Every cosmological argument depends upon a causal principle, yet for every causal principle under the sun, a skeptic can question whether it might have some exceptions. But what if the causal principle was something like this:
(C) There is something (or could be something) that would have to have a cause--such as my armchair.
Might a skeptic of "∀x" type causal principles find that principle plausible?
If so, then perhaps we can invite her to consider a couple different paths to a Necessary Being (a concrete thing whose non-existence would be impossible):
Path A:
If one admits that MY armchair--for example--would have to have a cause, then won't one also admit that any intrinsic duplicate of my armchair would have to have a cause? Surely, there's nothing special about MY armchair (origin essentialism aside). It seems that if an X has to have a cause, then any intrinsic duplicate of X should, too. We can go further: if my armchair has to have a cause, then surely any slightly smaller or slightly bigger armchair would have to have a cause as well. Change in size doesn't seem to be a relevant difference here. Same goes for changes in any of these: shape, number of parts, mass, velocity... When I ask myself what change might be relevant to its needing a cause, only two answers come to mind: change with respect to its AGE from finite to infinite, and change with respect to whether its existence is a matter of necessity or not. Now it seems to me that there's nothing about an armchair that would make it impossible for it to be infinite in age, if having an infinite age doesn't entail existing as a matter of necessity. But given the principle that every armchair would have to have a cause, it looks like either having infinite age entails existing of necessity or else having infinite age doesn't take away one's need for a cause. This leads to the following Principle of Similarity: if X would have to have a cause, then for every Y, if Y does not differ from X with respect to whether its existence is a matter of necessity, then Y would have to have a cause, too.
From (C) and the Principle of Similarity, we arrive at the traditional causal principle that every contingent (non-necessary) thing requires a cause. This is a conclusory premise. The paths from here to a Necessary Being are familiar: either deny that it is a necessary truth that every causal chain be infinite (in which case there is a possible world in which a causal chain is headed by a Necessary Being), or suppose that causal chains are themselves "things" (in which case the causal chain consisting of all contingent things would itself be a contingent thing in need of a cause), or interpret (C) and its supporting Principle of Similarity as statements about contingent facts concerning the existence of things. (For each path, add an auxiliary principle that rules out causal circularity.)
Path B:
Some philosophers accept a principle of recombination regarding distinct contingent things: any contingent thing can coexist with any other and can fail to coexist with any other (where coexisting need not be at the same time). One might worry about origin essentialism, however--perhaps, my armchair could not exist unless its very cause(s) existed. But there is a Principle of Independence in the neighborhood that is compatible with origin essentialism. It's this: any contingently exemplifiable, maximally specific but non-haecceitous, intrinsic type T can be co-exemplified in a world with any other contingently exemplifiable, maximally specific but non-haecceitous, intrinsic type and can be exemplified by exactly one thing while failing to be co-exemplified in a world with any other contingently exemplifiable, maximally specific but non-haecceitous, intrinsic type T* that is such that something can exemplify T without exemplifying T* and without having parts that exemplify T* (one should think about how to phrase this more simply... :)).
I suggest that one may find the Principle of Independence plausible without first having to admit the possibility of a Necessary Being. The principle can seem perfectly plausible in its own right. (That isn't to say that everyone ought to find it plausible.)
Now recall that (C) says that my armchair (or something) requires a cause. One need not accept the full Principle of Similarity above to thereby suspect that any intrinsic duplicate of my armchair would also require a cause. By the Principle of Independence, it's possible for there to be an intrinsic duplicate of my armchair that doesn't co-exist with any other contingent things (other than its parts). But if a cause is always required, then it's possible for an intrinsic duplicate of my armchair to be caused by something other than a contingent thing. Therefore, there can be a Necessary Being. Therefore, there is one (given S5).
Concluding thoughts:
I find it plausible that for any contingent thing or things, there ought to be a causal explanation for why that thing or those things exist. But for someone who is skeptical of this, I think it's fair to ask her whether she thinks anything at all requires a cause. If the answer is yes, then it may be worth exploring whether her answer has any significant implications when combined with various other principles, such as a principle of similarity or independence.
Similar remarks could be given with respect to the principle that there is something that could have a cause... Is there a principle of similarity that would suggest that a maximally "big" contingent thing could have a cause?
