With sufficiently robust assumptions about how causation works, it is possible to formulate various Cosmological Arguments (there's more than one) in a strictly deductive way. But in our age there isn't enough of a consensus about how causation works, or even whether it really exists, to create an argument with broad popular appeal. Some people even say that Science has refuted the idea of causality and replaced it with other concepts.
Instead I'm going to go the long way around and focus on the concept of explanations. It seems utterly clear to me that Science is in the business of finding explanations for certain phenomena. If it can't do that, it loses any claim to make sense out of the world. If you want your theory to explain even one single thing about the world, then that requires you to give an account of what circumstances explain that thing. Then we say that the thing happened because of those circumstances. And as you can see, that word “because” has the word cause sitting inside of it. Grammar itself teaches us that Science requires some notion of causation.
For example, we say things like “the planets all rotate around the sun in the same direction because the solar system formed from a rotating disk of gas”, or “the heat capacity of matter is finite because it is made out of atoms”, or “electrons attract protons because they have negative charge”, or “energy is conserved because the laws of nature are invariant under time translation.” It is not obvious that these various senses of “because” all correspond to the exact same concept, but we can take almost any of them as examples for what I am going to say. (Except perhaps for the “because” of pure logical deduction from definitions, i.e. “cold is the absence of heat because that is what the word cold means; 2+2 = 4 because 4 is twice two. But pure logic is not enough to explain everything that happens, since avoidance of strict logical inconsistency is a rather weak constraint.)
Aristotle famously said that there are four different types of causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. As a classification of the types of "because" answers we give to various questions, this seems fairly reasonable. But some people would argue that the physical sciences only use some of these types of explanations. In particular, it is disputed whether final causes, which express purposes—e.g. that the sun exists in order to produce light, or that the animals eat in order to receive nourishment—really exist in reality outside of our own minds. This question will pop up later when we discuss Ethics, not to mention the Fine-Tuning Argument. For the time being, let's consider less controversial notions of causation, without assuming Aristotle’s division to be correct.
In order to side-step some possible misunderstandings about what I mean by an explanation, let me make it clear that I am using the term explanation in a broad sense, so that:
A. Explanations can be Nondeterministic. An explanation does not need to be deterministic, in the sense that the effect invariably follows from the cause. It is enough if the explanation produces a framework, in which it makes sense that the cause might be produced. For example, Quantum Mechanics is a nondeterministic theory, in the sense that if you start with a given initial condition, and you know the laws of physics, there is generally more than one possible final outcome, and you can only predict their probabilities. So long as the probability of what happens is not so low as to indicate that the theory is probably wrong, I'm going to count this type of thing as an explanation of the experimental outcome. That's because it seems that the universe is not deterministic, and if it isn't, then probabilistic explanation is the best that we can do.
For example, if a radioactive atom decays, you can't predict exactly when it will decay, but you can still explain why it can decay with reference to the forces and particles in the nucleus. It's not like the decay occurs in an explanatory void. So I think in a quantum mechanical theory, we need to generalize our notions of "explanation" and/or "causation" to allow for such nondeterministic explanations. Just because you can't predict exactly what happens, doesn't mean there isn't a set of circumstances which causes whatever does happens to happen. It's just that there's more than one possible outcome that set of circumstances could have produced. That's different from something happening without any causes at all.
B. Explanations can be Unknown. Similarly, there obviously exist some phenomena which do have an explanation, but we don't know what it is yet. In that case, I want the term “explanation” to refer to the actual reason why the thing occurs, and not merely to those explanations which are currently known to our limited human minds. Maybe we will never find out the full explanation for something, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This point is important because Cosmological Reasoning, as I understand it, involves the attempt to push back the concept of explanation back to its ultimate fundamentals, to see what a fundamental explanation would have to look like in principle. For example, a Naturalist doesn't necessarily need to know what the most fundamental theory of physics should look like, to propose that if we did know it fully, it would then explain everything else.
On the other hand:
C. Explanations are not just Regularities. I reject the Humean view that causality is just a name for the constant conjunction of events. In the end, I think this boils down to a renunciation of the possibility of explaining anything. “Rocks have always fallen down before” is simply not an explanation for why the next rock falls down. It doesn't have the right form to be an explanation. It may make it rational to believe that the next rock will fall down, but the reason it does so is that we believe that there are underlying causes (in this case, gravitational attraction to the Earth) which remain roughly the same for each rock. Conversely, there are many types of regularities (e.g. as of 2014, a woman has never been U.S. President) which may be unbroken in our experience, but that doesn't make those recurrences Laws of Nature. Hence, when we seek to explain things, we ought to demand more than just the occurrence of regularities.
