of the Existence of God
Philosopher Edward Feser has a new book out in which he puts forth five arguments for the existence of God. These are not the “Five Ways” of Aquinas so it might be refreshing to discuss one or all of these. At the very least this OP may introduce readers to arguments for the existence of God which they had previously been unaware of.
The five proofs are:
- The Aristotelian Proof
- The Neo-Platonic Proof
- The Augustinian Proof
- The Thomistic Proof
- The Rationalist Proof
: The Aristotelian Proof
Chapter 1 defends what I call the Aristotelian proof of the existence of God. It begins with the fact that there is real change in the world, analyzes change as the actualization of potential, and argues that no potential could be actualized at all unless there is something which can actualize without itself being actualized—a “purely actual actualizer” or Unmoved Mover, as Aristotle characterized God. Aristotle developed an argument of this sort in book 8 of his Physics and book 12 of his Metaphysics. Later Aristotelians such as Maimonides and Aquinas developed their own versions—the first of Aquinas’ Five Ways being one statement of such an argument. These earlier writers expressed the argument in terms of archaic scientific notions such as the movement of the heavenly spheres, but as modern Aristotelians have shown, the essential kernel of the argument in no way depends on this outdated husk. Chapter 1 aims to present the core idea of the argument as it might be developed by an Aristotle, Maimonides, or Aquinas were they writing today.
: The Neo-Platonic Proof
Chapter 2 defends what I call the Neo-Platonic proof of God’s existence. It begins with the fact that the things of our experience are in various ways composite or made up of parts, and argues that the ultimate cause of such things can only be something which is absolutely simple or noncomposite, what Plotinus called “the One”. The core idea of such an argument can be found in Plotinus’ Enneads, and Aquinas gave expression to it as well. Indeed, the notion of divine simplicity is absolutely central to the classical theist conception of God, though strangely neglected by contemporary writers on natural theology, theists no less than atheists. Among the aims of this book is to help restore it to its proper place.
: The Augustinian Proof
Chapter 3 defends an Augustinian proof of God’s existence. It begins by arguing that universals (redness, humanness, triangularity, etc.), propositions, possibilities, and other abstract objects are in some sense real, but rejects Plato’s conception of such objects as existing in a “third realm” distinct from any mind and distinct from the world of particular things. The only possible ultimate ground of these objects, the argument concludes, is a divine intellect—the mind of God. This idea too has its roots in Neo-Platonic thought, was central to Saint Augustine’s understanding of God, and was defended by Leibniz as well. This book puts forward a more detailed and systematic statement of the argument than (as far as I know) has been attempted before.
: The Thomistic Proof
Chapter 4 defends the Thomistic proof of God’s existence. It begins by arguing that for any of the contingent things of our experience, there is a real distinction between its essence (what the thing is) and its existence (the fact that it is). It then argues that nothing in which there is such a real distinction could exist even for an instant unless caused to exist by something in which there is no such distinction, something the very essence of which just is existence, and which can therefore impart existence without having to receive it—an uncaused cause of the existence of things. Aquinas presented an argument of this sort in his little book On Being and Essence, and many Thomists have regarded it as the paradigmatically Thomistic argument for God’s existence.
: The Rationalist Proof
Chapter 5 defends a rationalist proof of the existence of God. The proof begins with a defense of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), according to which everything is intelligible or has an explanation for why it exists and has the attributes it has. It then argues that there cannot be an explanation of the existence of any of the contingent things of our experience unless there is a necessary being, the existence of which is explained by its own nature. This sort of argument is famously associated with Leibniz, but the version of it I defend departs from Leibniz in several ways and interprets the key ideas in an Aristotelian-Thomistic way. (Hence, while it is definitely “rationalist” insofar as it is committed to a version of PSR and to the thesis that the world is intelligible through and through, it is not “rationalist” in other common senses of that term. For example, it is in no way committed to the doctrine of innate ideas or other aspects of the epistemology associated with continental rationalist philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. And its interpretation of PSR differs in key respects from theirs.)
For whatever reason I’m starting my reading with the rationalist proof. Because, you know, everyone here is always so rational. 🙂
vjtorley:
keiths:
vjtorley:
In that case, does he freely acknowledge that much of what the Bible says about God is false? It attributes strong emotions to God. Take the example of Uzzah, which I brought up in the ‘evil babies’ thread:
Burning anger is not exactly the hallmark of an impassible deity.
Ditto for regret, which I mentioned earlier.
I should add that even John 3:16 depends on love as emotion, not as a mere expression of will:
It was not an impassive calculation, according to John. It was an emotion, the depth of which was sufficient for God to sacrifice his one and only son.
