The Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God

I must begin this section giving due credit to the lectures of Dr. David Johnson for this interpretation of what Leibniz's Cosmological Argument means. (He was in the philosophy department of UCLA in 1996 where I took his class on Leibniz, but I am informed now that he currently teaches at New York's Yeshiva University.) I will present the argument (nearly) in the exact formulation as Dr. Johnson has done.

The Cosmological Argument, like most arguments for God's existence, comes in several forms. The most famous was Thomas Aquinas's chain of causality argument. Basically this says that for the present world there must be a cause, for the present world is contingent upon the past world. It makes no sense for the causes to go back infinitely, though it is just absurd that, without God, the world came to be at any one point from nothing. Since the world is by nature contingent, it always rests upon what existed prior; but God is necessary, so postulating an eternal God—who is uncaused, being necessary, unlike the world—is the only coherent solution.

Leibniz's argument comes from a slightly different angle. It is an epistemological approach, resting on the principle of sufficient reason (that for every truth there is a reason why it is true). He asks the question, "Can I know the reason why the world is as it is, and the reason why the laws of nature will continue into the future as they have done in the past?" The reply to this is normally, "The reason that the world is as it is, and the laws of nature are what they are, is the world of the past, which was its cause." But this only pushes the argument back. For the next question is, "Can I know the reason why the world of the past was the way it was, and find the reason why the laws of nature were as they were in this past world?" And so the answer comes that the world yet father past is the reason. Each "past world" reason is not sufficient for us to answer the original question, because of the contingent nature of each "past world" answer to the original question. Thus the original question is not answered in any complete or ultimate way.

You might put the argument this way: supposing I know the reason why P, P being any given fact. The reason for P is Q. I must then ask the reason for Q. The reason for Q is R. As you see, it is hardly a coherent system if the nature of Q and R are the same as the nature of P; that is, if their nature is contingent, relying upon a further reason why just like the first fact P.

And so, if we do claim to know the reason for P, we must postulate knowledge of something not contingent, something that stands outside the entire contingent sequence, something necessary. So long as I postulate that the reason for why the world is as it is, is the prior world, which is just another step in the chain of causality of the same contingent nature, I have not answered my original question to satisfaction. If I know the reason for P is Q, but I do not know the reason for Q, then properly speaking I do not know the ultimate reason for even P.

What all of this means is that our original question, "Why is the world as it is, and the laws of nature what they are?" cannot be answered to satisfaction unless we postulate an entity that sits outside the entire contingent sequence, a reason for this that is not contingent but necessary. If there is a God that stands outside the entire sequence, a God who is eternal and necessary, and thus does not depend upon any further explanation, our system is coherent, and we can know the ultimate reason for things. So long as we do not postulate this, we must consider that we do not know any ultimate reasons for things, but merely the immediate reason, which is just as contingent and just as in need of an explanation as our original fact.

Thus, without postulating God, we cannot claim to know, ultimately, why the world is as it is, which means we cannot know why the laws of nature are what they are. So long as we postulate a merely contingent Q for each P, going back forever, we ultimately cannot know the reason why anything is what it is. So long as the reasons are of the same contingent nature as the original P, the reason for the original P remains unexplained and unknown. And not knowing why the laws of nature are what they are in the ultimate sense, we have no reason to believe they will continue to be the same in the future. Thus we must become as skeptical as Hume, believing that knowledge that the laws of nature will continue on in the future as they have in the past is impossible. Unless we can explain the reason for the laws of nature using a reason outside the contingent sequence, we cannot hold that they will remain as they have in the past. For without knowing ultimate reasons, we must hold that things are as they are only arbitrarily. Like a coin tossed 99 times and landing on heads every time, if we do not have any notion why it landed on heads (such as it is a "fixed" coin), we must hold that, the past notwithstanding, in the next toss it is only a fifty-fifty chance that it will land on heads again.

The most obvious challenge to this is for us to indeed become such skeptics. But this is a difficult position to hold, its biggest problem being dishonesty. I do not believe anyone really holds this view. It amounts to going to bed at night and not believing when I wake in the morning it will be as it was every morning, but chances are fifty-fifty that I could float up to my ceiling, or find myself on Mars. No one believes such things in his or her daily life. Of course, this is somewhat of an ad hominem response, but I think it is somewhat valid nonetheless. What it means is that the arguer is denying he believes what he in fact believes—no matter how he shall deny it, he yet believes that he knows the laws of nature will remain constant, and knows the reason why. And so he denies believing he knows what he does in fact believe he knows, something reasonable people will not do, unless they are playing devil's advocate.

The Cosmological Argument, according to the consensus in philosophy, was in effect destroyed conclusively by Kant, to never live again. Kant basically called the appeal to a past state to explain a present state a regulative, and not objective, function of reason. That is, it is not a function of how things are in themselves, but a function of the nature of our minds, that they operate in this way. Push our explanations of nature back, and we will always have another step further back to discover. In the same way that the mind cannot conceive of a highest number, but can at any given number add one to it and make it one higher, so too our minds function by means of always taking one more step back.

If this were commentary on the objective nature of things we end up with the following paradox. Supposing that we take enough steps into the past, such that we get to a point where there is no explanation for what came next. This is unintelligible to us, as unintelligible as an event without a cause. But supposing there is no first state of the world, before which there was nothing, and time goes back infinitely. Well, if that were so, we could never have gotten to the present moment, with an infinity of time before it, since an infinity of time by definition can never pass, so that we can arrive to Now. But Kant proposed that nature in-itself has no causality—causality is rather how our minds reason, a function of the nature of the mind. It is not because there is a reason for every truth that we naturally seek reasons; rather, it is because our minds are set up to analyze nature in this particular way.

It would require quite a digression for a full discussion of Kant's ideas on the cosmological argument. Suffice it to say that, if Kant is right, then it is merely the way our minds our set up that we seek reasons for each present and past state of things, such that no matter how many steps we take into the past, there will be one more to take, and one more explanation to give. Should we give reasons for reasons forever, there is not any paradox that there must either be an infinity of reasons, or a contingent thing without reason. Neither one nor the other will ever attain; we shall never arrive to an infinity of reasons, nor shall we ever arrive at a contingent state without prior reason. Just as if I should count numbers from now until I die--or, indeed, forever--I shall never arrive at infinity, nor a highest number.

In any case, Leibniz's Cosmological Argument is perhaps its strongest formulation, though Kant's critique of the argument is profound and very defensible, when properly understood.

[The Ontological Argument]

Angelhaunt.net: Because earth's madness is heaven's sense.