is that a God in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?) Then I can follow Jesus' moral example, as Daniel Tosh jokes, by setting people on fire and sending them to hell. Moreover, the meter rod analogy is weak since the meter at least measures something that exists independently of the rod. Perhaps the best analogy would be the rules of a game such as chess. There are rules governing how one must play chess, and they are objective, but the only force they have is over people who choose to play chess. You can break the rules of chess and then, by definition, you are no longer playing chess. The rules of chess could have been completely different and there could not be a reason to prefer one set of rules to another. The rules would not pick out the game of chess as we know it, but there would be no objective reason to prefer one game to another. However, it is not true that we can select any system of morality at all with equal justification. Morality is not arbitrary in the way the rules of chess are; morality has an objective reality that gives force to the commands independently of any divine threat or promise. God could only meaningfully be a paradigm of morality if morality exists independently of God.

4. God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Historians have reached something of consensus that the historical Jesus thought that in himself God’s Kingdom had broken into human history, and he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms as evidence of that fact. Moreover, most historical scholars agree that after his crucifixion Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty by a group of female disciples, that various individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death, and that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection despite their every predisposition to the contrary. I can think of no better explanation of these facts than the one the original disciples gave: God raised Jesus from the dead.

Naturally, historians believe none of this. But why should the opinions of historians even matter to claims of the supernatural? If historians agreed that someone presented himself as a prophet or otherwise divinely connected, we would not think that person or even his or her following required special explanation. No one asks for a divine explanation for the historical facts concerning Apollonius of Tyana, or other wandering miracle-workers who were common at that time, despite the stories about him closely paralleling those of Jesus. The best explanation of these Jesus stories is that people at the time were simply credulous. One wonders if Craig thinks the best explanation for alien abduction stories is that aliens are actually abducting drunken rednecks in remote locations before returning them to earth smelling of booze.

Please note the way Craig produces a subtle, and fallacious, appeal to the authority of the original disciples. Do we know that the original disciples believed that Jesus returned from the dead? No, we do not. We know that there must have been followers of this new religion, but we have no idea what those people believed. We do have gospels written by people within a couple of centuries of the purported events, but no serious religious scholar believes that the names on the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) actually wrote them. I know that Craig believes that these disciples wrote the gospels because he made the claim in one of those awful Lee Strobel books (The Case for Christ, I think it was). When I ask people in departments of religion whether Craig’s claim is true, they mostly just laugh. Historians think there is no testimony from eyewitnesses that Jesus did any of the things he is purported in the gospels to have done and that there is no need of divine explanations for these mundane facts.

5. God can be personally known and experienced. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Down through history Christians have found through Jesus a personal acquaintance with God that has transformed their lives.

What does God taste like anyway? (Mmmm . . . minty!) Personal experiences,of course, imply nothing about the existence of God. Scientologists often have life-changing subjective experiences. Does that imply that thetans and Xenu exists? The fact that people have certain subjective experiences is no evidence that something real corresponds to them. Didn’t Craig just mention this above in the context of dismissing the connection between atheists' subjective states of mind and objective morality? Apparently, Christian experiences are valid, but the experiences of every other religious or non-religious person are to be rejected.

The good thing is that atheists tend to be very passionate people and want to believe in something. If they would only put aside the slogans for a moment and reexamine their worldview in light of the best philosophical, scientific, and historical evidence we have today, then they, too, would find Christmas worth celebrating!

Craig continues his insinuation that atheists are emotional but not rational people. Sadly, No’s slogan: “It’s always projection!” seems to apply here. After examining Craig’s reasons, we can see which side is using slogans and which is examining the evidence clearly. Atheists are perfectly happy celebrating holidays based on our love for other humans and our belief in the worth of this life. We don’t celebrate because we fear that a tyrannical sky-man will burn us for eternity in hell if we don’t sing loudly enough. A celebration based on mutual love and respect is worth more than one based on worship for Craig’s magical sky-man. And most Christians know that too.

Something Rather Than Nothing--Reposted

As, God help me, a professional philosopher, I try to argue for a clear thesis with compelling, unchallengeable arguments. This post feels too tentative to me, but I don't want to put any more work into it. So, here it is.

One of the most puzzling questions in philosophy is "Why is there something rather than nothing at all?" Theists say that this question must have an answer and the only way to give an answer is to appeal to the existence of God. That God exists, on this view, explains why the contingent, dependent world exists, and God requires no further explanation since God's nature as a perfect being explains why God exists.

Refining the Cosmological Argument

The Judeo-Christian tradition does not provide an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing since even in the first Genesis creation story (the more systematic one) God does not create something from nothing. Apparently borrowing from the Babylonian stories, Genesis has God creating the universe from a watery chaos. Obviously, then, the Judeo-Christian mythology does not explain why there is a watery chaos and, hence, does not explain why there is something rather than nothing.

The Judeo-Christian text does not provide the purported explanation, but perhaps the more abstract theist position can do so. Philosophical theists tend not to attach their beliefs to the highly flawed text of any particular religion, so they conceive God as (borrowing from Alvin Plantinga) a maximally perfect being (one that has all perfections--goodness, wisdom--essentially) who created and designed the universe. How should this supposed need for an explanation prove the existence of this abstractly-conceived God?

Taking the need for an explanation for the universe as an argument for the existence of God is to give the cosmological argument. St. Thomas Aquinas is the most famous proponent of this argument, but, unfortunately, every one of his four ways--four versions of the cosmological argument--to prove the existence of God are obviously unsound. (I read the last of his "Five Ways" to be a version of the design argument.) I cannot go into these flawed arguments in detail here, but one of the proofs, the argument from efficient causation, appears to many to have some plausibility.

Efficient causality is essentially what we ordinarily think of as causality. Efficient causes trigger or bring about an event. Here the argument is that every event has a cause, so there must be a causal sequence of events that has occurred over some period of time in which causes precede their effects. If the cause does not occur, Aquinas argues, the effects would not occur. Since there are, evidently, effects, there must have been a first cause to begin it all. This first cause must itself be uncaused, and so is not simply another event, and is, thus, supposed to be God.

There are two problems with this argument. First, there is no reason to think the causal series has to be finite. Aquinas seems to think that some event, call it "A", must be the first cause because if A did not occur, nothing could happen at all. But if one denies that there is a first cause, one is not denying that A occurs, one is only denying that A is a first (uncaused) cause. Second, if there is a first cause, there is no reason to think that being is God. Something's being a first cause of the universe implies nothing about it having the other characteristics theists attribute to God. It need not be personal, rational, a moral agent, powerful, or wise (let alone the omni-version of each of these attributes). It could simply be a trigger, like the big bang, that did not require a cause for its occurrence.

Various attempts have been made to salvage this argument. One claim (from G.E.M. Anscombe) is that everything with a beginning has a cause, and the universe has a beginning so the universe has a cause. The only thing that could be the cause of the universe is God, so God exists. The first problem with this argument is that it assumes, with insufficient justification, that the universe is a thing that can have a cause rather than a collection of things which need not, as a mere collection, have a cause. I'll get to this point in a moment.

The second problem with this argument is that it would show that God also has a cause since there is no space-time without matter (according to general relativity), and thus God must also have a beginning. This fact would rather undermine the point of the argument since it would imply that God also must have a cause.

The other attempt to salvage the argument, besides relying on beginningless causes, is to claim that the universe as a whole must have a cause or explanation because every part does. This argument is clearly fallacious. If the universe is only a collection of beings, then there is no reason to think the universe as a whole must have a cause. Just because every event has a cause does not mean there is a cause for all events. There might simply be an infinite series of such events with no need for a cause or explanation for that sum of events. (Bertrand Russell, somewhat famously, pointed this out.)

Clearly, reasoning about causes won't prove the existence of God. Thus, theists have turned to more abstract concepts in order to prove God's existence. One such concept is that of a necessary being. A necessary being is a being that exists in all possible worlds, as we philosophers like to say. It is a being such that, if it exists at all, it exists necessarily. There are, potentially, necessary beings besides God. If there are abstract objects, such as numbers or universals, then they exist necessarily. God, as an all-powerful being, is an inviting prospect for such a necessary being. The rest of the observable, physical universe, it is alleged, consists of only contingent beings, things that might or might not exist. For these contingent things to exist at all, the argument goes, they must depend on a necessary being.

Still, there are limitations with the concept of a necessary being. My shoe might be a necessary being if it exists in all possible worlds, but it may not be the creator of the universe in this one. Hence, something's being necessary is not sufficient for it being God. We need, further, some connection of this necessary being and a dependent universe. Typically, this connection is made by appeal to the concept of explanation which, so the theory goes, means saying why something had to be the case given whatever set of conditions were in place. To explain, one might say, why the moon orbits the earth, we must cite conditions such that, given that they are in place, no other alternative is possible. If the cited conditions do not entail that the event occur (or the state be the way it is), they cannot be considered a complete explanation.