Now of course this is all bullshit, and the death of Jesus was not an act of love. But the point is that John saw it that way: as an emotion so deep that it motivated a great sacrifice.
Vincent,
My point was simply to dispute KN’s (and Mung’s) claim that a non-contingent entity is automatically a necessary entity.
Mung,
Are you going to tell us what aspects of the PSR we’re expected to discuss and which ones are off-limits?
It seems to me that Feser is trying to water down the PSR into a much weaker and less interesting claim: that the universe is intelligible to us, or that we can make sense of it.
We had a long discussion about that a few months ago. Without rehashing all of that, it seems to me that evolutionary theory and cognitive neuroscience do an adequate job of explaining how it is that we can make sense of the world as we experience it, to the extent that we do.
I think Feser needs a more demanding conception of the PSR besides, “look, we can understand some stuff!” if he’s going to have a job for God to do.
Why would you think that, given that Feser includes the necessary being within those beings which have an explanation?
The question is where do you put “facts” within “things that exist”? Are they contingent or necessary? Do facts exist apart from minds?
I don’t see how you can possibly read his argument as consisting of “look, we can understand some stuff!”
Hi everyone,
Ben Shapiro has posted an 18-minute interview with Feser on his Facebook page here.
Kantian Naturalist,
Surely he is saying more than that. In Scholastic Metaphysics, he quotes a definition by Bernard Wuellner’s Summary of Scholastic Principles (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1956):
Note that “adequate necessary objective explanation” isn’t the same as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. That’s a definition that Leibniz might like, but not Aquinas.
keiths,
I would certainly agree that without PSR, and on your definition of “contingent” as dependent, “non-contingent” doesn’t equate to “necessary.”
Feser has discussed these passages in various posts of his (e.g. here and here). Basically, his point is that the passages can’t be taken literally, at face value, or they would imply that God isn’t self-explanatory – in which case, He would need a Creator, too. Consequently, they must be interpreted in an analogical fashion.
and
I think I’m confused as to whether Feser wants the PSR to assume that there’s a necessary being or is supposed to show that there is a necessary being if there any any contingent beings.
For present purposes I’m happy enough to treat “facts” as “states of affairs”, and as such are mind-independent. But I’d distinguish between “facts” and “states of affairs” if we delved deeper into semantics and epistemology.
I was asking for a better understanding, which VT provided:
This nicely gives us a lot more to sink our teeth into, for sure.
I still don’t see how denial of the PSR has anything to do with undermining our confidence in our cognitive abilities or why we need something as demanding as the PSR in order to do science if the weaker Peircean “rule of hope” can do the same thing.
Vincent,
Feser’s reasoning is completely backwards. If he’s correct about the impassibility of God, then he ought to conclude that the Bible is incorrect, since it depicts God as having a wide range of intense emotions. Instead, he assumes that the Bible is correct, and concludes that a straightforward reading of it must therefore be incorrect, since it is at odds with classical theism!
It’s standard theistic procedure: start with the desired conclusion, and then twist the evidence, or reinterpret it altogether, to fit the prejudice.
As for interpreting those emotion-ridden passages in “an analogical fashion”, what does that even mean in the case of something like this?
So the Lord’s anger burned against Uzzah, but not really because God doesn’t experience emotions, and the death had nothing to do with anger, but was merely the result of a dispassionate calculation? And this is supposed to be an “analogical” interpretation of a true biblical statement?
It’s ridiculous. Feser should just accept that the Bible is a human book, full of errors. If he really wants to be a philosopher, he should let go of his childish attachment to tradition, including the outdated idea that the Bible is the trustworthy word of God.
The thing is, Leibniz’s definition is comprehensible and clear, the Scholastic one is muddy and therefore subject to abuse. If no can or ever will understand why something is the case, does that mean that thing has no explanation or doesn’t it? How, exactly, DOES an “adequate necessary objective explanation” outstrip necessary and sufficient conditions?
walto,
I’d still like to know what makes an adequate necessary objective explanation different from other kinds of explanation.
walto and Kantian Naturalist,
The beauty of the Scholastic definition is that it does not assume the truth of determinism. It looks for something which is able to explain a contingent event, without endeavoring to show that this explanation must inevitably produce the effect which it does in this case.
You’ll have to explain that, I’m afraid. Both the “adequate” and the “necessary” seem to belie your claim here.
I’m OK with preferring Scholasticism over rationalism on this specific point, but that’s because I agree with Nancy Cartwright that we should be realists about theoretical entities but anti-realists about laws.