This seems to me to be elementary common sense, and I don't think the mathematization of physics (which merely describes these regularities, in increasing generality and detail) should change this conclusion. But even if you accept the Regularity View, you still can't do Science at all unless you try to figure out how to describe these regularities with the most fundamental and deep laws possible. On any reasonable view of causation, we can ask whether this process of explaining things finally terminates; and that will be the topic of the next section.
You know a lot, I'm so jelly.
This series has been enormously informative and helpful to me on my own process of thinking and faith, and I wanted to thank you.
However, I was also hoping to ask, would this particular formulation of the cosmological argument rely on the principle of sufficient reason? I ask because it was previously discussed on this blog that, as I understand it, the PSR is a fairly controversial philosophical principle, and further I further read that there is a formulation of it that falls victim to the risk of modal collapse (http://blog.kennypearce.net/archives/philosophy/explanation/explanatory_principles_and_inf.html), unless certain responses are taken which problematize the cosmological argument for explaining facts, albeit not for explaining events (which I take this series to engage in cosmological reasoning for regarding events in the real world subject to natural laws) or entities (such as conscious minds or moral agents/principles).
Another response could be that this series doesn’t make use of the PSR, and rather than saying that all events are explained, this instead seeks an explanation for specific things or facts, or admits the possibility that those facts could in principle be unexplained but argues to look for an explanation regardless?
RC1,
By allowing explanations to be non-deteriministic (point A in the post), I am explicitly disclaiming the PSR as most conventionally formualted. Because, in cases of nondeterminisic explanation, there can be a reason why an outcome lies within a certain set of possibilities, without there being a (contrastive, sufficient) reason why one possibility X is selected over any of the others.
Dear Professor Wall,
Thank you for the response! It is possible that I am misunderstanding some aspect of the idea of indeterministic causation, but I wonder if this might not potentially undermine theodocies that seek to deal with the problem of evil or the fine-tuning argument, if God does not provide an explanation for why one option (a finely-tuned universe, or a creation in which some evil is allowed in order to achieve a greater God) is selected over another? I recall Brian Davies arguing in his book "The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil" that God is not "something that can be said to chose between on choice or another", but it feels to me that the fine-tuning argument presupposes that the universe could have been otherwise but is this particular possibility in order to admit the possibility of life. Is it possible that this is rooted in a misunderstanding of theological language on my part, and that while God does not "reason" like humans do, God does reason in a manner analogous to us, which is what admits concepts such as fine tuning and divine providence?
RC1,
I didn't say there was ONLY non-deterministic causation, or that all things God might do are equally probable. That seems sufficient to allow fine-tuning evidence (as well as the argument from evil, potentially). And while God does not reason like we do, any discussion of divine purposes does seem to require that God does specific things in order to produce certain desired outcomes.
Dear Professor Wall,
Thank you for your response and explanation. I would like to ask a further clarification, however.
It seems to me fairly intuitive that the universe and the laws of physics could have been otherwise, that they are contingent, and if I recall correctly you have pointed out that is part of traditional Christian theology, that God did not create the universe by necessity. If I recall correctly, this relates to the modal collapse objection to divine simplicity, that if God is taken to be simple and necessary, posessing no unactualized potencies, then everything that is a result of God (such as creation) must also become necessary. The response I’ve seen that seems to resolve it is similar to the account of indeterministic causation/explanation you’ve explained here; that more than one outcome is possible from the same, unchanging, identical circumstances, namely God, and that no essential, real properties of God are changed by God’s act of creating the universe. That largely makes sense to me, and is part of the reason I asked about this topic, as it seems to preserve the contingency of the nature of God’s creation and that God’s creation is not deterministic.
A different account I have heard (though I feel it is probably circling around to indeterministic causation from a different direction) is that God’s simplicity, necessity, and lack of unactualized potency relates merely to God’s real properties, as opposed to God’s relational, Cambridge properties pertaining to creation, and that God is merely without unactualized potencies relating to the real properties; that God’s real property of “being able to create the universe” exists regardless of whether God did create a universe or what universe God did create, to which “having created this specific universe” is merely a relational, Cambridge property.
