Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Existential Dependence

Form

Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, I, q.104, a.1) and, in its modern form, Edward Feser's "Aristotelian proof" (Five Proofs, 2017):

  1. Things do not merely come into existence; they are kept in existence from moment to moment. A contingent thing's existence is "borrowed" and must be continuously supplied.
  2. In a hierarchical or "essentially ordered" causal series (the hand moves the stick that moves the stone), the lower members have causal power only derivatively and only while the higher member acts, here and now.
  3. Such a series cannot regress to infinity, since derivative power must derive from something that has it non-derivatively.
  4. Therefore there is a first member whose existence is underived, which sustains everything else at every instant.
  5. That sustaining cause is God: not a creator who started things off, but the one in whom all things live and move and have their being.

The argument is designed to be immune to cosmology: it does not matter whether the universe had a beginning.

My Positions

  1. Premise 1 assumes that existing needs a continuous cause, and physics says the reverse. Persistence is the default. Nothing is needed to keep an electron in existence; something would be needed to destroy it. Conservation laws, inertia, and the stability of matter are not evidence of an unseen hand holding things up; they are the absence of any process that would make them fall down. The Aristotelian picture was wrong about motion, which was its first example, and the correction, Newton's first law, applies here too (Prime Mover Argument).
  2. "Being" is not a fluid passed down a chain. The hand moves the stick by transferring energy, a quantity that physics describes exactly. Nothing analogous is transferred when a thing "exists". The argument reifies existence into a substance that must be supplied and then asks who supplies it (Kalam Cosmological Argument on the same move with "cause").
  3. The essentially ordered series is a picture, not a finding. Every real example is of things in the world acting on each other through time, and the "here and now" simultaneity the argument needs does not exist: causes propagate at finite speed. A series of physical dependences bottoms out, if it bottoms at all, in a physical substrate, and the quantum fields are as good a candidate for "existing in themselves" as anything the theist proposes.
  4. If God sustains every instant, God does everything. A being who holds the cancer cell in existence at each moment it divides is not permitting the cancer; he is making it. This is occasionalism, and it removes the free-will defence, the "natural causes" of the theodicies, and any difference between what God does and what merely happens (Problem of evil).
  5. The attributes are added afterwards and more weakly. The argument, if it worked, would deliver a non-derivative existent. That it is one, personal, good, and interested in us is argued separately in every presentation, by the steps I reject under Argument from Divine Simplicity and Argument from Contingency.
  6. Its immunity to cosmology is bought with immunity to evidence. An argument that holds whatever the universe is like, whether it began or not, whatever physics turns out to be, is an argument that no observation bears on (Popper's Razor). That is not a strength.

I do not know what, if anything, is fundamental. I see no reason to believe the fundamental thing is continuously propping up the non-fundamental things, and no reason to call it God if it were (Owens Tryptic of Ignorance).

Sources

  • Aquinas, T., Summa Theologica (c. 1270), I, q.104, a.1
  • Feser, E., Five Proofs of the Existence of God (2017), ch. 1
  • Oppy, G., Arguing About Gods (2006), ch. 3, on cosmological arguments
  • Hume, D., Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Part IX

Also see