Of course, there is a trade-off: the more modest the causal principle in a cosmological argument, the more we must rely upon auxiliary principles to reach an interesting conclusion.
Very clever! I do think, however, that the typical philosophical opponent will either deny that the chair needs a cause or say that it only needs a cause due to origins essentialism.
If the chair doesn't need a cause or only needs a cause due to origins essentialism, then we have to answer this question: why don't intrinsic duplicates of my chair ever pop into existence uncaused? The simplest answer, I think, is that they can't. A different answer is that there is a physical law P, such that P obtains and necessarily, if P obtains, then nothing can come to be without a cause. But this answer has two costs: (i) it's more complex; (ii) it posits a contingent law that has no explanation (what would it's explanation be?) Are there other answers?
Another route to explore is to begin with the principle that there could be something that could have a cause. Who would deny that? Then, using a defeasible Principle of Similarity, we might be able to support the idea that a maximally "big" contingent thing--one that occuppies as much space as anything could occuppy and that is maximally dense--could have a cause. Well, it couldn't have a cause unless there could be a non-spatial cause because no spatial cause could fit in the same world (unless it popped out of existence just prior to its effect... but I suspect that that kind of causation would only be possible on eternalism, and on eternalism we can talk about a maximally big spatio-temporal contingent thing). So unless one has a reason to think that there couldn't be non-spatial things, the Principle of Similarity might provide a reason to think there could be such things.
Now a chair is an arrangement of various parts, so if a chair could have a cause, then a Principle of Similarity might suggest that any contingent arrangement of things could have a cause. So, take a maximal arrangement M that consists of a maximal collection of contingent non-spatial things (I'm assuming there is such a collection because there is no worry that there could be too many non-spatial things to "fit" them into a world) plus a maximally "big" contingent thing. If M can have a cause, then there can be a Necessary Being (as no contingent thing could cause M without causal circularity). Therefore, there is a Necessary Being.
Of course, here the sort of work that is usually carried out by a causal principle is being carried out by a principle of similarity. That's the trade-off.
Clever, but you may well run into set-theoretic paradox with the maximally big non-spatial arrangement. How many duplicates of St Michael are there? Aleph-17? But why not Aleph-18?
The maximal spatiotemporal arrangement is also problematic since you could have infinitely many universes which are not spatiotemporally related to each other.
Alex,
I would guess: either Aleph-1 St. Michael duplicates or else no cardinality because the duplicates form a proper class.
Nice point about the universes that aren't spatiotemporally related. I see three options here:
1. Deny that x and y could be spatial and yet not spatially related. (This seems reasonable to me.)
2. Suppose along with Lewis that spatially unrelated universes would also be causally unrelated. Then, any cause of a maximally big object would have to be within the same "universe" as that object.
3. Let M be that contingent arrangement consisting of a maximal collection--a proper class--of spatially unrelated universes.
Very interesting. I have worries about both Path A and Path B. Regarding path A, you write:
So far, at least, I see the appeal of this.
This seems to me inadequately imaginative. Consider an object O that differs from your armchair in the following respect: O is a complex object that includes within itself many particular objects, a space-time structure, and a set of laws (of a non-Humean kind), yet O doesn't exist as a matter of necessity. Does O need a cause? If you want to prod the intuition that it does, you might try to emphasize its similarity to the armchair by making it seem to be nothing more than an aggregate of things similar to an ordinary physical object like that armchair. But I've included in this thing both a space-time structure and laws of nature, and this was meant just to forestall such comparisons. Those elements don't require that O be infinite or a necessary existent. (The laws have modal force of some sort, but that hardly implies that O itself is a necessary existent.)
Perhaps the reason we find it appealing to suppose that the armchair needs a cause is that we already think of it as part of a system that includes laws of nature, where those laws ensure that such entities don't pop into existence willy-nilly. But this would hardly ensure that entities such as entire systems can't "pop" into existence willy-nilly. (The "pop into existence" talk is misleading, of course, given that it suggests an event of something's beginning to exist within a universe of some sort, or at least something that admits of spatiotemporal characterization, already.)
You make a point in comments that seems relevant.
