much the same as a First Cause plus an extra idea imported into the argument from nowhere—the idea that God’s existence is not only a truth but a necessary truth, like the truths of logic. If there were anything in the First Cause argument, it would show only that there was a being who was uncaused, not that there was one who was “necessary.”
leslie
It goes against the grain, but I’m inclined to agree with you.
myra
I am not sure that I am. If God really is God, it seems absurd to say that he might quite well never have existed.
geoffrey
Isn’t this getting perilously close to the “ontological argument,” which tried to show that since the very idea of God implied, as you say, that he was in some way “necessary,” he must exist? We none of us care for that argument, and in any case we agreed at the beginning not to discuss it.
myra
I wasn’t trying to devise an argument at all; just a comment on what Leslie was saying. Sorry, Leslie; you carry on.
leslie
What bothers me is that Geoffrey seems to think the existence of the universe as a whole is something that requires no explanation. To be honest, I have not spent very much time or energy defending the first two forms of this group of “cosmological arguments” because I thought the third was far and away the strongest.
myra
Then can we hear this “strongest argument,” please?
An Explanation for the World?
leslie
Generally speaking, we can look for explanations of things—of events, say, or states of affairs. Obviously, in many cases we don’t bother to look; but even when we don’t, we assume that there is some sort of explanation somewhere. Certainly we can always ask for one. Now this applies to the state of affairs which we call “the existence of the universe.” Why does this state of affairs hold? There must surely be some reason. But the only possible candidate is what you called “the creative will of God.”
geoffrey
You know the obvious answer to that just as well as I do. If everything requires an explanation, doesn’t the existence of a creator require one too?
myra
In some forms of Hinduism it actually has one. Brahma, the Creator, is himself derived from the supreme deity Vishnu; and Vishnu himself may be thought of as deriving from an impersonal Reality which lies beyond even him.
leslie
But that actually illustrates the point I was trying to make. You have to stop somewhere. It may be at the immediate Creator, or some being from whom even he derives; but there is an ultimate Explanation. If this dialogue included a Hindu—at least, a Hindu who held the position Myra has just described—I am sure it would make for much interesting discussion, but it wouldn’t seriously affect my point. Any explanation requires an element of “brute” or “basic” fact and a principle (such as a law of nature, but not confined to them) which links that fact to the thing we want to explain. But you can’t eliminate the element of “basic fact” altogether; that would only produce an incomplete explanation, just the connecting principle and the thing to be explained. And then the latter is not explained after all.
myra
Didn’t St. Thomas Aquinas say something like that? “If you suppress a cause, you suppress its effect.”
geoffrey
He was right in principle, after a fashion, but completely wrong in the way he tried to apply it. There is no question of “suppressing” a First Cause; only of denying that there is one. If something were known to be the potential cause of a world, and somebody suppressed it—if, to take Myra’s Hindu example, Vishnu were to destroy Brahma or forbid him to create the world—then that world would not exist. But there is no question of anything like that being done. Talk of “suppression” is utterly misleading.
leslie
I think the introduction of Aquinas was a bit of a red herring: his language is not that which I was using. My point remains: if your series of explanations contains no element of basic fact, it does not explain. You can have, I suppose, three main types of explanation. First, you can explain one fact in terms of another. Secondly, you can show that the fact is a necessary truth. And thirdly, you can explain it as a matter of chance—it was one of several possibilities, but there simply is no explanation of why this one rather than the others should have been actual. Now the point is that the first of these (and indeed the third) is not a complete explanation, for it leaves us with a further fact that has not been explained. You need what I called a “basic” fact—one that does not require explanation.
geoffrey
But in an infinite series of explanations, there is no need for any “basic fact.” A is the case because B is, and B is because C is, and so on ad infinitum. There is a complete explanation, only it happens to be one that goes on back for ever. That is quite different from giving up part-way!
myra
Doesn’t that bring us back to what we were talking about earlier—the beginning of the universe? If there was a beginning to the universe, you cannot go back ad infinitum.
leslie
Geoffrey wanted at that stage to avoid your point by treating the universe as a whole, didn’t he? Well, I shall do so myself, and argue that even if there are explanations (perhaps) for everything in the universe, we still need an explanation for the universe itself, as a whole. Whether there is a beginning of time, or an infinite past, or some distortion of time on the lines suggested by Hawking—all that makes no difference. The thing as a whole cries out for explanation.
geoffrey
Why? If everything in the universe is explained, there is no need for an explanation for the universe itself; for the universe does not consist of anything over and above its component parts. Your own ancestor Cleanthes put it admirably two hundred years ago: “Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable should you afterwards ask me what was the cause of the whole twenty.”
leslie
I’m not absolutely sure about that “not consisting of anything over and above its component parts” business. But let that pass; for I am absolutely sure that Cleanthes’ argument was wrong. If each, or even one, particle in the “collection” is explained in terms of something outside the collection, you have a First Cause (or more than one). But if each is explained purely in terms of others in the collection, all you have is an explanation of why these particles go together, not why they exist, why they go together in a real world as opposed to an imaginary one. If you explain everything in the universe in terms of other things in the universe, all in terms of one another, then you do need an external explanation for the whole. If I never go anywhere without Myra, and Myra never goes anywhere without Geoffrey, and Geoffrey never goes anywhere without me, then if any of us is in this room the others will be too. And yet it still makes sense to ask why we are in this room rather than in another.
This was the heart of Leibniz’s “book argument.”