The rationalism of Descartes and other rationalists assumes nomological necessity. That’s what makes libertarian freedom such a huge concern for Descartes: if the physical world can be described exhaustively in exceptionless laws expressed in mathematical symbols, then where does human freedom come from? It’s precisely that worry about freedom that drives Descartes into substance dualism.
But putting aside the rationalist emphasis on exceptionless laws and just focusing on explanations, what does ‘adequate necessary objective explanation’ mean? Is this a specific kind of explanation? Is it a list of conditions on something’s being an explanation?
Hi everyone,
Before I retire for the evening, I’d just like to make a few comments on Feser’s arguments for PSR, now that I’ve had time to reflect on them.
A. If PSR were false, then it would be very surprising if all events (or the vast majority of events) turned out to have a legitimate explanation; yet they do.
Skeptical reply: a world in which most events occurred without any explanation would likely be fatal to life. Consequently, in those possible worlds containing life-forms, we would expect that most events will have a law-like explanation and PSR appears to hold true most (if not all) of the time. However, this is merely an anthropic bias.
B. If PSR is false, then there is no a priori reason to believe that our perceptual experiences actually correspond to external objects and events – in which case, we have no reason to trust them.
Skeptical reply: There is indeed no a priori reason for us to trust our perceptions, but we do have a strong a posteriori reason to do so: namely, the fact that we are able to navigate our way around the world successfully.
C. If PSR is false, then there is no a priori reason to believe that our rational deliberations are the outcome of following logical rules – in which case, we have no reason to trust them.
Skeptical reply: There is indeed no a priori reason for us to trust our rational deliberations, but we do have a strong a posteriori reason to do so: namely, the fact that our scientific quest to understand the world actually works as well as it does.
D. If PSR is false, then all scientific explanations ultimately rest on some set of fundamental laws, which are just “brute facts” – which means that scientific explanations don’t really explain anything.
This, to my mind, is the best argument. I think Feser is onto something here. If A is explained by B, which is explained by C, which is explained by D, and D has no explanation, then have we really explained A by saying that it rests upon B, C and D? I think not.
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t accept the implicit assumption that exceptionless laws imply the truth of determinism. I would argue that laws constrain the course of events, without defining it.
Again, this depends on what’s meant by an explanation–is it something in the causal world or something in the world of reasons? This is precisely the muddle that Spinoza gets into over and over again in the Ethics.
I believe myself that reasons must come to an end at some point. We have axioms, or what Aristotle called basic categories. But that’s something about us, not about the ‘outside world.” We simply have to start somewhere.
Nothing of great metaphysical import follows from that fact, IMO, although I do think it’s critical to understand this in order to do epistemology correctly. Sellars, e.g., didn’t get it.
The mistake is in accepting determinism! 🙂
Laws, like religions, are human inventions. They might be fairly good models, but they are models.
KN:
vjtorley:
Vincent,
I think you missed the import of the word “exhaustively” in KN’s statement:
In any case, the introduction of indeterminism doesn’t rescue libertarian free will. LFW is an incoherent notion, and remains so whether or not physicalism holds and regardless of whether reality is deterministic.
For a Thomistic approach to PSR Feser refers to pp 137-43 of his Scholastic Metaphysics.
Hate the hate, love the hater. I forgive you.
I don’t think this makes any sense. The fact that it makes some sense to you suggests that we mean quite different things by the PSR.
I don’t understand what “adequate necessary objective explanation” means, so I’ll drop that and just talk in terms of “explanation.” I’ll just use “fact” as a term for states of affairs that need to be explained, without worrying about the ontological constituents of states of affairs (powers, processes, events, beings, objects, etc.)
I understand the PSR as the following principle:
“Necessarily, every fact has an explanation.”
Denying the PSR yields:
“Possibly, not every fact has an explanation”.
But here’s the rub, then: from the possibility that not every fact has an explanation, nothing at all follows about how we ought to assign probabilities. Thinking that it does is a conflation (as walto pointed out above) of metaphysics and epistemology. Possibility is a modal category, and it’s part of metaphysics. Probability is an epistemic category; it’s how we assess evidence.
But if that’s right, then the denial of the PSR doesn’t make it at all surprising that
facts have explanations; it only means that isn’t necessary that they do.
I think this claim relies on a problematic — indeed, I would say, false — conception of what it is to perceive.