This is a fairly intuitive concept of explanation. Suppose we learn that Bob did not get tenure at his job as assistant professor. To explain why he did not get tenure, we have to be able to say what those conditions were that led to him not getting tenure. It wouldn't be much of an explanation if all we could say was, "Sometimes people get tenure and sometimes they don't." Intuitively, you need to say why conditions were such that they had to work out as they did.

Theists have tended to think that this means that, ultimately, there must be a necessary being to explain why everything exists at all. After all, they say, if there are only contingent beings, then when you attempt to explain something, you've only just deferred the explanation to some further state that is also contingent. Atheists can, however, ask why there should be this uber-explanation. We know people give ordinary explanations all the time, for why Bob was denied tenure, for example, but we don't have any explanations that go back to first causes. We give explanations, but rarely of this uber-explanatory kind. (And some of our explanations appear to be even less complete in that they are only statistical, but more on that later.)

A better move is to demand that there be an explanation for why there is anything at all or why there is something rather than nothing. Explanations for the existence of individual things need never amount to an explanation for the universe as a whole, just as causes for individual events need not invoke a cause for the whole of the universe. But in order to explain why there is something rather than nothing, what is required is a being that explains why something's existing is necessary and which requires nothing else to explain why the explanans (the thing doing the explaining) exists.

William Rowe calls such a being "self-existent". A self-existent being is one whose existence is explained by the nature of the thing itself; its concept explains why the thing exists. Traditionally, God's existence is supposed to be explainable without reference to anything else because God is the greatest possible being and contingent beings (that might not exist) are less great than necessarily existent ones. (Please note this is not the ontological argument which tries to show that God exists through the concept alone. Here we only explain God's existence through God's concept, and the fact that we can do this for God and--presumably for nothing else--combined with the fact that something exists rather than nothing, is supposed to show that God exists.) Assuming the principle of sufficient reason (that every event that occurs and every fact have explanations), God's existence is explained by the nature of God, and God's creation of the universe explains everything else, so, on theism, everything has an explanation, whereas, on atheism, it is not clear that everything does.

Difficulties with God as Explanatory
Before I consider atheist responses, I want to point out that this idea that a self-existent being might create and maintain the universe in existence is less coherent than is sometimes granted. Recognizing the failure of cause-based cosmological arguments, theists have fallen back on explanation-based cosmological arguments that make no assumptions about time or efficient causes. In other words, because the argument that God must be the first efficient cause is unsound, they have banked on God explaining the existence of the universe as an underlying ground of being or fundamental essence of existence. Theists, and I'm thinking of Richard Taylor in his book Metaphysics primarily here, consider the argument not to prove that there is a God who is the first in a series of efficient (triggering) causes, since any such argument is flawed, but as the "first" self-existent being that explains why the universe exists at all even if such a universe has existed forever with no temporal beginning. Instead, God is the most fundamental existent upon which everything in the universe currently depends for its existence. If God ceased to exist (a metaphysical impossibility on this view) or ceased to pay attention to the universe, then it would cease to exist.

In fact, there are theories that this has already happened and that's how we ended up with Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House.

Sorry, needed some levity.

This idea of God as the fundamental ground of all existence is what leads to these odd formulations of the concept of God as the essence of being qua being and that sort of thing. However, it is far from clear (1) what any of this "being qua being" talk means, (2) that being qua being is necessary for things to exist and (3) how God could be said to create the universe if God does not do so as an efficient or triggering cause but as a "fundamental ground of existence".

First, I'm not sure what this "being qua being" talk means. Certainly it is true that things that exist "have" being in some sense, at least in the sense that they exist. But it is hardly clear that there must be some essence that they must have in order to exist. I understand what it means to say that a whole depends for its existence upon its parts, and we can thereby see that in order for the universe to exist, there must be some units or parts which constitute it. But what is it to say that these parts (fundamental particles, if you like) require this being qua being in order to exist? There must, so the principle of sufficient reason goes, be an explanation for why they exist, but this might be given in terms of causes. If PSR is true, there must also be an explanation for the fact that there are fundamental particles at all, but I'm not sure how saying that they depend on any fundamental essence or being qua being constitutes such an explanation.

Second, it is not clear that the universe requires God, understood as this being qua being, in order to exist. I'm open to the idea that some theory of everything in physics might explain why they exist, but that explanation would do well to be more than that they are grounded in being itself. In short, the intuition bus stops for me at the idea that there must be some further explanation for the fundamental particles. Maybe there is an explanation for why there are fundamental particles at all. And there must be such an explanation if PSR is true. I can see why people might think for any event that it needs a cause. How else could it have gotten here if it were not caused? one might ask. But I just don't feel that same pull for the question, "Why are there fundamental particles at all?" I'm saying here that the intuitive support for PSR may not be so strong when we think about fundamental particles as it is when we think of events needing causes.

Third, it is not clear how God can be the fundamental essence of existence and explain the universe's existence. God would not, on this view, have brought the universe into existence as a first, temporal cause. But if God did not do this, then it's not clear what it means for God's existence (choices, etc.) to explain why the universe exists at all. If God didn't cause the universe or bring it into existence, I'm not sure how God's existence can explain anything at all. The explanation must be that God's existence somehow underpins the existence of anything at all, that God is the fundamental property of all existence that makes it such that it exists. I believe at this point all talk of God has either lost all touch with reality or been reduced to tautology.

Atheist Explanations
Atheists are mostly naturalists in that they believe everything can be explained in natural terms using the tools of contemporary science. There are well-known exceptions to the principle of sufficient reason from quantum physics, but, for the most part, it is taken as given that events have explanations. So, naturalistically-minded people should require an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing unless they can show that there is an exception for the case of the universe or that there is something ill-formed about the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

It is tempting to say that the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a non-sensical question. It involves an implicit contrast between a state in which something exists and a state in which nothing exists, and it is incoherent to say that there is a state in which nothing exists for to say that something exists is to say that there is something rather than nothing. Thus, we cannot even conceive or state the alternative necessary for the question to make sense. The cosmological argument, then, must fail to gain a foothold since there is no contrast case for which an explanation is necessary. (I think this is Sartre's view, but I get this only from my largely uninformed reading of Nausea.) Since one cannot even assert the possibility of nothing existing, one cannot require an explanation for why it doesn't.

Alas, the problem is not so easily dissolved. To say that nothing exists is not to reify nothing and treat it like an ordinary object. To say that nothing exists is to say that it is not the case that anything exists; it is not the case that there is anything at all. There is no incoherence in such a thought any more than there is to say that Socrates does not exist. If it were not the case that anything at all existed, I would not be here to ask the question, but there is nothing nonsensical about considering whether everything might simply not exist. The question does not appear to be defective.

Others have claimed that the universe might have popped into existence as scientists working in the field of quantum electrodynamics have discovered particles sometimes do. This, however, does not explain why there is something rather than nothing because it takes for granted that there is a quantum field, and whatever that is, it is not nothing. Hence, this explanation does not appeal to a real contrast in which nothing is a possibility but a contrast in which a quantum field exists but no particles pop into existence in it. Similarly, one cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing by appeal to quantum tunneling in which a particle travels back in time in order to bring itself into existence since such things only occur in quantum fields, and, to explain why there is anything at all, requires that we not assume that there is anything as part of our explanation (unless that thing can be established to be self-existent).

My students always want to say that the necessarily existent thing is matter or mass/energy. We know, they say, that mass/energy can neither be created nor destroyed. That means it must exist and must always have existed in order for it to be here now. No one much likes the idea of positing some physical being (mass/energy) as necessarily existent because it always appears sensical to ask, "Why should that exist?" in a way that does not if we accept the theist conception of God. Of course, we might be wrong about what's possible and impossible, and it might be metaphysically impossible for mass/energy not to exist (rather than just a law of physics that it cannot go out of existence once it exists). But it sure seems to be a physical law only that mass/energy cannot cease to exist. And, more important, it is unclear why a law that says mass/energy that exists cannot cease to exist should be, in any way, relevant to why that mass/energy exists in the first place.

Rowe, forthrightly, thinks that PSR is not adequately supportable. Thus, there is no strong reason to think PSR is true. The general principle, that everything that exists or any fact that is true, has an explanation is false. Questions such as, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" need not, therefore, have an answer at all.

The worry about this response is that it threatens to be the same sort of science stopper that theism is. If we cannot be certain that everything has an explanation, then for any particular scientific experiment we do, there may be no explanation for why it turns out as it does. Hence, we would prefer an argument that there are explanations in the natural, spatio-temporal world, but that demanding an explanation for the whole ball of wax is an impossible demand.