My question/clarification is regarding how this relates to divine knowledge, however. Elsewhere in this series, you discussed how God’s knowledge is non-representational, and that omniscience in knowing everything that is true is an essential property of God, and that God knows such things directly. Having taken this much time to get to my point, I was wondering how this wouldn’t make the category of all truths into necessary truths? If it is the case that God knows things directly, and that God’s knowledge/omniscience is a necessary and essential aspect of God, would that not make all the truths that constitue God’s knowledge necessary as well?
On my end, I feel that my response to this would be that the essential aspect of God’s knowledge is that God knows everything, and that what the contents of God’s knowledge are would remain contingent. However, part of me wonders if that doesn’t just feel like a word game. It’s possible that this is all a muddle rooted in me misunderstanding necessity and contingency and set logic, but it feels odd that the set of everything God knows would be necessary, but most things inside that set are contingent. Alternatively, could it be that, for a given contingent truth, it is necessary that God knows it given that it is true, but it need not have been true. If so, would it make it such that God’s knowledge of creation would then constitute Cambridge properties as well? If that’s the case, wouldn’t it make God’s knowledge contingent and changeable? I suppose the answer is that the proposition specifying what the set that constitutes God’s knowledge (the set of all truths) is necessary, but those that specify what is inside that set can be contingent?
I apologize if my question is rooted in a misunderstanding of the logic involved and thus wasted your time. Thank you for having taken the time to answer my previous questions on this matter.
PS:
It seems to me that some of my thoughts on responses to my question above can be summed up as “that God knows” is necessary, but “what God knows” can be contingent as some of those truths can be contingent truths. I am unsure if this is a meaningful distinction to make, or if it is just playing word games, though.
RC1,
I agree with the point in your summary. In fact it seems to me like the only way to reconcile God's omniscience with the existence of contingent truths.
As for whether we are playing "word games", that would be true if nothing like God actually exists, but if God does exist, then he has some sort of essence even if it is completely beyond our understanding. But, even if God is beyond our understanding, in theism this means that God is greater than our own minds, not lesser, and so we are forced to model God along the lines of a super-mind even if this is also misleading in other ways.
But I do think there are some semantic hazards trying to formulate this in the language of set theory. A set is usually viewed as constituted by its elements, so that 2 sets are distinct iff one of them has an element not found in the other. So, there is some sense in which sets exist necessarily given their elements, but I think this sort of necessity is a distraction that is unrelated to the actual questions being discussed here. But, your use of the phrase "the proposition specifying what the set that constitutes God’s knowledge" seems like a valid way of sidestepping this semantic point; it is the proposition "God knows all truths" which is necessary, not the identity of the set itself.
Dear Professor Wall,
Thank you for the reply to my questions, particularly since I expect this may be a busier time of year for you.
This relates somewhat to your recent responses to the other commenter on your blog, particularly relating to the discussion on whether the universe is infinite or not.
I was hoping to ask if you believe that theism requires that space be not infinite, that the universe is indeed closed and non-eternal. My previous beliefs that theism was perfectly compatible with an open universe, and that theism did not require commitment to a particular idea of how the universe may be are somewhat shaped by some of your previous comments on your blog: namely, on "Big Bang Cosmology", where you said "the existence of God is compatible with any sort of cosmology which one might care to name (closed, open, flat, etc.)" and on "More About Zero Energy" where you said that "there is no reason why a universe of infinite magnitude and eternal duration could not have been created by God". Having read those discussions when I was first coming to faith, they were very relevant to shaping my subsequent mindset to faith, that God would indeed still be the creator of all whether or not the universe was open or closed, or of other universes existed, or if the universe had a first moment of time or not. Is this a wise position to take, or has your thinking changed on whether God would still be the creator if the universe was hypothetically infinite and eternal? In essence, do you still agree with the statements regarding God's compatibility with creating an open, infinite, and eternal universe before, or has your thinking shifted?
You previously said that it wasn't wise to demand that our faith be compatible with everything that science could potentially come to prove or how the universe could be, and I have tried to resolve that by arguing, mentally, that that is because theism was compatible with those various hypotheses for how the universe could be, that, on essence, science couldn't disprove God because God would nevertheless have been the creator regardless of what science proved about the principles of the universe.
I admit, while this is possibly not how credence and degrees of belief are supposed to work, I find the idea that theism requires that I disbelieve in a particular way for the universe to be, when it isn't experimentally determined, such as whether space is spatially infinite or not, while atheism would be compatible with any option for how the universe could be, to reduce my prior probabilities of the likelihood of theism when assessing the matter.