The answer appealing to a law is relevant to the object I considered above. How is this answer "more complex"? Presumably you mean it's more complex than saying that such entities as armchairs simply can't pop into existence. Well, yes, but if insisting that armchairs do need a cause for their existence leads us to a necessary existent that does cause such things, we reintroduce complexity in another way, so I don't find that very persuasive. But setting aside (i), what of point (ii)? It doesn't seem to me that there's anything odd about positing such unexplained contingent laws. Certainly it's no more objectionable than positing a necessary existent with a variety of features needed to make it suitable as a cause of the universe, where those features certainly appear to be contingently exemplified, even if theists insist they are not.
What of Path B? Well, the Principle of Independence proposed here is being combined with a sort of principle of dependence -- namely, that for certain kinds of types, they cannot be exemplifed unless their tokens are caused. Seeing this should make us very cautous about endorsing both. What are the intuitions behind them? I venture to say that if a philosopher finds the Principle of Independence plausible, he likely finds it plausible precisely because what he is imagining, and taking to be possible, is a world in which there are un-caused tokens of those types. Certainly when I've discussed such independence principles with others, that is the sort of scenario that seems to be at issue. So, the intuition supporting the independence claim is actually at odds with whatever intuitions support the claim that armchair-like things cannot exist without a cause. As a result, it's reasonable to reject the conjunction of the two claims and insist that one or the other should be given up.
-Gene
Hi Gene,
Thanks for those remarks. You make a really good point about the intuition behind the Principle of Independence possibly being in tension with the intuition behind the causal principle of dependence. Of course, the principles are not themselves inconsistent with each other. But your point is that it may be that one's reason for believing the one would be a reason to doubt the other. That is an important observation.
Still, I wonder if there can be motivations for the principles that are not in tension with one another. For example, it may seem to someone--as it does to me--that the existence of contingent substances are logically independent of each other, but not because for each contingent thing one can imagine it existing alone (perhaps there is an un-image-able necessary being lurking around...), but rather because for any two contingent things, one can imagine one existing without the other (same for sets of contingent things). That motivation behind a Principle of Independence seems perfectly consistent with the feeling that my chair requires some cause or other.
But I can appreciate how your observation may raise caution concerning the above sort of reasoning.
Regarding path A, your proposal of O [a complex object that includes within itself many particular objects, a space-time structure, and a set of laws] is very interesting. I have a few questions/remarks:
1. Why can't we say the same about my chair: it's a complex object that includes within itself many particular objects, a space-time structure, and a set of laws? Of course, the laws at work within my chair are also at work outside it, but why should that matter? Would O only need a cause if there were things located outside O? Why should an extrinsic difference make a difference to O's need for a cause? Same question regarding my chair: would my chair no longer need a cause if the stuff around it were deleted? Why would that be?
2. You suggest that if a simpler hypothesis entails greater complexity, then the virtue of simplicity is awash. I think I see things differently here. Every hypothesis entails infinitely many propositions, including the infinitely complex conjunction of them. The complexity entailed is of little consequent, it seems to me. Example: we accept simple electron theories that explain various common effects of atoms even though a more complex hypothesis could be given that doesn't commit us to the existence of countless electrons.
3. My sense is that any theory that posits an unexplained contingency (or apparent contingency) bears a cost (unless a reason can be given for thinking that the sort of contingency in question cannot or need not have an explanation). I don't see that the theistic hypothesis does that--I may well have missed something though. I'm curious what features of a necessary being would be required that appear to you contingent. One reason some theists have given for thinking that a necessary (concrete) being would be infinite in various respects is that finite measures would appear arbitrary and contingent.
Josh,
Thanks for the further thoughts.
Fair enough. In my own case, though, I find some such independence thesis tempting precisely because find no conceptual or imaginative resistance to imagining such entities as existing entirely alone, or at least alone but for anything that exists necessarily and which can be ignored for the purposes of the thought experiment (and hence is not imagined as playing any causal role vis-a-vis the contingent entity).
There's a lot to say here.
First, it's not clear that the type that is at issue -- that is, the one that was salient in the discussion, exemplified by the armchair, and requiring only intrinsic properties -- is one that contains any laws. I meant "containing" simply in terms of requiring them as part of its essence, so if O contains some laws, then, necessarily, if O exists, the entities in O's spacetime structure are governed by those specific laws. Was the armchair type in question one that built in such laws or not? I suppose we should just consider both cases.