My starting-point here is Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (which is not the easiest or shortest of books). On Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of perceptual experience, we do not first have perceptual experiences ‘in the head’ or ‘in the mind’ and then look for ‘external’ objects to which those experiences ‘correspond’. Rather, perception is a kind of intentionality, and perceptible objects are a kind of intentional object. The act of perceiving is an act that terminates at the perceptible object.
And with a phenomenology of perception, or any other version of direct realism, the whole picture of perceiving here collapses. So denial of the PSR wouldn’t have the baneful effect that Feser imagines.
Again, this simply doesn’t follow. Just because it is possible that not every fact has an explanation it doesn’t follow that we cannot figure things out by reasoning about likely causes — by constructing models that contain posited causes of observed phenomena and then testing those models against perceptual reality.
Let me see if I understand this: if I explain rainbows in terms of refraction, and I explain refraction in terms of the physical properties of light and spherical water droplets, but then I don’t have an explanation for why light has the properties it does, then I haven’t really explained rainbows? That seems pretty obviously silly — of course I’ve explained rainbows! I just haven’t explained everything. But is the view supposed to be that we haven’t really explained anything unless we’ve explained everything? So incomplete objections aren’t real explanations?
I hasten to add that of course I accept Peirce’s point that we must accept as a rule of hope that there are explanations to be found. Without that hope or faith, they’d be no point in doing science. But I see this as the existential commitment of scientific objectivity, and not a principle in the sense that rationalists or Kantians have made it out to be.
and
Seems reasonable to me! Why do children ask why?
Is anyone denying this?
ETA:
Still seems quite uncontroversial.
Mung,
Your attempt at faux nobility might have worked better if you hadn’t fabricated the quote.
You just can’t help yourself, can you?
Don’t you have some emails to write?
And why haven’t you acknowledged my rather obvious superiority?
Moved a comment to guano.
We have noyau for personal attacks.
Kantian Naturalist,
Iain McGilchrist Here
In your view, do those all mean the same thing? Can the “reason” be a causal chain? Do we have to understand this chain for it to be “intelligible”? Must it have a starting point that we are aware of?
Isn’t it obvious that no good can come of slopping together sciency/metaphysical claims with epistemological ones?
I agree that the systematic conflation of reasons and causes is a philosophical dead-end. (We might disagree on how far that’s also Spinoza’s problem, but that’s a tangential issue.)
The deeper problem here — which I think you’re getting at — is the assumption that the explanation ‘exists’, whether we’ve discovered it or not. The idea here is that explanations aren’t things that we construct, but rather we discover the explanation itself. That requires (in turn) that the world in itself has a rational or categorical structure, and that inquiry is the progressive disclosure or explication of the world’s own rational or categorical structure.
This assumption is built into the very strong rationalist reading of the PSR, quite different from the pragmatist ‘rule of hope’ reading of the PSR. The defender of the rationalist PSR needs to show that our practices of empirical inquiry would be unintelligible to us — they would not make sense — unless we presuppose that the world in itself has a rational structure.
Put otherwise: the rationalist needs to say that our practices of empirical inquiry would not make sense to us unless we assume that the world in itself conforms a priori to our standards of rational intelligibility.
What I want to tease out there is that the rationalist is committed to a theocentric conception of epistemic conditions: she is thinking about knowledge in terms of what would be knowable sub specie aeternitatis (‘under the aspect of eternity’) by a being with cognitive powers similar to our own (but unlimited, unlike our own).
In a theocentric conception of epistemic conditions, we first conceive of an unlimited or absolute cognitive agent, think about what He or She or It would conceptualize of the world, and then evaluate our own knowledge insofar as it approximates (or falls short) that of the absolute mind.
In this picture, scientific progress is imagined to be the progressive approximation to how God Himself understands the world that He created.
Without in any way disputing the historical influence or importance of this picture, I do aim to dispute that it is the only way or even the best way of understanding what we do when we construct testable models of causal regularities.
The theocentric epistemologist is like someone who insists on first positing an ideal or perfect map of some territory — a map that corresponds 1:1 with the territory being mapped* — and then saying that our maps are good, useful, etc only insofar as they are rough, crude approximations of the perfect map (the God’s-eye point of view). By contrast, the naturalist is perfectly happy to say that our maps are good and useful insofar as they allow us to navigate the territory; there’s no need to posit some ideal map. Put less metaphorically, we do not need to posit how things would look from the God’s-eye point of view in order to make sense of our all-too-human practices of successful empirical inquiry.
And, insofar as the rationalist version of the PSR is already committed to a theocentric conception of epistemic conditions, the idea that one can thereby conclude that God exists is as impressive as a stage magician who pulls a rabbit out of a hat when everyone saw him put the rabbit in the hat a few minutes earlier.