In addition, truthfully, I don't really see how an infinite number of beings or a spatially infinite universe would reduce individual human significance to something as transcendent as God. To an extent, it feels like me to be that claiming that God wouldn't create an infinite universe would be similar to one of those cases of having overly confident priors for what God would do, which you brought up previously on the topic of sceptical theism. I do think that there could be reasons to create an infinite universe with an infinite number of beings that could be more apparent to an infinitely transcendent being such as God than to us.
To summarize, I want to ask: do you still believe that God would still be the creator even if the universe was infinite and/or eternal, and if not, wouldn't that affect the relative balance of priors for our assessment of theism? Basically, as a sort of thought experiment, if the hypothetical "metaphysical bookie" that you previously discussed on the matter confirmed that the universe was open and infinite in magnitude and/or eternal in duration, would we forced to be atheists? Or is this just for particular models for an infinite universe? I feel as if theism requires me to eliminate a possibility for how the universe to be that we don't have any other reasons to reject, that atheism is perfectly compatible with, that lowers my priors for how plausible theism is. My "solution" to that was taking the position that theism was indeed compatible with those possibilities, but I was wondering if that was an untenable solution, that theism is indeed incompatible with models of a universe that are spatially infinite or temporally eternal.
In addition, I would like to ask, if you had any thoughts regarding my questions on the topic of the No Best World problem that I had posted in the comments for "Fundamental Reality: Does God Need a Brain?" I apologize if that was not the correct location to ask those questions.
Finally, to clarify your answer to my comment on "Fundamental Reality: Causes and Explanations", my thinking was that essentially, what could be considered essential to God, and necessary is God's ability to know the truth value of any proposition, that the fact that God knows a given contingent proposition is a contingent fact grounded in the necessary fact that God knows the truth value of that proposition, directly, grounded in God's necessary knowing of all things directly. Is this a sensible formulation of the answer to the question?
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Hopefully, this isn't too much trouble to answer. I apologize if I went on for a lot, I am just trying to be clear with what I am asking.
RC1,
Thanks for your questions. Let me note that all the comments I made here were in response to specific questions or arguments, so in some cases what I was doing was evaluating the validity of particular arguments, not making a universal statement of principle.
1. I believe that in my comments you refer to, I was primarily thinking about whether God would have the power to create an infinite universe (whether infinite in space, or in time). I think he can, because I think that an infinite universe is logically possible, and I am not convinced by any philosophical argument that it is somehow metaphysically impossible. Hence, I believe an omnipotent God would have the power to create an infinite universe.
More specifically, there are lots of people who don't correctly distinguish the notion of "creation" (which applies to ALL times) from "the beginnning of the universe" (which applies to, at most, a single instant of time). Those people wrongly believe that, if the universe had no beginning, it could not have been created. (E.g. Hawking's infamous "What Place, then, for a Creator?’ comment in Brief History of Time.) This is the viewpoint I was arguing against.
This doesn't mean I am simply agnostic about the question of whether the universe has a beginning---I think a beginning is more plausible both scientifically (from Big Bang cosmology) and theologically (if one accepts the Bible as divine revelation). But, it seems important to correct the mistake about what "creation" means, because a mistake there will infect a lot of other theological topics!
2. On the other hand, in my most recent comments, I was thinking not about God's power, but his goodness. Specifically, what kind of world should/would God choose to create? I was expressing my belief that God would not create specifically the sort of infinite multiverse that deprives individual human lives of meaning, although for all I know, he might make some other sort of multiverse.
In my view, not every type of infinity (spatial or temporal) would lead to this consequence, but only an infinity that makes it so every possible person (and every possible choice they make) is instantiated somewhere. There are infinite worlds that would not be a problem (e.g. an infinite sequence of increasingly complicated angels/aliens, all of them quite distinct from each other), as well as finite-but-enormous multiverses that would be a problem (because they are still big enough to include all possible humans, say.)
I also maintain that unity, and freedom, are virtues in artistic creation. So I also don't think it is likely that God simply creates all possible beings whose goodness exceeds some level. I think that this fails to understand the element of "arbitrary" choice that is present in the work of any artist. (Balanced, of course, with a certain sort of "justice" in which one has to be faithful to whatever theme one has chosen.) To be an artist is to select THIS instead of THAT, not to simply spew out all possible creatures (which seems more suited to the pantheistic deity described in the Bhagavad Gita than the biblical God who doesn't seem to have any problem with making specific choices (e.g. the divine "election" of Abraham and thus Israel, king David and the prophets, and ultimately the choice of Mary to become his mother, and thus to enter the universe in one particular time and place.)