"Why there is something rather than nothing?" need have no answer whereas empirically testable why-questions must have answers (at least in the non-quantum realm). But how can one argue for this?

Victor Stenger, apparently, argues that we can explain why something exists by contrast with nothing because nothing is unstable. I think what he means by this is that a quantum vacuum is unstable; things pop into existence spontaneously in the quantum field, so nothing would not exist for long. As noted, this argument is flawed since a quantum field is not nothing. Nothing is not a vacuum or a probability field. Nothing exists when there is not anything of any kind, when there is no location or place in which that quantum field might exist. So, Stenger cannot contrast something and nothing but only contrast some particles in a quantum field and no particles in a quantum field.

Is this real, absolute nothing stable or not? It's tempting to say that nothing is stable since, as philosophers used to say, "nothing can come from nothing". On the other hand, how can nothing have any properties at all? So, I'm not sure whether it's stable or unstable, but I don't see a good case that nothing (rather than a quantum vacuum) is unstable or would very likely (or inevitably) give rise to something.

Robert Nozick starts with the assumption implicit in my formulation of the question that explanation is contrastive. To explain why X occurred, we must explain why other possibilities did not occur. It makes no sense to explain, in isolation, why the US soccer team lost, we explain it implicitly by contrasting it to their winning. The contrast is explicit in asking why there is something rather than nothing. If it is logically impossible for there to be nothing, for example, then no explanation for why there is something would be necessary. Nozick does not attempt to prove that nothing existing is logically impossible, however.

Instead, Nozick argues that explanations are given in contrast to a likely, normal, or natural condition. Thus, we need not explain why something exists if nothing existing is statistically unlikely, abnormal or unnatural. Nozick then claims that, since there are an infinite number of ways for something to exist, and only one way for nothing to exist, it is infinitely more likely that there is something rather than nothing. Hence, if nothing existed, that would require explanation, but one need not propose an explanation for why something exists since it is the more likely situation.

I do not see how one could ascertain the likelihood that nothing exists, and Nozick's argument does nothing to establish that nothing existing is unlikely. Moreover, this assumption, that only unlikely, unnatural or abnormal situations can be or need to be explained is simply not true; Nozick is confusing a pragmatic convention with an epistemic necessity.

First, is nothingness statistically more likely or less likely than something? I have no idea how one could answer this question meaningfully. Since there is something and not nothing, perhaps the answer is that the existence of something is a certainty, the existence of nothing is then a statistical impossibility, and we do not need an explanation of the existence of something. That would miss the point since we have to make our probability claims in deciding what needs an explanation absent our knowledge that the thing actually exists. Otherwise nothing that existed would require an explanation. I have no idea how one would argue that something is likely. No one has any idea what the probability is that our universe have the constants, laws of nature or basic features that it does. How could anyone even begin to estimate the probability that there be anything at all (without even considering what such an estimate of probability could even mean)? Without a scientific theory of why something exists at all (which is the question at issue), I don't see how any probability estimate is possible.

Second, the claim that there are infinitely more ways for something to exist than nothing to exist is completely irrelevant to the probability of nothing existing. There are an infinite number of ways in which I might cease to exist from one moment to the next, and only one way to exist (in conformity to the natural law), but I know it's more likely that I will continue to exist as an integrated biological object it is that all those other possibilities (that I will turn into a chicken, that my brain will explode, that I will become a slice of cheese, a bowl of petunias or a whale, etc.) combined will occur.

Making an argument that something is more natural or normal is even less likely to be fruitful than arguing for statistical unlikelihood. I have enough trouble figuring out what it means for something to be natural or normal in other (natural or normal?) contexts, I have no idea how to establish such a claim in this context. I don't think anyone else does either.

Pragmatically, we often look for an explanation for the unusual, abnormal or unnatural because it is unexpected, and we tend to want explanations for the unexpected more than we want explanations for the expected. But that need not be the case. If John, a human being, is born with flippers instead of hands, we might explain this by pointing out that his mother took thalidomide when she was pregnant and that thalidomide causes birth defects of this sort. But if John is a dolphin, and his being born with flippers is normal, natural and statistically expected, we can still explain why he's born with flippers, and it is perfectly reasonable to ask such a question. The statistically likely can still be explained, and we can still reasonably demand such an explanation. In short, pragmatically we often look for explanations for the unexpected, but it is not part of the logic of explanation that we are required to do this.

This leaves us only with the remaining possibility of rejecting PSR and living with the consequences. Is there any legitimate reason to reject PSR or would this have to be an ad hoc atheism-saving move? As it turns out there are two good reasons to reject PSR. First, it is empirically refuted by quantum mechanics. Some facts about the quantum world have no explanation. Why an electron drops from one orbital to another now rather than later has no explanation. Second, we are quickly returned to the infinite regress the theist hoped to avoid if we ask for an explanation for why PSR is true.

Suppose we accept, as does the theist, that PSR is true. There must, therefore, be an explanation for why it is true. It cannot be true because God acts only for reasons and thus nothing would occur without an explanation. Rather amusingly Leibniz gave this as his reason for belief in PSR, yet he later turned around and used PSR to prove the existence of God. Genius!

What other explanation could there be for PSR? It isn't self-evidently true, so we cannot expect it, like God, to be explained in terms of its own concept or nature. So, it must be explained in terms of something else whose explanation, we can, of course, also demand. This means, I think, that we must reject the idea that everything has an explanation.

The theist, in particular, must be unhappy to reject PSR since it underpins the cosmological argument, but to accept PSR renders the whole cosmological argument moot. The point of the argument is to show that we need not be caught in an infinite regress of explanations but can find a first, self-explaining explainer. Unless we reject PSR, however, we are stuck with exactly the regress that the appeal to God is supposed to prevent. And, of course, rejecting PSR means we no longer have the cosmological argument to support belief in God.

The naturalistically-inclined atheist must be unhappy with rejecting PSR in that it potentially blocks scientific inquiry. It's not clear how to limit the damage here. We could accept the "Every event has an explanation for why it occurs" part of PSR (call these type 1 claims) since that does not entail that PSR itself has an explanation. So, this principle is, at least, not caught in our regress problem. The "Every fact has an explanation" part of the principle (call these type 2 claims) remains problematic since PSR is supposed to be a fact. Yet, it is not easily possible to imagine that all scientific demands for an explanation can be understood as type 1 claims. It appears reasonable to demand to know why a falling object has the acceleration that it has, and this is not to be explained (apparently) just in terms of events occurring. Rejecting PSR, while independently necessary, has problematic consequences for science that render it problematic even when considered only as a rejection of this part of the principle.

Conclusion
My conclusion has to be tentative. Theism is not adequately supported by the cosmological argument since it relies on a principle (and part of a principle) that is false. We must, tentatively at least, reject the idea that there is an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. Even if there were such an explanation, appeal to God would be ontologically excessive and unnecessary. More limited posits would, presumably, be preferable to the extravagant claims of the theists. We must, apparently, reject the idea that there are explanations for all facts, and, indeed, the fact that there is something rather than nothing might be (and certainly appears to be) the kind of fact we cannot explain. We must reject the principle of sufficient reason that supports the idea that there is such an explanation.

The difficulty is in limiting the epistemic carnage wrought by rejecting this principle, even if we must only reject one part of it. To say that some facts lack an explanation is problematic since any apparently inexplicable empirical result might turn out to be such a fact. It would be nice if there were some way to reject PSR only for foundational or fundamental claims, but I doubt that there is a clear line one could draw or a way to justify drawing it. Apparently, explanations, as Wittgenstein said, have to come to an end somewhere. There is, at any rate, no reason to think that end has to be God.


Note: I had to revise this a second time after some revisions simply disappeared. Thus, the fact that this post is incomplete or imperfect is entirely the fault of the technical glitch that destroyed all my perfect ruminations. None is the fault of the author.

Divine Simplicity (Reposted)

I am very happy to see serious attempts by philosophers to present their arguments to the public. And I'm equally happy to see a non-expert (Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels) trying to understand them. This is the first of two posts on this blog post for the New York Times philosophy blog by Gary Gutting. Since these issues, especially those discussed in this entry on divine simplicity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Divine Simplicity, are far from clear, I thought I would attempt a little explanation and my own critique.

Gutting argues that Dawkins is not justified in assuming as a premise that God is complex, and that God's complexity requires explanation. There is some brief mention that Dawkins addressed arguments by Richard Swinburne but did not address the serious thinkers on divine simplicity. I'm glad to know that Swinburne can be excluded from the club of serious thinkers. Even so, according to Gutting, Dawkins cannot assume that God is complex, and so Dawkins's argument, that God must require at least as much explanation as the complexity of the universe that God is posited to explain, fails. Gutt enjoins Dawkins to review the serious thoughts from this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on divine simplicity.

