... as summarized by the great apologist Frank Sheed:
If we consider the universe, we find that everything in it bears this mark, that it does exist but might very well not have existed. We ourselves exist, but we would not have existed if a man and a woman had not met and mated. The same mark can be found upon everything. A particular valley exists because a stream of water took that way down, perhaps
because the ice melted up there. If the melting ice had not been there, there would have been no valley. And so with all the things of our experience. They exist, but they would not have existed if some other thing had not been what it was or done what it did.
None of these things, therefore, is the explanation of its own existence or the source of its own existence. In other words, their existence is contingent upon something else. Each things possesses existence, and can pass on existence; but it did not originate its existence. It is essentially a receiver of existence. Now it is impossible to conceive of a universe consisting exclusively of contingent beings, that is, of beings which are only receivers of existence and not originators. The reader who is taking his role as explorer seriously might very well stop reading at this point and let his mind make for itself the effort to conceive a condition in which nothing should exist save receivers of existence.
Anyone who has taken this suggestion seriously and pondered the matter for himself before reading on, will have seen that the thing is a contradiction in terms and therefore an impossibility. If nothing exists save beings that receive their existence, how does anything exist at all? Where do they receive their existence from? In such a system made up exclusively of receivers, one being may have got it from another, and that from still another, but how did existence get into the system at all? Even if you tell yourself that this system contains an infinite number of receivers of existence, you still have not accounted for existence. Even an infinite number of beings, if no one of these is the source of its own existence, will not account for existence.
Thus we are driven to see that the beings of our experience, the contingent beings, could not exist at all unless there is also a being which differs from them by possessing existence in its own right. It does not have to receive existence; it simply has existence. It is not contingent: it simply is. This is the Being that we call God.
All this may seem very simple and matter of course, but in reality we have arrived at a truth of inexhaustible profundity and of inexhaustible fertility in giving birth to other truths.
From Theology and Sanity (pp. 54-55), available in both paperback and electronic book formats.
This convinced me, as a 14 year-old atheist, of the necessity for God, and I have remained convinced.
Posted by: Christopher Wright | Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 03:15 PM
How valid is this argument to serious minds today, Carl? Educated persons know today, in a way the medievals did not, "existence" is not given or received; rather, matter and energy are just constantly, as it were, being re-arranged. It seems entirely possible that the cosmos itself is this being whose existence is not contingent; everything within the cosmos is simply being rearranged constantly.
Isn't that more or less how any serious atheist would reply to this argument?
Posted by: Eric Giunta | Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 04:03 PM
Good point, Eric. But it still does not escape Sheed's observation about contingency. Precisely how the matter and energy are rearranged is where contingency enters in. So if your mother's and father's eyes never lock across the lunchroom at Acme Enterprises, the matter and energy that would have eventually formed you are instead spread out in an incalculable array across three continents and every ocean on the planet.
Voila! Contingency, and the lack thereof.
BTW, educated persons know today that it is entirely possible that matter and energy are simply distinct manifestations of the same elemental force -- be it known as vibrating 'strings' or an infinite 'membrane' or whatever other metaphor the quantum physicists apply to the very real, infinitely salient will of God.
Posted by: Gregorio | Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 09:46 PM
Gregorio:
I don't see why, logically, it is not possible for the cosmos itself to be eternal and to posses necessary existence. That's what I am getting at.
Posted by: Eric Giunta | Friday, May 27, 2011 at 12:42 AM
Eric: Dr. Edward Feser addresses this at length in his book, The Last Superstition, which I'm going to quote at length because I think it is helpful and because he does a much better job that I can do (especially at 1:30 am). I recommend the entire book if you've not read it. Anyhow, Feser earlier notes that Aquinas did not think one could prove by philosophical arguments that the universe had a beginning. What Aquinas did argue is that since the universe/cosmos is in a state of constantly changing (what you describe as "rearranged constantly"), it is going from potential to actual. But anything going from a potential state to an actual state is changing, and such change (rearrangement) must have an origin or source for such change from potentiality to actuality. "To show that an Unmoved Mover exists, then," writes Feser, "is just to show that there is a single being who is the cause of all change, Himself unchangeable, immaterial, eternal, personal (having intelligence and will), all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. It is, in short, to show that there is a God."
Feser then goes on the argument of "The First Cause", and here is where I quote at length; a key observation is in the first paragraph, but the whole quote should be of some help:
The Last Superstition (St. Augustine's Press, 2008), by Dr. Edward Feser, pp. 102-110.
Posted by: Carl E. Olson | Friday, May 27, 2011 at 01:50 AM
Eric and Gregorio: "Matter and energy are constantly being rearranged", but contingency does not reside in "precisely how the matter and energy are rearranged". Where do matter and energy come from? Have they not received "existence" also? They are two essential elements in the universe and are "something" rather than "nothing". It is "precisely here" that Sheed's argument of contingency enters.
Posted by: Ben Joseph | Friday, May 27, 2011 at 06:47 AM
Carl:
Your last post addresses the causation argument, I think, not that of contingency. Furthermore, most physicists would today argue that not every effect does need a cause, that at the subatomic level particles do act completely randomly and Einstein was wrong to think otherwise (i.e., that there exist "hidden variables" which are the causes of this apparently random activity).
Sorry, guys, I'm just not getting this. The contigency argument just seems based on false premises. Things are not constantly receiving a magic substance called "being"; they're simply the products of eternal rearrangement of matter/energy. This being the case, I see no inherent reason why the universe cannot be a necessary being, and everything "it" constantly being rearranged.
Posted by: Eric Giunta | Friday, May 27, 2011 at 12:13 PM
Eric,
Here's a proof from Stanley Jaki on the finite and contingent nature of the universe:
Premise 1: There exists material entities.