Suppose it has some laws built into it. In that case, it may be that the reason that the type in question is such that its instances need a cause is just this: the laws that must attend any such instances govern instances of that type. More precisely, let C be an intrinsic type that the chair exemplifies but which doesn't have any laws built into it; let L be some laws that govern C; then CL can be the type in question such that, necessarily, instances of CL have a cause -- because instances of CL are instances of C and governed by L.
If that's the story about the salient chair type, does it apply to O as well? It depends on what exactly O is and what the laws are that are built into it. I was imagining that O is a kind of system of nature where the laws in question govern things in the spacetime of O but not any type exemplified by O itself. So that would be a relevant difference between O and the chair.
As is no doubt obvious, I was thinking of O as being a complete universe of some sort, and there is a good question as to how to think of the nature of such a thing in the first place. If you think of it as nothing but an aggregate of all the things within it, then it seems that the relevant laws will apply to it as well. But this is not how I was thinking of O; I was imagining it as something not reducible to such an aggregate. For lack of a better term, call O a "natural system" or a "system of nature." The laws built into O need not govern natural systems as such, of course. You might complain that it's not obvious exactly what sort of thing a natural system is, and I recognize that, but I doubt the idea is utterly foreign or bizarre.
But what of the other option -- supposing that the armchair type doesn't have any laws built into it? Well, in that case, does it still seem to need to have a cause? It might seem to so long as we are imagining it existing in a world which is governed by laws that do require it to have such a cause. But now we need to consider the possibility of it existing in a world without any such laws, and now the intuitive appeal of this idea -- that it must have a cause -- starts to lose its grip. Or so I would report.
I found this comment surprising; I wasn't supposing that merely entailing infinitely many propositions made an hypothesis complex, but entailing those that are complex by some other measure (don't ask; I don't know) and which we know to entail such further complexities.
I take it that the necessary being such commitments drive us to has to be capable of explaining the contingent things that uncontroversially exist, and to do so it either must make those things not contingently existent after all or cause them in some fashion requiring free will. If the former, then we have lots of apparent contingency even if it's allegedly necessary. If the latter, we apparently need to appeal to some kind of libertarian free will to create the contingent universe.
In appealing to such, a similar kind of apparent contingency will be brought in. Obviously, we have the contingency of the free act of creation, but that, I take it, is thought not to introduce an explanatory cost as it is only to be expected from the nature of freedom. But the necessary being does not act arbitrarily -- he apparently has reasons to act as he does. On the familiar story, he is all good and wants to do something good, and this free creation is a good act. His being all-good is one feature that seems rather arbitrary. Yes, it's not as arbitrary as saying that he is, say, 84% good, but it's no less arbitrary than saying that he is infinitely morally indifferent or infinitely morally depraved. So far as the cosmological argument goes, further, there's no reason to prefer saying that he had a good reason to create than saying that he is a whimsical being who creates things for no reason. That might be his character.
There are other ways of bringing out the contingency. If we compare "all powerful" with "powerful to N degree" we of course incline to the former as less seemingly arbitrary. But we need to consider not just "all vs. n degree" for familiar characteristics but the various kinds of characteristics that could be relevant. For instance, compare a necessary being who loves more than anything else a certain geometrical pattern and this influenced his free act to create a world with as much of that pattern as possible; he's not all good, but hey, just good enough consistent with the goal of maximizing that pattern.
I suppose someone might think he has an argument for thinking that a perfectly good, deliberate, wise, knowing, &c. necessary being is somehow a priori more likely than any of these alternative necessary beings with features to these limiting degrees, but I doubt anything like that could be more than an ad hoc attempt to rationalize what we already find "natural" to suppose as a result of the theistic tradition.
(Obviously, if there are other theistic arguments conjoined with this one, that could change the judgments as to which of these suppositions should be treated as more credible, but my point is just relevant to the cosmological argument on its own.)
In any case, that's the sort of thing I had in mind.
-Gene
Gene,
Those are good clarifications and remarks. Thank you!