As a first pass at divine simplicity, we might claim that God is a simple, non-physical substance and so is simple in that sense. God might have complex thoughts that occur in a substance that has no parts and so no possibility of complex relations among its parts. How this thinking might occur without any interaction of cognitive systems is all very mysterious. And immaterial substances are highly problematic entities. We have no way of verifying or falsifying claims about them. Why think, for example, that God is constituted by only one immaterial stuff rather than two? Why think that God's immaterial stuff is the same stuff from one day to the next? What does it even mean to say that immaterial stuff is the same or different? Immaterial stuff is so mysterious that it is hard to see how there could be any such substance, divine or not. These problems with the concept of a simple, immaterial substance are probably insuperable. But let's move on.

Even if God does not have parts, God is still informationally complex in the Shannon-sense that representing God's knowledge and potential behavior--assuming that God created and designed the universe and considered all possible alternatives in doing so--would require an enormous, indeed infinite, number of bits. I believe some theists will say that this is a mistaken view of God's knowledge of the world. God, it might be said, does not represent anything but knows it directly in a non-representational way. I cannot make sense of this if God considers alternative possibilities in creating the universe. Merely possible objects cannot be their own representation. So, how God's informational complexity is instantiated in God's supposedly simple substance is another significant mystery.

All this suggests that Dawkins is right that God is complex--and if not, there is no way to understand what God is and so there could be no reason to believe that God exists. Even so, it would not follow that God's existence and complexity must be explained by reference to anything outside God's own nature. A better alternative for theists is not to argue that God is informationally simple but to argue that God, or God's complexity, can be explained by God's own nature or concept. That is a key assumption of the cosmological argument and evaluation of such a claim goes far beyond my discussion here. However, the idea of divine simplicity discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is altogether more bizarre and probably incoherent if not logically inconsistent.

The author of the SEP piece William F. Vallicella suggests another notion of divine simplicity. This notion is that God is not a thing that has properties but is those properties, or, as Vallicella writes,

Besides lacking spatial and temporal parts, God is free of matter/form composition, potency/act composition, and existence/essence composition. There is also no real distinction between God as subject of his attributes and his attributes.

There is no distinct stuff that makes up God and the properties that God has. There is no distinction between God's nature, the properties God "has", and God's existence. God is God's properties; for God, our ordinary conception of objects as things with properties does not apply.

What could motivate such a strange and seemingly incoherent doctrine? One central consideration derives from the Anselmian definition of God as maximally perfect, as that than which no greater can be conceived. A God who was less than maximally perfect would not be an absolute reality and appropriate object of worship. A God who was less than ultimate and absolute would be an idol. Now an absolute reality must be a se, from itself, and so not dependent on anything distinct from itself for either its nature or its existence. If God had properties in the way creatures have them, however, he would be distinct from them and so dependent on them. This is the case whether one thinks of a property of x as a constituent of x, or as an entity external to x to which x is tied by the asymmetrical relation (or nonrelational tie) of instantiation. If the properties of x are constituents or ontological (proper) parts of x, then x will depend on them in the same way that any whole composed of parts depends on its parts. But if x is tied to its properties by the asymmetrical relation of instantiation, it is still the case that x will depend on them: if x is F in virtue of x's instantiation of F-ness, then F-ness is a logically prior condition of x's being F. In sum, the divine aseity would seem to require that God be rather have his attributes.

Translation: if God is "composed" of a stuff that has properties, then God would depend on that stuff and those properties in order to exist. The immaterial stuff and the divine properties would be more basic than God. But God cannot depend on anything; nothing can be more fundamental than God. So, God must not be "composed" in this way.

The author defends this view of God against the charge that it is incoherent or logically inconsistent. This is an extremely low bar, but I do not think he meets it. Or, he might meet it in the very weak sense that it might be logically possible for 2 + 2 not to equal 4. That is, if I were completely mistaken about everything I think I know about numbers, then this might somehow be logically consistent even though I could have no idea what such a claim could even mean. In this case, it might be logically possible that God be identical to God's (singular) property if I somehow was completely wrong about everything I think I know about what objects are, what God is supposed to be and what properties are.

It is at least as plausible a conclusion of the previous argument that God does not exist. Since everything that exists is "composed" in this way of substance with properties, and if God cannot be so composed, then God does not exist. Unfortunately, as nice as it would be to have such a simple argument against the existence of God, I think the assumptions of this argument are incorrect.

Do things depend for their existence on the properties and underlying stuff that "composes" them? I don't think so. First, it's not plausible that anything depends for its existence on its properties. On the Aristotelian conception, properties depend on their instantiations (the things that have them). Bob would exist whether he was tall or short. Bob does not depend on his tallness in order to exist. Possibly things have essential properties, but it's hard to see how even then the thing would depend on its properties. How could Bob depend for his existence on his humanity? Aristotle supposes that properties depend on their instances, so humanity as a property would not exist without humans to instantiate that property. Even if we do not accept Aristotle's view, it is bizarre to suggest that Bob depends for his existence on his humanity (even if Bob could not exist without being human).

It is more plausible that God's existence might depend on the stuff that makes God up. For example, we might think that humans are constituted by physical stuff that could exist even if those humans did not exist. In that case, the stuff that makes us up is more basic than we are. But this is not the sense of "constitution" Vallicella mentions.

We should not think the matter that constitutes things is more fundamental than the thing itself when we get to the most basic stuff. Humans might depend on the organs and cells that make them up, and those cells and organs might depend on the molecules and atoms that make them up. But it is a fundamentally different situation when we get to the basic constituents of the world, quarks, say. If we ever reach bottom, there will not be a stuff more basic which constitutes that bottom level. And in that case, it does not make much sense to say that a quark depends on the matter that constitutes the quark. There is no other matter (or energy) there besides the quark; there just is the quark. The quark is not "constituted" by matter and properties in any sense that makes this matter and these properties more basic. It may still be correct to say that the quark is matter with properties, but it does not follow from this that the matter of the quark exists more fundamentally than the quark and the quarkiness of it is a property that also preexists (one might say) the quark itself. This "pincushion" model of reality in which a thing is undifferentiated matter with properties imposed on it to give it structure--especially one in which the pins and the pincushion are more fundamental than the thing itself--takes us from the realm of common sense (i.e. things have properties) to the realm of highly problematic metaphysics. If I am right about this, and God is a simple substance, then there's no more basic stuff that constitutes God, and so God does not depend on God's properties and undifferentiated stuff. Vallicella continues:

A central threat to coherence is the question of how a thing could be identical to its properties. Alvin Plantinga (1980, p. 47) maintains that if God is identical to his properties, then he is a property, and they are a single property, in which case God is a single property. Given that properties are abstract entities, and abstracta are causally inert, then God is abstract and causally inert — which is of course inconsistent with the core tenet of classical theism according to which God is the personal creator and sustainer of every contingent being. No abstract object is a person or a causal agent. No abstract object can be omniscient, or indeed know anything at all. More fundamentally, no abstract object can be identical to any concrete object.

Vallicella is making a very clever move here without it being at all obvious what he's doing. This is a form of the strawman fallacy, one I call the fallacy of Spurious Specificity. This fallacy occurs when one takes only one specific idea or argument, rather than the broader set of such ideas or arguments of which it is a subset, and counters only that narrower idea. Plantinga and those arguing for the view of facts as abstract objects are not the only ones who might object to the doctrine that God is identical to God's property, and so you cannot undermine objections to the doctrine by rejecting Plantinga's view. And you cannot reasonably pretend that this debate is a matter of some obscure, debatable program of one particular philosopher. The problem with divine simplicity is not exhausted by Plantinga's argument that it entails that God is abstract. Vallicella comes close to the problem by saying that "More fundamentally, no abstract object can be identical to any concrete object."

The problem with Vallicella's account of divine simplicity is basic and obvious. It does not even make sense that a thing, being or entity, an individual object, is identical to a property. Properties are features or characteristics of things. A property cannot itself be a thing. Let's consider why philosophers even talk about properties; properties are things that are shared by multiple objects; they account for sameness or similarity of individual things. There are lots of different accounts of properties, whether they must be abstract, or whether we can understand properties completely as sets of individuals (or sets of actual and possible individuals). A theory of properties that did not somehow account for similarities among objects would not be a theory of properties at all. But the reason we talk about them in the first place is because we need to account for how two things can share something in common, how, for example, two things can both be red. If there is some property, redness, that they each have, then we have an explanation for why they are both red and how the statement "John McCain's angry visage is the same color as a ripe tomato," is true. That means that nothing can do the job of a property if it cannot, in some sense, be shared among individual things or instances of that property.