This is also my response to the No Best World problem. I think it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of creation, and in particular treats God as if he were morally obligated to maximize some quantity rather than an artist who wants to tell a particular story of his choosing.
Perhaps so, which is why we should distinguish here between Theism in general, and more specifically the Judeo-Christian concept of God. I think the vision you articulate above is compatible with a certain concept of God, but does not seem consonant with the God of revealed religion. I could be wrong of course, but I don't think I am. (There exists at least one Christian cosmologist who disagrees with me about this, St. Don Page.)
3. Next, the epistemological question. I do not think I quite endorse the universal principle of indifference to science you thought I was saying. In principle, as a Bayesian epistemologist, I think we can and should say that as God would be more likely to create some universes than others. Hence, particular scientific discoveries can be, and sometimes are, evidence for and against Theism.
However, in practice I think we are confused about lots of things and cannot adequately imagine God's purposes. And so, we cannot and should not be surprised to live in a universe that contains many things we do not understand. As Modern Cosmology teaches us, this includes that the Observable Universe is enormously vast (billions of lightyears across). Hence, we should have a relatively "uniform" (not very confident) prior. But it is not logically consistent to literally assign equal probability to everything, nor am I saying we should. Nor is there any good reason for the probability distribution over physical laws given Theism to be identical to that given Atheism (indeed, for the Fine-Tuning Argument to work, it has to not be the same). I think some observations are genuinely evidence for and against Theism, and in order to believe in Theism, I only need to think that the balance of probabilities favors it given our actual observations. I do not need to say that I would be a Theist no matter what was observed.
One should also take into account that we have no way of observing what is outside of the Observable Universe. We might be able to make projections given certain scientific theories about the origin of our cosmos, but in principle if things started being different outside, we would have no way of knowing this. And furthermore, our current theories don't definitively answer the question. Scientifically, I think the question of finite vs infinite space is wide open. Although I am committed to accepting the results of (sufficiently) empirically confirmed Science, in cases where empiricism does not give a clear answer, one is forced to place more reliance on one's priors. And in my case this includes certain theological prejudices.
While it might depend on exactly how you set up the problem, I don't feel this is correct in Bayesian terms. I think that it is only if we actually OBSERVE that the universe is in a Theism-disfavoring configuration (or observe something that is indirect evidence for it) that we should lower our probability of Theism. Simply imagining that it might be that way, seems to be begging the question. If I have a coin in my fist which I tell you is either a double-header or a fair coin, then you imagining "If it lands tails, that would rule out the double-header, so there are less possibilities compatible with it" shouldn't play any role in determining your prior probabilities. Of course, if I flip the coin and it actually does land tails, that would be decisive. But if it lands heads, that would actually double the relative odds of it being a double-header.
4.
Yes.
Dear Professor Wall,
Also, relating to the discussion of indeterministic causation, I also encountered that concept to refute the modal collapse argument against divine simplicity, wherein contingent truths (including the specific laws of nature and properties of the universe) are not necessary because while God causes those truths to be true, it is in an indeterministic way that means that even though a cause did result in them, a different set of outcomes could have obtained without any change in the cause. I found the concept summarized in this paper (https://www.academia.edu/50764857/Reaping_the_Fruitful_Death_of_Modal_Collapse_Arguments_A_Reply_to_Joe_Schmid)
In your view, such a formulation nevertheless preserves the idea of divine simplicity/necessity while preserving the contingency of the universe, right? My issue raised in previous comments was worry that the issue of "providence" would interfere with things such as the fine tuning argument or the idea that God makes any choices regarding the universe. Would you say that it is resolved by the previously discussed idea that God doesn't reason like humans do, and that God's reasoning for freely doing certain things doesn't change God's essentially nature? Relatedly, in the point about God choosing to become incarnate, subsequently leading to the atonement, it was my understanding that Christian theology maintained that it was purely a free act of grace by God, not one necessitated by God's essential nature as the fundamental Goodness. Does indeterministic causation maintain the idea that it was a contingent action by God, rather than a necessary one, while also preserving the idea that it was indeed a "choice" by God?
Also, on the topic of the above; given that traditionally, theology maintains that both the choice to create humans and the atonement were purely actions of grace, not necessitated by God's essential nature as all that constitutes Goodness, how are we then able to really call it something good at all? It seems true to me that the atonement was a very good thing to us, but if it wasn't the result of God's essential Goodness, how does that mean it was good in any absooute, objective way?