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

Argument from the Unity of Reality

Form

A Neoplatonic argument (Plotinus, Enneads V.1) that survives in natural theology and in Hindu and Sufi apologetics:

  1. Reality is a single coherent whole. The same laws and constants hold everywhere; every thing is related to every other; the universe is a cosmos, not a heap.
  2. A plurality of independent things would not cohere unless something made them one. Unity is not self-explaining.
  3. Therefore there is a single ultimate source from which the many derive their unity.
  4. That source is God.

The argument is a cousin of the Argument from the Laws of Nature (why the same rules everywhere?) and of the Argument from Contingency (why anything at all?), with the emphasis on oneness rather than regularity or existence.

My Positions

  1. "Unity" is an abstraction we bring, not a thing we find. We describe reality as one because our models aim at coherence; a single consistent description is the goal of enquiry, not a discovery about the world that needs a cause (My Presuppositions). Where the models do not yet cohere (general relativity and quantum mechanics), the world does not look less unified; our descriptions do.
  2. That parts interact does not make the whole an object with a cause. Everything in the universe is connected by gravity and shared history. It does not follow that the collection is a thing which must have been unified by something outside it (Composition Fallacy). The universe is "one" in the way a crowd is one: by being all the things there are.
  3. If a single source is required, the universe already is one. Modern physics describes everything as excitations of a handful of fields that were once a single hot state. The premise that unity requires a unifier is satisfied by the thing to be explained, which is the usual difficulty with cosmological arguments: whatever is said to need an external cause turns out to be a better candidate for not needing one (Occam's Razor - Principle of Parsimony).
  4. Monism is a naturalist option. Spinoza held that there is one substance and called it God or Nature; Jonathan Schaffer's priority monism holds that the whole is more fundamental than its parts; neither needs a mind. The argument reaches "reality is one" and then adds a person.
  5. Plotinus's One was explicitly not a person. It did not think, will, or know the world; it "overflowed". The apologist who borrows the argument swaps in the God of scripture at the last line, exactly as with the Prime Mover Argument.
  6. This is pantheism with an extra step. If the oneness of reality is the evidence, then the thing the evidence points to is reality. Calling reality "God" changes nothing (Deism).

Sources

  • Plotinus, Enneads (c. 270), V.1
  • Spinoza, B., Ethics (1677), Part I
  • Schaffer, J., "Monism: The Priority of the Whole", Philosophical Review 119 (2010)
  • Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason (1781), A620/B648 onwards, on the physico-theological proof

Also see