God, an individual thing, cannot be shared, exemplified, instantiated or otherwise exist in more than one thing. The reason we call them "individual things" is that they cannot be shared by other individuals (not in this sense, anyway). You might say that God is everything (in which case we are all part of the individual object that is God), or you can say that God is omnipresent (in which case that individual thing pervades the universe like a particularly invasive gas), but you cannot say that anything is an instance of God. Even God is not an instance of God but is identical to God. Even if there were only one red thing in the universe, redness would not, could not, be that thing. Redness would be a property with a unique instance, but it just makes no sense to say that being red could be identical to a red thing. (Even for the nominalist about properties, the unit set is distinct from its element.) What I'm saying is that individual, distinct, enumerable objects cannot at the same time be characteristics or qualities that can be shared by distinct individuals.

In short, the only way to understand God as a property is to throw out everything that properties are for and understand properties in your own unique way. This is a bit like saying, "Well, in your ordinary language 2 + 2 = 4, but in my vernacular, '4' refers to a rabbit's rectum, not a number, so on my way of understanding '4', 2 + 2 is not equal to 4." Fine, you can change talk of properties in this way if you want to, but when you do so, you have given up any possibility of making sensical claims that anyone else can accept.

My argument here might be little more than an incredulous stare: how can a thing be a property or a property be a thing? Those are mutually exclusive ontic categories (types of being). Properties can be shared by individuals, and individuals can exemplify properties, but neither can be identical to the other.

In sum, to say that God is the property Godness (say), is nonsensical; it contradicts everything we understand about the nature of properties. This whole construct of divine simplicity is misguided. Even though there are lots of issues philosophers discuss that he should take seriously, in this case, Dawkins has no obligation to evaluate such a bizarre theory. Gutting may as well have demanded that Dawkins, if he denies the existence of angels, must have a complete theory of angelic nature--including their pin-head-dancing proclivities--before denying their existence. Some theist arguments are too arcane, bizarre, wrong-headed or incoherent to be seriously entertained outside academia. The claim that God is identical to God's singular property is one such claim.

Note: I started this post months ago and finally finished it, so I've posted it under the original date as well.

Plantinga, A., 1980, Does God Have a Nature?, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

Divine Simplicity

I am very happy to see serious attempts by philosophers to present their arguments to the public. And I'm equally happy to see a non-expert (Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels) trying to understand them. This is the first of two posts on this blog post for the New York Times philosophy blog by Gary Gutting. Since these issues, especially those discussed in this entry on divine simplicity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Divine Simplicity, are far from clear, I thought I would attempt a little explanation and my own critique.

Gutting argues that Dawkins is not justified in assuming as a premise that God is complex, and that God's complexity requires explanation. There is some brief mention that Dawkins addressed arguments by Richard Swinburne but did not address the serious thinkers on divine simplicity. I'm glad to know that Swinburne can be excluded from the club of serious thinkers. Even so, according to Gutting, Dawkins cannot assume that God is complex, and so Dawkins's argument, that God must require at least as much explanation as the complexity of the universe that God is posited to explain, fails. Gutt enjoins Dawkins to review the serious thoughts from this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on divine simplicity.

As a first pass at divine simplicity, we might claim that God is a simple, non-physical substance and so is simple in that sense. God might have complex thoughts that occur in a substance that has no parts and so no possibility of complex relations among its parts. How this thinking might occur without any interaction of cognitive systems is all very mysterious. And immaterial substances are highly problematic entities. We have no way of verifying or falsifying claims about them. Why think, for example, that God is constituted by only one immaterial stuff rather than two? Why think that God's immaterial stuff is the same stuff from one day to the next? What does it even mean to say that immaterial stuff is the same or different? Immaterial stuff is so mysterious that it is hard to see how there could be any such substance, divine or not. These problems with the concept of a simple, immaterial substance are probably insuperable. But let's move on.

Even if God does not have parts, God is still informationally complex in the Shannon-sense that representing God's knowledge and potential behavior--assuming that God created and designed the universe and considered all possible alternatives in doing so--would require an enormous, indeed infinite, number of bits. I believe some theists will say that this is a mistaken view of God's knowledge of the world. God, it might be said, does not represent anything but knows it directly in a non-representational way. I cannot make sense of this if God considers alternative possibilities in creating the universe. Merely possible objects cannot be their own representation. So, how God's informational complexity is instantiated in God's supposedly simple substance is another significant mystery.

All this suggests that Dawkins is right that God is complex--and if not, there is no way to understand what God is and so there could be no reason to believe that God exists. Even so, it would not follow that God's existence and complexity must be explained by reference to anything outside God's own nature. A better alternative for theists is not to argue that God is informationally simple but to argue that God, or God's complexity, can be explained by God's own nature or concept. That is a key assumption of the cosmological argument and evaluation of such a claim goes far beyond my discussion here. However, the idea of divine simplicity discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is altogether more bizarre and probably incoherent if not logically inconsistent.

The author of the SEP piece William F. Vallicella suggests another notion of divine simplicity. This notion is that God is not a thing that has properties but is those properties, or, as Vallicella writes,

Besides lacking spatial and temporal parts, God is free of matter/form composition, potency/act composition, and existence/essence composition. There is also no real distinction between God as subject of his attributes and his attributes.

There is no distinct stuff that makes up God and the properties that God has. There is no distinction between God's nature, the properties God "has", and God's existence. God is God's properties; for God, our ordinary conception of objects as things with properties does not apply.

What could motivate such a strange and seemingly incoherent doctrine? One central consideration derives from the Anselmian definition of God as maximally perfect, as that than which no greater can be conceived. A God who was less than maximally perfect would not be an absolute reality and appropriate object of worship. A God who was less than ultimate and absolute would be an idol. Now an absolute reality must be a se, from itself, and so not dependent on anything distinct from itself for either its nature or its existence. If God had properties in the way creatures have them, however, he would be distinct from them and so dependent on them. This is the case whether one thinks of a property of x as a constituent of x, or as an entity external to x to which x is tied by the asymmetrical relation (or nonrelational tie) of instantiation. If the properties of x are constituents or ontological (proper) parts of x, then x will depend on them in the same way that any whole composed of parts depends on its parts. But if x is tied to its properties by the asymmetrical relation of instantiation, it is still the case that x will depend on them: if x is F in virtue of x's instantiation of F-ness, then F-ness is a logically prior condition of x's being F. In sum, the divine aseity would seem to require that God be rather have his attributes.

Translation: if God is "composed" of a stuff that has properties, then God would depend on that stuff and those properties in order to exist. The immaterial stuff and the divine properties would be more basic than God. But God cannot depend on anything; nothing can be more fundamental than God. So, God must not be "composed" in this way.

The author defends this view of God against the charge that it is incoherent or logically inconsistent. This is an extremely low bar, but I do not think he meets it. Or, he might meet it in the very weak sense that it might be logically possible for 2 + 2 not to equal 4. That is, if I were completely mistaken about everything I think I know about numbers, then this might somehow be logically consistent even though I could have no idea what such a claim could even mean. In this case, it might be logically possible that God be identical to God's (singular) property if I somehow was completely wrong about everything I think I know about what objects are, what God is supposed to be and what properties are.

It is at least as plausible a conclusion of the previous argument that God does not exist. Since everything that exists is "composed" in this way of substance with properties, and if God cannot be so composed, then God does not exist. Unfortunately, as nice as it would be to have such a simple argument against the existence of God, I think the assumptions of this argument are incorrect.

Do things depend for their existence on the properties and underlying stuff that "composes" them? I don't think so. First, it's not plausible that anything depends for its existence on its properties. On the Aristotelian conception, properties depend on their instantiations (the things that have them). Bob would exist whether he was tall or short. Bob does not depend on his tallness in order to exist. Possibly things have essential properties, but it's hard to see how even then the thing would depend on its properties. How could Bob depend for his existence on his humanity? Aristotle supposes that properties depend on their instances, so humanity as a property would not exist without humans to instantiate that property. Even if we do not accept Aristotle's view, it is bizarre to suggest that Bob depends for his existence on his humanity (even if Bob could not exist without being human).

It is more plausible that God's existence might depend on the stuff that makes God up. For example, we might think that humans are constituted by physical stuff that could exist even if those humans did not exist. In that case, the stuff that makes us up is more basic than we are. But this is not the sense of "constitution" Vallicella mentions.

