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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Contingency

Form

  1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
  2. The universe exists.
  3. Therefore the universe has an explanation of its existence.
  4. The universe does not exist by the necessity of its own nature; it is contingent, since it could have been otherwise or not at all.
  5. Therefore the universe has an external cause.
  6. (Usually added) That cause must itself exist necessarily, and a necessarily existing cause of everything else is God.

This is the third of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways (Summa Theologica, I, q.2, a.3), the argument from possibility and necessity, in the form later given to it by Leibniz. Premise 1 is Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason. The modern apologetic version is William Lane Craig's, which compresses the argument to "if the universe has an explanation, that explanation is God".

My Positions

  1. Premise 1 is an assumption, not a finding. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is an attractive habit of mind, and a useful working rule for enquiry, but nothing demonstrates that it holds without exception. Some facts may simply be brute. Worse, taken in its strong form the principle undermines the argument that uses it: if everything has a sufficient reason, then nothing could have been otherwise, and there are no contingent things left for the argument to start from.
  2. "Necessary" is doing all the work, and it is not clear it can do any. A necessary being is one whose non-existence is impossible. But there is no contradiction in supposing that God does not exist, so God is not necessary in any sense I can test. "Metaphysically necessary" is defined to fit the conclusion. The same difficulty sinks the Ontological Argument.
  3. The move from contingent parts to a contingent whole is unearned. That each thing in the universe depends on something else does not show that the universe as a whole depends on anything. Every brick in a wall rests on another brick; it does not follow that the wall rests on a brick. See Composition Fallacy.
  4. Aquinas's version contains a quantifier shift. From "each contingent thing at some time does not exist" he concludes "at some time nothing exists". That is a non-sequitur: every member of a club may at some point be absent without the club ever being empty. See Equivocation.
  5. The stopping point is a choice, not a discovery. If your explanation terminates in a necessarily rational being, and mine in a necessarily ordered cosmos, both stop somewhere. But mine stops with fewer entities and no hidden intentions. Thus the principle of parsimony would suggest mine is the more reasonable position. Every chain of explanation ends in a brute fact, a circle, or a regress (Münchhausen trilemma); the argument merely insists that its preferred brute fact be called God.
  6. Exempting God from the demand for explanation is special pleading. The argument asks why there is a universe rather than nothing, and then declines to ask why there is a God rather than nothing. "God exists necessarily" is not an answer to that question; it is a refusal to take it.
  7. Even granted, the argument does not reach a god. A necessarily existing something need not be conscious, personal, good, singular, or interested in us. Craig's further step, that the explanation must be a personal agent because an abstract object cannot cause anything, assumes that the only candidates are abstract objects and minds. A necessarily existing physical substrate is neither, and it is the obvious third option.
  8. The argument, like its relatives, trades on the Appeal to Ignorance: we cannot say why there is something rather than nothing, therefore God. I do not know why the universe exists, and I see no reason to think that the question has an answer of the kind the argument wants. See Owens Tryptic of Ignorance.

Notes

The argument is distinct from the First Cause Argument and the Kalam Cosmological Argument in that it does not depend on the universe having a beginning. A universe with an infinite past would still, on this argument, be contingent and still need an explanation. That makes it the strongest of the cosmological family, since it is not hostage to any particular cosmology, and also the most purely metaphysical, since all of its weight rests on the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the notion of a necessary being.

Leibniz set out the modern form in On the Ultimate Origination of Things (1697) and the Monadology (1714). Aquinas's Third Way is the medieval ancestor, by way of Aristotle and the Islamic philosophers. The version most often heard today is Craig's, from Reasonable Faith (3rd ed., 2008).

Also see