Premise 2: All material entities contain quantitatively determinable, measurable properties, in the sense that they can counted.
Therefore, those entities constitute a coherent system insofar as its parts reveal some basic quantitative properties whereby they can be counted. And if they can be counted, the universe has to be finite and so the universe must be the strict totality on interacting things.
And, if finite, it must be contigent and cannot be necessary, only God is that. Whether you realize or not, you are making the universe out to be God, albeit a pantheistic version!
Posted by: RP | Saturday, May 28, 2011 at 05:19 PM
Eric, I see contingency woven throughout Carl's post, so I must be misunderstanding your comment. First paragraph: "The question isn’t about what got things started or how long they’ve been going, but rather what keeps them going." Or, a little further down: "So, nothing can cause itself; whatever comes into existence, or more generally whatever must have existence added to its essence in order for it to be real, must be caused by another. This is the “principle of causality” (also sometimes known as a version of the “principle of sufficient reason”). Notice that it does not say that “Everything has a cause”...something which, as I have said, Aquinas never asserted or would have asserted. The principle says only that what does not have existence on its own must have a cause." Or, still further down: "That is, whereas the ordinary objects of our experience of their nature are the sorts of things that need not have existed — they do in fact exist, but things could have gone differently — the First Cause could not possibly have failed to exist."
As for the subatomic particle example, we can avoid postulating "hidden variables" as their cause. Even though the random, unpredictable character of a subatomic particle is consistent with its nature, this does not entail the pure actuality that Feser is describing. If I am understanding this correctly (and I'm not sure that I am), randomly coming into and out of existence is not the same as pure actuality (2nd and 3rd paragraphs in Carl's quotation of Feser): "For consider the nature or essence of any of the things that make up the physical universe — people, for example...So there’s nothing about the nature or essence of being human that entails one way or the other whether any human being exists. And the same thing is obviously true of the other inhabitants of the physical world, be they rocks, trees, planets, or whatever. Moreover, all of these things come into existence and go out of existence all the time, which shows by itself that there’s nothing about their nature that entails that they must exist."
While being is neither magic nor a substance, this post from edwardfeser.blogspot.com might shed some light on your example (from "The early Wittgenstein on scientism," June 1, 2010): "The supposition that “the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena” is an “illusion” for two reasons (which do not necessarily correspond to Wittgenstein’s reasons). First, “laws of nature” are mere abstractions and cannot explain anything. What exist in the natural order are concrete material substances with certain essences, and talk of “laws of nature” is merely shorthand for the patterns of behavior they tend to exhibit given those essences. Second, that some fundamental level of material substances (basic particles, or whatever) exist and behave in accordance with such laws can also never be the ultimate explanation of anything, because we need to know, not only how such substances came into existence, but what keeps them in existence. For as compounds of act and potency and essence and existence, they cannot possibly account for themselves; only that which is Pure Act and Subsistent Existence Itself can be the ultimate explanation of them, or of anything else. In general, whatever is composite in any way requires explanation in terms of that which is metaphysically simple. (As usual, see The Last Superstition and Aquinas for the full story.)"
Also, because you mentioned, "most physicists would today argue that not every effect does need a cause," I wonder if the false premisis you perceive for the contingency argument stems from relying on the truncated version of Aristotelian causality as opposed to the complete version, as Feser explains on his blog: "For the moderns, all causation gets reduced to what the Aristotelians called efficient causation; that is to say, for A to have a causal influence on B is for A either to bring B into being or at least in some way to bring into existence some modification of B. Final causality is ruled out; hence there is no place in modern thought for the idea that B might play an explanatory role relative to A insofar as generating B is the end or goal toward which A is directed. Formal causality is also ruled out; there is no question for the moderns of a material object’s being (partially) explained by reference to the substantial form it instantiates. We are supposed instead to make reference only to patterns of efficient causal relations holding between basic material elements (atoms, or corpuscles, or quarks, or whatever). "The interaction problem" (Oct. 8, 2008).
Posted by: Jean | Saturday, May 28, 2011 at 09:38 PM
Jean:
Thanks for trying to clarify that. I still don't understand why it is not possible for the universe to be necessary being. Why isn't it possible that the universe (or universes, however many exist in as many possible dimensions) is necessarily existent, while no particular combination of its mater/energy is necessary?
Posted by: Eric Giunta | Sunday, May 29, 2011 at 10:35 AM
Nothing exists infinitely in nature. By saying that the universe itself is not contingent on anything, is saying that it possess existence as part of it's essence, which can not be possible. Think of the problem of time. If there were an infinite amount of time between now and sometime in the infinite past, since the universe (or universes) had no beginning, then how did we actually arrive at today, or even the present moment--you reading this post? If we went from "then" to six years closer to "now", there would still be an infinite amount of time from then to now. If we proceeded 80 billion years from then, we still would be no closer to reaching now than if we had gone 80 minutes, becaue an infinite amount of time would still exist between now and then. Similarly, we would not be able to go from now to some moment in the indefinite future because an infinite amount of time would have to pass before we could reach that moment. But, we can conclusively and triumphantly say that we are at the present. Right...now. And by that that fact alone, the universe could not have existed eternally. The universe must be finite. And since everything that is finite must have a cause, we can infer that the universe had a cause. And since the universe entails all that there is in the universe, everything in the universe must also have a cause. There's just no getting around it. And, well, you know what that means Mr. Dawkins...
Posted by: www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmAJsejYTznGyIr2VjdzUXMG_npRMC-5l4 | Wednesday, June 01, 2011 at 03:07 AM