We should not think the matter that constitutes things is more fundamental than the thing itself when we get to the most basic stuff. Humans might depend on the organs and cells that make them up, and those cells and organs might depend on the molecules and atoms that make them up. But it is a fundamentally different situation when we get to the basic constituents of the world, quarks, say. If we ever reach bottom, there will not be a stuff more basic which constitutes that bottom level. And in that case, it does not make much sense to say that a quark depends on the matter that constitutes the quark. There is no other matter (or energy) there besides the quark; there just is the quark. The quark is not "constituted" by matter and properties in any sense that makes this matter and these properties more basic. It may still be correct to say that the quark is matter with properties, but it does not follow from this that the matter of the quark exists more fundamentally than the quark and the quarkiness of it is a property that also preexists (one might say) the quark itself. This "pincushion" model of reality in which a thing is undifferentiated matter with properties imposed on it to give it structure--especially one in which the pins and the pincushion are more fundamental than the thing itself--takes us from the realm of common sense (i.e. things have properties) to the realm of highly problematic metaphysics. If I am right about this, and God is a simple substance, then there's no more basic stuff that constitutes God, and so God does not depend on God's properties and undifferentiated stuff. Vallicella continues:

A central threat to coherence is the question of how a thing could be identical to its properties. Alvin Plantinga (1980, p. 47) maintains that if God is identical to his properties, then he is a property, and they are a single property, in which case God is a single property. Given that properties are abstract entities, and abstracta are causally inert, then God is abstract and causally inert — which is of course inconsistent with the core tenet of classical theism according to which God is the personal creator and sustainer of every contingent being. No abstract object is a person or a causal agent. No abstract object can be omniscient, or indeed know anything at all. More fundamentally, no abstract object can be identical to any concrete object.

Vallicella is making a very clever move here without it being at all obvious what he's doing. This is a form of the strawman fallacy, one I call the fallacy of Spurious Specificity. This fallacy occurs when one takes only one specific idea or argument, rather than the broader set of such ideas or arguments of which it is a subset, and counters only that narrower idea. Plantinga and those arguing for the view of facts as abstract objects are not the only ones who might object to the doctrine that God is identical to God's property, and so you cannot undermine objections to the doctrine by rejecting Plantinga's view. And you cannot reasonably pretend that this debate is a matter of some obscure, debatable program of one particular philosopher. The problem with divine simplicity is not exhausted by Plantinga's argument that it entails that God is abstract. Vallicella comes close to the problem by saying that "More fundamentally, no abstract object can be identical to any concrete object."

The problem with Vallicella's account of divine simplicity is basic and obvious. It does not even make sense that a thing, being or entity, an individual object, is identical to a property. Properties are features or characteristics of things. A property cannot itself be a thing. Let's consider why philosophers even talk about properties; properties are things that are shared by multiple objects; they account for sameness or similarity of individual things. There are lots of different accounts of properties, whether they must be abstract, or whether we can understand properties completely as sets of individuals (or sets of actual and possible individuals). A theory of properties that did not somehow account for similarities among objects would not be a theory of properties at all. But the reason we talk about them in the first place is because we need to account for how two things can share something in common, how, for example, two things can both be red. If there is some property, redness, that they each have, then we have an explanation for why they are both red and how the statement "John McCain's angry visage is the same color as a ripe tomato," is true. That means that nothing can do the job of a property if it cannot, in some sense, be shared among individual things or instances of that property.

God, an individual thing, cannot be shared, exemplified, instantiated or otherwise exist in more than one thing. The reason we call them "individual things" is that they cannot be shared by other individuals (not in this sense, anyway). You might say that God is everything (in which case we are all part of the individual object that is God), or you can say that God is omnipresent (in which case that individual thing pervades the universe like a particularly invasive gas), but you cannot say that anything is an instance of God. Even God is not an instance of God but is identical to God. Even if there were only one red thing in the universe, redness would not, could not, be that thing. Redness would be a property with a unique instance, but it just makes no sense to say that being red could be identical to a red thing. (Even for the nominalist about properties, the unit set is distinct from its element.) What I'm saying is that individual, distinct, enumerable objects cannot at the same time be characteristics or qualities that can be shared by distinct individuals.

In short, the only way to understand God as a property is to throw out everything that properties are for and understand properties in your own unique way. This is a bit like saying, "Well, in your ordinary language 2 + 2 = 4, but in my vernacular, '4' refers to a rabbit's rectum, not a number, so on my way of understanding '4', 2 + 2 is not equal to 4." Fine, you can change talk of properties in this way if you want to, but when you do so, you have given up any possibility of making sensical claims that anyone else can accept.

My argument here might be little more than an incredulous stare: how can a thing be a property or a property be a thing? Those are mutually exclusive ontic categories (types of being). Properties can be shared by individuals, and individuals can exemplify properties, but neither can be identical to the other.

In sum, to say that God is the property Godness (say), is nonsensical; it contradicts everything we understand about the nature of properties. This whole construct of divine simplicity is misguided. Even though there are lots of issues philosophers discuss that he should take seriously, in this case, Dawkins has no obligation to evaluate such a bizarre theory. Gutting may as well have demanded that Dawkins, if he denies the existence of angels, must have a complete theory of angelic nature--including their pin-head-dancing proclivities--before denying their existence. Some theist arguments are too arcane, bizarre, wrong-headed or incoherent to be seriously entertained outside academia. The claim that God is identical to God's singular property is one such claim.

Plantinga, A., 1980, Does God Have a Nature?, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

Something Rather than Nothing

As, God help me, a professional philosopher, I try to argue for a clear thesis with compelling, unchallengeable arguments. This post feels too tentative to me, but I don't want to put any more work into it. So, here it is.

One of the most puzzling questions in philosophy is "Why is there something rather than nothing at all?" Theists say that this question must have an answer and the only way to give an answer is to appeal to the existence of God. That God exists, on this view, explains why the contingent, dependent world exists, and God requires no further explanation since God's nature as a perfect being explains why God exists.

Refining the Cosmological Argument

The Judeo-Christian tradition does not provide an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing since even in the first Genesis creation story (the more systematic one) God does not create something from nothing. Apparently borrowing from the Babylonian stories, Genesis has God creating the universe from a watery chaos. Obviously, then, the Judeo-Christian mythology does not explain why there is a watery chaos and, hence, does not explain why there is something rather than nothing.

The Judeo-Christian text does not provide the purported explanation, but perhaps the more abstract theist position can do so. Philosophical theists tend not to attach their beliefs to the highly flawed text of any particular religion, so they conceive God as (borrowing from Alvin Plantinga) a maximally perfect being (one that has all perfections--goodness, wisdom--essentially) who created and designed the universe. How should this supposed need for an explanation prove the existence of this abstractly-conceived God?

Taking the need for an explanation for the universe as an argument for the existence of God is to give the cosmological argument. St. Thomas Aquinas is the most famous proponent of this argument, but, unfortunately, every one of his four ways--four versions of the cosmological argument--to prove the existence of God are obviously unsound. (I read the last of his "Five Ways" to be a version of the design argument.) I cannot go into these flawed arguments in detail here, but one of the proofs, the argument from efficient causation, appears to many to have some plausibility.

Efficient causality is essentially what we ordinarily think of as causality. Efficient causes trigger or bring about an event. Here the argument is that every event has a cause, so there must be a causal sequence of events that has occurred over some period of time in which causes precede their effects. If the cause does not occur, Aquinas argues, the effects would not occur. Since there are, evidently, effects, there must have been a first cause to begin it all. This first cause must itself be uncaused, and so is not simply another event, and is, thus, supposed to be God.

There are two problems with this argument. First, there is no reason to think the causal series has to be finite. Aquinas seems to think that some event, call it "A", must be the first cause because if A did not occur, nothing could happen at all. But if one denies that there is a first cause, one is not denying that A occurs, one is only denying that A is a first (uncaused) cause. Second, if there is a first cause, there is no reason to think that being is God. Something's being a first cause of the universe implies nothing about it having the other characteristics theists attribute to God. It need not be personal, rational, a moral agent, powerful, or wise (let alone the omni-version of each of these attributes). It could simply be a trigger, like the big bang, that did not require a cause for its occurrence.

Various attempts have been made to salvage this argument. One claim (from G.E.M. Anscombe) is that everything with a beginning has a cause, and the universe has a beginning so the universe has a cause. The only thing that could be the cause of the universe is God, so God exists. The first problem with this argument is that it assumes, with insufficient justification, that the universe is a thing that can have a cause rather than a collection of things which need not, as a mere collection, have a cause. I'll get to this point in a moment.

The second problem with this argument is that it would show that God also has a cause since there is no space-time without matter (according to general relativity), and thus God must also have a beginning. This fact would rather undermine the point of the argument since it would imply that God also must have a cause.

The other attempt to salvage the argument, besides relying on beginningless causes, is to claim that the universe as a whole must have a cause or explanation because every part does. This argument is clearly fallacious. If the universe is only a collection of beings, then there is no reason to think the universe as a whole must have a cause. Just because every event has a cause does not mean there is a cause for all events. There might simply be an infinite series of such events with no need for a cause or explanation for that sum of events. (Bertrand Russell, somewhat famously, pointed this out.)