I'd like to offer just one further thought concerning the idea that it is somewhat arbitrary that a necessary being should be perfectly good rather than infinitely bad or a-moral. It may seem to someone--I don't say everyone--that greatness is conceptually and/or ontologically prior to goodness, as well as to every other intrinsic property a necessary being might have. That is to say, if a necessary being were maximally great, then it may seem that the being should thereby be maximal in other jointly compatible great-making properties, including moral goodness. And the concept of a maximal being may seem to be the simplest and least arbitrary. By contrast, if a necessary being were infinitely bad, then its greatness would be partial rather than maximal. And such partiality may seem arbitrary. Does it strike you as arbitrary that a necessary being should be maximally great?
Josh:
It seems to me that the issues that led to positing a proper class are going to come back again. It makes intuitive sense to talk of a "collection" of sets. It's too big to be a set, fine, so it's a proper class. But in exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reasons, it makes sense to talk of a "collection" of classes. It's too big to be a class, so...
But here is another problem. If one can coherently talk of the maximal aggregate of contingent beings--call it Big--then the atheist can say:
1. There is an exact duplicate of Big that has a cause.
2. If essentiality of origins is false, Big can have a cause.
Here's how (1) could be done. It could be that Big is an exact duplicate of a proper part, LessBig, of Big. It could, further, be the case that something in Big outside of LessBig is a cause of LessBig. That would yield (1). As for (2), if essentiality of origins is false, then there might be an exact duplicate, Big*, of Big, which contains an isomorphic copy LessBig* of LessBig, but which is such that LessBig* = Big.
This is only going to work if Big has the form of a bunch of infinite causal chains, and a Big posited by an atheist probably won't have that form.
Alex,
You raise an important worry concerning classes, but I'm not convinced that whatever reasons there are to think that there could be a proper class of St. Michaels are reasons to think that there could be a collection of St Michaels that isn't a class.
Your next proposal is clever (if I understand it), but can't one argue that it is implausible that there could be a thing that is an exact duplicate of one of its proper parts? Maybe I'm missing something...
Josh:
Someone who thinks that there is no problem with actual infinities and who denies the identity of indiscernibles (I myself affirm it, in a fairly strong form) is pretty much committed to there being aggregates (whether we see these as objects or handle them by plural quantification) that are exact duplicates of their proper parts. For instance, imagine an infinite ruler, with an indiscernible chickens arranged at 1m, 2m, 3m, 4m, .... Then take the aggregate of these indiscernible chickens. This aggregate is a duplicate of the aggregate of chickens at 2m, 3m, 4m, ....
As soon as you have infinities of intrinsic duplicates that are not spatiotemporally arranged, it doesn't seem all that hard to get aggregates that are duplicates of their proper parts.
On classes, imagine this. For each class C, there possibly is a world w and a person x in w such that it is true at w that (a) C is x's favorite abstract object, (b) x without any overdetermination makes a duplicate of Michaelangelo's David, and (c) the facts in (a) and (b) express an intrinsic properties of x. Call a being that satisfies (a)-(c) (in the world we are interested in) a C-lover. Now, for every pair (w,x) satisfying (a)-(c), Big will have to contain an intrinsic duplicate of x-in-w. Therefore, Big will contain a C-lover for every C. So, we get:
1. There are at least as many persons in Big as there are classes.
Moreover, how many intrinsic duplicates of the David are there? Well, there is at least one for every C-lover. So:
2. There are at least as many duplicates of the David in Big as there are classes.
Now, one might worry that non-overdeterminedly creating a duplicate of the David cannot be an intrinsic property. Suppose that that objection is a good one.
There still are other moves that can be made. First, we might replace (b) with (b*) and x has a non-overlappable body, and replace (c) with (c*) which says that (a) and (b*) express intrinsic properties, where something is non-overlappable provided that it is impossible that two duplicates of y occupy overlapping regions of spacetime. This would then imply that Big contains a non-overlapping C-lover* (where that's defined by (a), (b*) and (c*)) for every C. It's problematic whether they could all fit in one spacetime. If they can't, then that's a problem if you're right in a suggestion in an earlie comment that spatiotemporal objects need to be in the same spacetime. But it's hard to see how they could fit. Moreover, it seems that once one has a world with infinitely many C-lovers*, it should be imaginable that each of them sculpts a duplicate of the David. The non-overlap condition on their bodies makes it very hard to see how they could be making fewer Davids than there are classes.
