From World to God?. Richard L. Sturch
Читать онлайн книгу.
principle (such as a law of nature, but not confined to them) which links that fact to the thing we want to explain. But you can’t eliminate the element of “basic fact” altogether; that would only produce an incomplete explanation, just the connecting principle and the thing to be explained. And then the latter is not explained after all.
myra
Didn’t St. Thomas Aquinas say something like that? “If you suppress a cause, you suppress its effect.”
geoffrey
He was right in principle, after a fashion, but completely wrong in the way he tried to apply it. There is no question of “suppressing” a First Cause; only of denying that there is one. If something were known to be the potential cause of a world, and somebody suppressed it—if, to take Myra’s Hindu example, Vishnu were to destroy Brahma or forbid him to create the world—then that world would not exist. But there is no question of anything like that being done. Talk of “suppression” is utterly misleading.
leslie
I think the introduction of Aquinas was a bit of a red herring: his language is not that which I was using. My point remains: if your series of explanations contains no element of basic fact, it does not explain. You can have, I suppose, three main types of explanation. First, you can explain one fact in terms of another. Secondly, you can show that the fact is a necessary truth. And thirdly, you can explain it as a matter of chance—it was one of several possibilities, but there simply is no explanation of why this one rather than the others should have been actual. Now the point is that the first of these (and indeed the third) is not a complete explanation, for it leaves us with a further fact that has not been explained. You need what I called a “basic” fact—one that does not require explanation.
geoffrey
But in an infinite series of explanations, there is no need for any “basic fact.” A is the case because B is, and B is because C is, and so on ad infinitum. There is a complete explanation, only it happens to be one that goes on back for ever. That is quite different from giving up part-way!
myra
Doesn’t that bring us back to what we were talking about earlier—the beginning of the universe? If there was a beginning to the universe, you cannot go back ad infinitum.
leslie
Geoffrey wanted at that stage to avoid your point by treating the universe as a whole, didn’t he? Well, I shall do so myself, and argue that even if there are explanations (perhaps) for everything in the universe, we still need an explanation for the universe itself, as a whole. Whether there is a beginning of time, or an infinite past, or some distortion of time on the lines suggested by Hawking—all that makes no difference. The thing as a whole cries out for explanation.
geoffrey
Why? If everything in the universe is explained, there is no need for an explanation for the universe itself; for the universe does not consist of anything over and above its component parts. Your own ancestor Cleanthes put it admirably two hundred years ago: “Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable should you afterwards ask me what was the cause of the whole twenty.”
leslie
I’m not absolutely sure about that “not consisting of anything over and above its component parts” business. But let that pass; for I am absolutely sure that Cleanthes’ argument was wrong. If each, or even one, particle in the “collection” is explained in terms of something outside the collection, you have a First Cause (or more than one). But if each is explained purely in terms of others in the collection, all you have is an explanation of why these particles go together, not why they exist, why they go together in a real world as opposed to an imaginary one. If you explain everything in the universe in terms of other things in the universe, all in terms of one another, then you do need an external explanation for the whole. If I never go anywhere without Myra, and Myra never goes anywhere without Geoffrey, and Geoffrey never goes anywhere without me, then if any of us is in this room the others will be too. And yet it still makes sense to ask why we are in this room rather than in another.
This was the heart of Leibniz’s “book argument.” Suppose a geometry textbook, he reasoned, to have been copied from an earlier edition, and that from one before, and that from one before that, and so on: even if the line extended back for ever, we should have been given no reason why there should be such things as geometry textbooks at all.
myra
I am not happy with an illustration taken from something which is quite certainly impossible.
leslie
Leibniz’s point surely was just that, that it was impossible. But let me put it another way. There might be more than one possible universe—I mean, there is more than one way in which a universe might be put together. Indeed, there surely are many. A Newtonian universe, with no relativity or quantum physics, would be quite possible. And in it every event would doubtless follow on from others. The difference between it and the actual universe we live in is that one exists and the other does not. What I am insisting on is that an explanation for the existence of the actual universe may legitimately be asked for—and the natural explanation is the creative will of God.
geoffrey
It may seem natural to you, but it doesn’t to me. I do not see that explanation in terms of God is really any advance. You said that any explanation must include an element of brute fact. Now you have your brute fact—indeed, you really have two of them, the existence of God and his decision to create—which have no explanations at all. But so have I. Granted for the sake of argument that basic facts are inevitable, that we have to have some unexplained element, then the obvious one is the existence of the universe as a whole. After all, we do actually know that the universe exists. We do not know for certain that a God exists; that is what this whole dialogue is about.
The Question of “Simplicity”
leslie
I should say that the difference is that my explanation is simpler.
geoffrey
How do you work that out? Your explanation actually adds to the complexity of things. Remember the old slogan called Ockham’s Razor: “do not multiply entities unless you have to.”
leslie
I don’t see why we shouldn’t have a Hair-Restorer as well as a Razor. If there is no God, we have as our ultimate inexplicability: (1) whatever minimum of scientific laws is needed to describe the way the universe behaves; (2) a description of the universe over a stretch of space and time sufficient to entail a description of it at all other times; and (3) any undetermined, partially uncaused events occurring in the universe. If there is a God, however, we have as inexplicables (I) the existence of a God and (II) His free decision to create an ordered universe of the sort described by (1) (2) and (3). This does require one more entity than the first, I admit; on the other hand, it has replaced (1) (2) and (3) by a set of rational decisions whose possibility flows from (I). In other words, by adding one entity we have simplified the explanation.
To take the universe as “brute fact” is preposterous. This is where “contingency” really does come in. The universe is contingent through and through—it could have been different in an unimaginable number of ways. If it is to be the way it is, it had to have strong initial conditions or restrictions on its nature. More than that: it is the most complex thing of which we know; all other complexities are contained within it. But God is One. Some have even held that He is totally simple, with no elements within Him that can be separated even in thought. I should not wish to defend such a position myself; it seems hard to square with the idea of the Trinity. But certainly God could not be otherwise than the way He is, His free will alone excepted.
Alter your description of the universe, and you have just a universe that is different, perhaps only slightly different: alter your description of God and you do not have God at all. A being like God in all respects except that he, she or it was powerless, or imperfectly good, or the like, would not be a different