Clearly, reasoning about causes won't prove the existence of God. Thus, theists have turned to more abstract concepts in order to prove God's existence. One such concept is that of a necessary being. A necessary being is a being that exists in all possible worlds, as we philosophers like to say. It is a being such that, if it exists at all, it exists necessarily. There are, potentially, necessary beings besides God. If there are abstract objects, such as numbers or universals, then they exist necessarily. God, as an all-powerful being, is an inviting prospect for such a necessary being. The rest of the observable, physical universe, it is alleged, consists of only contingent beings, things that might or might not exist. For these contingent things to exist at all, the argument goes, they must depend on a necessary being.

Still, there are limitations with the concept of a necessary being. My shoe might be a necessary being if it exists in all possible worlds, but it may not be the creator of the universe in this one. Hence, something's being necessary is not sufficient for it being God. We need, further, some connection of this necessary being and a dependent universe. Typically, this connection is made by appeal to the concept of explanation which, so the theory goes, means saying why something had to be the case given whatever set of conditions were in place. To explain, one might say, why the moon orbits the earth, we must cite conditions such that, given that they are in place, no other alternative is possible. If the cited conditions do not entail that the event occur (or the state be the way it is), they cannot be considered a complete explanation.

This is a fairly intuitive concept of explanation. Suppose we learn that Bob did not get tenure at his job as assistant professor. To explain why he did not get tenure, we have to be able to say what those conditions were that led to him not getting tenure. It wouldn't be much of an explanation if all we could say was, "Sometimes people get tenure and sometimes they don't." Intuitively, you need to say why conditions were such that they had to work out as they did.

Theists have tended to think that this means that, ultimately, there must be a necessary being to explain why everything exists at all. After all, they say, if there are only contingent beings, then when you attempt to explain something, you've only just deferred the explanation to some further state that is also contingent. Atheists can, however, ask why there should be this uber-explanation. We know people give ordinary explanations all the time, for why Bob was denied tenure, for example, but we don't have any explanations that go back to first causes. We give explanations, but rarely of this uber-explanatory kind. (And some of our explanations appear to be even less complete in that they are only statistical, but more on that later.)

A better move is to demand that there be an explanation for why there is anything at all or why there is something rather than nothing. Explanations for the existence of individual things need never amount to an explanation for the universe as a whole, just as causes for individual events need not invoke a cause for the whole of the universe. But in order to explain why there is something rather than nothing, what is required is a being that explains why something's existing is necessary and which requires nothing else to explain why the explanans (the thing doing the explaining) exists.

William Rowe calls such a being "self-existent". A self-existent being is one whose existence is explained by the nature of the thing itself; its concept explains why the thing exists. Traditionally, God's existence is supposed to be explainable without reference to anything else because God is the greatest possible being and contingent beings (that might not exist) are less great than necessarily existent ones. (Please note this is not the ontological argument which tries to show that God exists through the concept alone. Here we only explain God's existence through God's concept, and the fact that we can do this for God and--presumably for nothing else--combined with the fact that something exists rather than nothing, is supposed to show that God exists.) Assuming the principle of sufficient reason (that every event that occurs and every fact have explanations), God's existence is explained by the nature of God, and God's creation of the universe explains everything else, so, on theism, everything has an explanation, whereas, on atheism, it is not clear that everything does.

Difficulties with God as Explanatory
Before I consider atheist responses, I want to point out that this idea that a self-existent being might create and maintain the universe in existence is less coherent than is sometimes granted. Recognizing the failure of cause-based cosmological arguments, theists have fallen back on explanation-based cosmological arguments that make no assumptions about time or efficient causes. In other words, because the argument that God must be the first efficient cause is unsound, they have banked on God explaining the existence of the universe as an underlying ground of being or fundamental essence of existence. Theists, and I'm thinking of Richard Taylor in his book Metaphysics primarily here, consider the argument not to prove that there is a God who is the first in a series of efficient (triggering) causes, since any such argument is flawed, but as the "first" self-existent being that explains why the universe exists at all even if such a universe has existed forever with no temporal beginning. Instead, God is the most fundamental existent upon which everything in the universe currently depends for its existence. If God ceased to exist (a metaphysical impossibility on this view) or ceased to pay attention to the universe, then it would cease to exist.

In fact, there are theories that this has already happened and that's how we ended up with Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House.

Sorry, needed some levity.

This idea of God as the fundamental ground of all existence is what leads to these odd formulations of the concept of God as the essence of being qua being and that sort of thing. However, it is far from clear (1) what any of this "being qua being" talk means, (2) that being qua being is necessary for things to exist and (3) how God could be said to create the universe if God does not do so as an efficient or triggering cause but as a "fundamental ground of existence".

First, I'm not sure what this "being qua being" talk means. Certainly it is true that things that exist "have" being in some sense, at least in the sense that they exist. But it is hardly clear that there must be some essence that they must have in order to exist. I understand what it means to say that a whole depends for its existence upon its parts, and we can thereby see that in order for the universe to exist, there must be some units or parts which constitute it. But what is it to say that these parts (fundamental particles, if you like) require this being qua being in order to exist? There must, so the principle of sufficient reason goes, be an explanation for why they exist, but this might be given in terms of causes. If PSR is true, there must also be an explanation for the fact that there are fundamental particles at all, but I'm not sure how saying that they depend on any fundamental essence or being qua being constitutes such an explanation.

Second, it is not clear that the universe requires God, understood as this being qua being, in order to exist. I'm open to the idea that some theory of everything in physics might explain why they exist, but that explanation would do well to be more than that they are grounded in being itself. In short, the intuition bus stops for me at the idea that there must be some further explanation for the fundamental particles. Maybe there is an explanation for why there are fundamental particles at all. And there must be such an explanation if PSR is true. I can see why people might think for any event that it needs a cause. How else could it have gotten here if it were not caused? one might ask. But I just don't feel that same pull for the question, "Why are there fundamental particles at all?" I'm saying here that the intuitive support for PSR may not be so strong when we think about fundamental particles as it is when we think of events needing causes.

Third, it is not clear how God can be the fundamental essence of existence and explain the universe's existence. God would not, on this view, have brought the universe into existence as a first, temporal cause. But if God did not do this, then it's not clear what it means for God's existence (choices, etc.) to explain why the universe exists at all. If God didn't cause the universe or bring it into existence, I'm not sure how God's existence can explain anything at all. The explanation must be that God's existence somehow underpins the existence of anything at all, that God is the fundamental property of all existence that makes it such that it exists. I believe at this point all talk of God has either lost all touch with reality or been reduced to tautology.

Atheist Explanations
Atheists are mostly naturalists in that they believe everything can be explained in natural terms using the tools of contemporary science. There are well-known exceptions to the principle of sufficient reason from quantum physics, but, for the most part, it is taken as given that events have explanations. So, naturalistically-minded people should require an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing unless they can show that there is an exception for the case of the universe or that there is something ill-formed about the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

It is tempting to say that the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a non-sensical question. It involves an implicit contrast between a state in which something exists and a state in which nothing exists, and it is incoherent to say that there is a state in which nothing exists for to say that something exists is to say that there is something rather than nothing. Thus, we cannot even conceive or state the alternative necessary for the question to make sense. The cosmological argument, then, must fail to gain a foothold since there is no contrast case for which an explanation is necessary. (I think this is Sartre's view, but I get this only from my largely uninformed reading of Nausea.) Since one cannot even assert the possibility of nothing existing, one cannot require an explanation for why it doesn't.

Alas, the problem is not so easily dissolved. To say that nothing exists is not to reify nothing and treat it like an ordinary object. To say that nothing exists is to say that it is not the case that anything exists; it is not the case that there is anything at all. There is no incoherence in such a thought any more than there is to say that Socrates does not exist. If it were not the case that anything at all existed, I would not be here to ask the question, but there is nothing nonsensical about considering whether everything might simply not exist. The question does not appear to be defective.

Others have claimed that the universe might have popped into existence as scientists working in the field of quantum electrodynamics have discovered particles sometimes do. This, however, does not explain why there is something rather than nothing because it takes for granted that there is a quantum field, and whatever that is, it is not nothing. Hence, this explanation does not appeal to a real contrast in which nothing is a possibility but a contrast in which a quantum field exists but no particles pop into existence in it. Similarly, one cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing by appeal to quantum tunneling in which a particle travels back in time in order to bring itself into existence since such things only occur in quantum fields, and, to explain why there is anything at all, requires that we not assume that there is anything as part of our explanation (unless that thing can be established to be self-existent).