We can go further: if my armchair has to have a cause, then surely any slightly smaller or slightly bigger armchair would have to have a cause as well. Change in size doesn't seem to be a relevant difference here. Same goes for changes in any of these: shape, number of parts, mass, velocity
While I am not convinced by this rejoinder myself, couldn't someone argue there is a kind of fallacy here. A bit like the kind of fallacy made when a person notes that taking one cent from a person does not make a relevant difference to their wealth and then, by incrementally subtracting a cent at a time till nothing is left, coming to the conclusion that a poor person is not poor.
Alex,
Thanks for those interesting thoughts. Is there a problem with affirming (1) and (2)? I'm not sure I understood why it would be a problem if the non-overlappable bodies couldn't fit into one space-time. That would just show that there is no Big that contains all possible bodies, right? I apologize if I missed your point.
You're right about overlappable bodies.
But as for (1), it suggests that saying that there are classwise many duplicates is unlikely to be enough for maximality.
Why can't Big simply contain all possible immaterial persons (plus some maximally big and dense material object), whether or not they can all be contained by a class?
Josh -
Sorry for the delayed followup.
I was unsure what I wanted to say here for a while, and I think it's because I myself muddied the waters a bit by starting to move back and forth between apparent contingency and arbitrariness as if they were equivalent, but this masks an important distinction between (i) saying that the fact that P is arbitrary in the sense that it's a contingent truth that P that lacks explanation and (ii) saying that it's arbitrary to suppose that P is true in the sense that we could with equal warrant suppose some contrary hypothesis.
Say we have argued ourselves to the existent of a necessary existent X, and X has a feature F to some degree. In this case, I agree that it's not arbitrary to prefer the hypothesis that X has F to some limiting degree (maximal -- or minimal, really, if there's room for such) to any particular value in between. But that is not to say that, supposing X indeed has F to that limiting degree, it's not contingent that X has F to that degree. Nor is it to say that there is an explanation of the fact that X has F to that degree. It's only to make a claim about our warrant for opting for the simpler hypothesis.
What was at issue, though, was whether all contingent beings have causes, and I was expanding this a bit to the question as to whether all contingent facts must have explanations. So, even if we were warranted in supposing that this necessary existent has a certain set of familiar features because it's simpler to suppose it has those rather than others, the question remains as to whether this supposition is consistent with the thought that all the contingencies need explanation. My point is that one could be warranted in attributing all those features but still have to deny that all the contingent facts have been explained.
And if that's right, then the earlier steps of the argument need to be rethought; after all, if the upshot is to admit that there are going to be certain contingencies that cannot be explained, then one should re-examine earlier steps that seemed plausible only because one didn't want to allow any unexplained contingencies. (Of course, it may be that the earlier steps in the favored cosmological argument get by on a weaker claim about what needs explanation. Perhaps, for instance, contingent facts about what exists need explanation but not all contingent facts, period. But I find this a suspicious discrimination.)
Now how does all this get back to what you were saying about greatness? You suggest that greatness might be "conceptually and/or ontologically prior to" goodness. I'm not sure I know how you mean this but my guess is that it means that, when something has both goodness and greatness, it has goodness because it has greatness, and not vice versa. Okay - so that's an explanatory claim. Perhaps then you'd want to use this explanatory claim to deal with all the attributes that seem contingent, saying they are all possessed because that thing has greatness.
I understand the move formally, but I don't see any appeal to it, since I don't have any grip on what "greatness" could signify that would make this sort of explanation plausible.
-Gene
Josh:
Plausibly, however many immaterial persons there actually are, there could be another person. One way to get that intuition is to use the recombination principles that your argument anyway needs. Here's one way to see this. Suppose we have a world w that contains persons P1, P2, .... Now, there will be a world w* that contains P1, P2, ... and one other person. Here is one construction. For any plurality Q of persons, it is possible to have a person who likes each member of Q more than he likes himself. Moreover, by recombination principles, this person should be able to coexist with P1, P2, ... while still having that property of liking each member of Q more than he likes himself (maybe--one may worry that the property is not intrinsic). And this person cannot be one of P1, P2, .... So, there is a world w* that contains all the persons of Q, plus one more person, who likes each member of Q more than himself.