My students always want to say that the necessarily existent thing is matter or mass/energy. We know, they say, that mass/energy can neither be created nor destroyed. That means it must exist and must always have existed in order for it to be here now. No one much likes the idea of positing some physical being (mass/energy) as necessarily existent because it always appears sensical to ask, "Why should that exist?" in a way that does not if we accept the theist conception of God. Of course, we might be wrong about what's possible and impossible, and it might be metaphysically impossible for mass/energy not to exist (rather than just a law of physics that it cannot go out of existence once it exists). But it sure seems to be a physical law only that mass/energy cannot cease to exist. And, more important, it is unclear why a law that says mass/energy that exists cannot cease to exist should be, in any way, relevant to why that mass/energy exists in the first place.

Rowe, forthrightly, thinks that PSR is not adequately supportable. Thus, there is no strong reason to think PSR is true. The general principle, that everything that exists or any fact that is true, has an explanation is false. Questions such as, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" need not, therefore, have an answer at all.

The worry about this response is that it threatens to be the same sort of science stopper that theism is. If we cannot be certain that everything has an explanation, then for any particular scientific experiment we do, there may be no explanation for why it turns out as it does. Hence, we would prefer an argument that there are explanations in the natural, spatio-temporal world, but that demanding an explanation for the whole ball of wax is an impossible demand.

"Why there is something rather than nothing?" need have no answer whereas empirically testable why-questions must have answers (at least in the non-quantum realm). But how can one argue for this?

Victor Stenger, apparently, argues that we can explain why something exists by contrast with nothing because nothing is unstable. I think what he means by this is that a quantum vacuum is unstable; things pop into existence spontaneously in the quantum field, so nothing would not exist for long. As noted, this argument is flawed since a quantum field is not nothing. Nothing is not a vacuum or a probability field. Nothing exists when there is not anything of any kind, when there is no location or place in which that quantum field might exist. So, Stenger cannot contrast something and nothing but only contrast some particles in a quantum field and no particles in a quantum field.

Is this real, absolute nothing stable or not? It's tempting to say that nothing is stable since, as philosophers used to say, "nothing can come from nothing". On the other hand, how can nothing have any properties at all? So, I'm not sure whether it's stable or unstable, but I don't see a good case that nothing (rather than a quantum vacuum) is unstable or would very likely (or inevitably) give rise to something.

Robert Nozick starts with the assumption implicit in my formulation of the question that explanation is contrastive. To explain why X occurred, we must explain why other possibilities did not occur. It makes no sense to explain, in isolation, why the US soccer team lost, we explain it implicitly by contrasting it to their winning. The contrast is explicit in asking why there is something rather than nothing. If it is logically impossible for there to be nothing, for example, then no explanation for why there is something would be necessary. Nozick does not attempt to prove that nothing existing is logically impossible, however.

Instead, Nozick argues that explanations are given in contrast to a likely, normal, or natural condition. Thus, we need not explain why something exists if nothing existing is statistically unlikely, abnormal or unnatural. Nozick then claims that, since there are an infinite number of ways for something to exist, and only one way for nothing to exist, it is infinitely more likely that there is something rather than nothing. Hence, if nothing existed, that would require explanation, but one need not propose an explanation for why something exists since it is the more likely situation.

I do not see how one could ascertain the likelihood that nothing exists, and Nozick's argument does nothing to establish that nothing existing is unlikely. Moreover, this assumption, that only unlikely, unnatural or abnormal situations can be or need to be explained is simply not true; Nozick is confusing a pragmatic convention with an epistemic necessity.

First, is nothingness statistically more likely or less likely than something? I have no idea how one could answer this question meaningfully. Since there is something and not nothing, perhaps the answer is that the existence of something is a certainty, the existence of nothing is then a statistical impossibility, and we do not need an explanation of the existence of something. That would miss the point since we have to make our probability claims in deciding what needs an explanation absent our knowledge that the thing actually exists. Otherwise nothing that existed would require an explanation. I have no idea how one would argue that something is likely. No one has any idea what the probability is that our universe have the constants, laws of nature or basic features that it does. How could anyone even begin to estimate the probability that there be anything at all (without even considering what such an estimate of probability could even mean)? Without a scientific theory of why something exists at all (which is the question at issue), I don't see how any probability estimate is possible.

Second, the claim that there are infinitely more ways for something to exist than nothing to exist is completely irrelevant to the probability of nothing existing. There are an infinite number of ways in which I might cease to exist from one moment to the next, and only one way to exist (in conformity to the natural law), but I know it's more likely that I will continue to exist as an integrated biological object it is that all those other possibilities (that I will turn into a chicken, that my brain will explode, that I will become a slice of cheese, a bowl of petunias or a whale, etc.) combined will occur.

Making an argument that something is more natural or normal is even less likely to be fruitful than arguing for statistical unlikelihood. I have enough trouble figuring out what it means for something to be natural or normal in other (natural or normal?) contexts, I have no idea how to establish such a claim in this context. I don't think anyone else does either.

Pragmatically, we often look for an explanation for the unusual, abnormal or unnatural because it is unexpected, and we tend to want explanations for the unexpected more than we want explanations for the expected. But that need not be the case. If John, a human being, is born with flippers instead of hands, we might explain this by pointing out that his mother took thalidomide when she was pregnant and that thalidomide causes birth defects of this sort. But if John is a dolphin, and his being born with flippers is normal, natural and statistically expected, we can still explain why he's born with flippers, and it is perfectly reasonable to ask such a question. The statistically likely can still be explained, and we can still reasonably demand such an explanation. In short, pragmatically we often look for explanations for the unexpected, but it is not part of the logic of explanation that we are required to do this.

This leaves us only with the remaining possibility of rejecting PSR and living with the consequences. Is there any legitimate reason to reject PSR or would this have to be an ad hoc atheism-saving move? As it turns out there are two good reasons to reject PSR. First, it is empirically refuted by quantum mechanics. Some facts about the quantum world have no explanation. Why an electron drops from one orbital to another now rather than later has no explanation. Second, we are quickly returned to the infinite regress the theist hoped to avoid if we ask for an explanation for why PSR is true.

Suppose we accept, as does the theist, that PSR is true. There must, therefore, be an explanation for why it is true. It cannot be true because God acts only for reasons and thus nothing would occur without an explanation. Rather amusingly Leibniz gave this as his reason for belief in PSR, yet he later turned around and used PSR to prove the existence of God. Genius!

What other explanation could there be for PSR? It isn't self-evidently true, so we cannot expect it, like God, to be explained in terms of its own concept or nature. So, it must be explained in terms of something else whose explanation, we can, of course, also demand. This means, I think, that we must reject the idea that everything has an explanation.

The theist, in particular, must be unhappy to reject PSR since it underpins the cosmological argument, but to accept PSR renders the whole cosmological argument moot. The point of the argument is to show that we need not be caught in an infinite regress of explanations but can find a first, self-explaining explainer. Unless we reject PSR, however, we are stuck with exactly the regress that the appeal to God is supposed to prevent. And, of course, rejecting PSR means we no longer have the cosmological argument to support belief in God.

The naturalistically-inclined atheist must be unhappy with rejecting PSR in that it potentially blocks scientific inquiry. It's not clear how to limit the damage here. We could accept the "Every event has an explanation for why it occurs" part of PSR (call these type 1 claims) since that does not entail that PSR itself has an explanation. So, this principle is, at least, not caught in our regress problem. The "Every fact has an explanation" part of the principle (call these type 2 claims) remains problematic since PSR is supposed to be a fact. Yet, it is not easily possible to imagine that all scientific demands for an explanation can be understood as type 1 claims. It appears reasonable to demand to know why a falling object has the acceleration that it has, and this is not to be explained (apparently) just in terms of events occurring. Rejecting PSR, while independently necessary, has problematic consequences for science that render it problematic even when considered only as a rejection of this part of the principle.

Conclusion
My conclusion has to be tentative. Theism is not adequately supported by the cosmological argument since it relies on a principle (and part of a principle) that is false. We must, tentatively at least, reject the idea that there is an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. Even if there were such an explanation, appeal to God would be ontologically excessive and unnecessary. More limited posits would, presumably, be preferable to the extravagant claims of the theists. We must, apparently, reject the idea that there are explanations for all facts, and, indeed, the fact that there is something rather than nothing might be (and certainly appears to be) the kind of fact we cannot explain. We must reject the principle of sufficient reason that supports the idea that there is such an explanation.

The difficulty is in limiting the epistemic carnage wrought by rejecting this principle, even if we must only reject one part of it. To say that some facts lack an explanation is problematic since any apparently inexplicable empirical result might turn out to be such a fact. It would be nice if there were some way to reject PSR only for foundational or fundamental claims, but I doubt that there is a clear line one could draw or a way to justify drawing it. Apparently, explanations, as Wittgenstein said, have to come to an end somewhere. There is, at any rate, no reason to think that end has to be God.


Note: I had to revise this a second time after some revisions simply disappeared. Thus, the fact that this post is incomplete or imperfect is entirely the fault of the technical glitch that destroyed all my perfect ruminations. None is the fault of the author.