* Apologies to Borges and Eco for stealing this idea from them.
Thanks for that quote! Yeah, Merleau-Ponty is exceptionally good on how to describe what it is to perceive and the interdependence between perceiving and moving. Fortunately a whole generation of new cognitive science has emerged that looks to Merleau-Ponty (as well as to Heidegger, William James, and Dewey) for inspiration rather than to Descartes and Turing.
(I cannot promise that I will not write a paper on the relevance of contemporary cognitive science for philosophy entitled “Total Eclipse of Descartes”.)
Kantian Naturalist,
Nice post, KN.
walto,
Thanks! I’d be interested to see how Mung and/or Torley respond, if they do.
walto,
I’m not sure what you mean by a “cause” or a “reason.” In modern parlance, the former term means roughly what Aristotle would have called an efficient cause, while the latter term means not just an Aristotelian final cause, but an intelligent agent’s goal – usually something extrinsic rather than intrinsic.
Be that as it may, I would argue that the notion of “explanation” is more general than either “cause” or “reason.” Briefly, an explanation is whatever serves to make something more fully intelligible. And Feser’s point is that if we ground A’s intelligibility in that of B, and B’s in that of C, and C’s in that of D, and then we declare D unintelligible, then we don’t have a real explanation at all, but a bogus one.
You suggest that the demand for explanations to come to a halt is an anthropocentric one. I disagree. I put it to you that an alien from Vega who was informed of our current theories of physics would find them unsatisfying for the same reason we do: they come to a halt at some “brute fact,” which we’re told to take as a given. Any alien worth their salt would surely ask, “Why stop here?”
In the end, I believe that we shall never make sense of Nature unless we heed the maxim of Sir James Jeans:
I’ll just say one more thing. The real question we need to ask is: what would a self-explanatory Reality have to be like?
This is indeed what I happen to hold.
But this not the same statement put otherwise. It’s totally different. First you said that we don’t construct explanations, but rather discover them. For this to work, the world does not have to conform to our standards of intelligibility. It’s us conforming to the world’s standards. And they are not really the world’s standards, but universal, we being a part of it.
It’s the scholastic view of science.
Not really. The territory is what it is, and there are good and bad maps about it. The “theocentric epistemologist” only says that telling a good map from a bad map can be objective, if one evaluates them in the light of PSR, that is by looking at their explanatory scope.
The principle of economy (Occam’s razor) is not the only tool to evaluate scientific theories, but also explanatory scope, i.e. the theory should have no exceptions and its formulation should explain as much as possible. Insofar as explanatory scope matters to scientists, PSR is tacitly presupposed and undisputed.
Why does an explanation need to be grounded in that way?
You seem to be insisting on some kind of foundationalism, which leads to a strict reductionism. Yet I seem to recall that you are opposed to reductionism.
Even the skeptical responses turn out to themselves be explanations. They affirm rather than deny PSR.
The appeal to many worlds to explain the features of this world still is to offer an explanation. Perhaps an alternative one, but an explanation nonetheless.
Why explain why the PSR only seems to be true?
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Johannes_Kepler
It leads to reductionism, if you are a materialist or atomist. Or a nominalist. In other cases it leads to essentialism or holism.
Essentialism is, in effect, a reductionism to hypothetical essences.
Matter and atoms are in fact derivable from essences, whereas essences (things sensible and intelligible) are not derivable from matter and atoms. This is why materialism and atomism are more properly termed reductionism – they actually end up reducing ontology.
To a nominalist of course it does not matter either way, because nominalists expect everybody else to treat words as they do, namely meaninglessly, equivocating all the way.
Erik:
Untrue. It simply isn’t necessary to accept the PSR in order to do science.
All that’s necessary is to think that whatever you’re investigating might have an explanation, and that the probability is high enough to make the investigation worthwhile.
If I’m investigating the antioxidant properties of hazelnuts, for example, it doesn’t matter to me whether the laws of physics have an underlying explanation or whether they are just brute facts.
Talk about reading comprehension issues. Nothing you wrote leads to the conclusion that what Erik wrote is untrue. You misread what he wrote and your response is a non-sequitur.
Are you seriously claiming that if I explain rainbows in terms of differential refraction, but I haven’t explained the underlying principles of quantum mechanics, then I haven’t really explained rainbows? That my explanation of rainbows is bogus because I haven’t explained the universe?
This response simply begs the question: it assumes that acceptance of the PSR is built into the very logic of explanation in the first place. But that is precisely what we’re contesting. My point is that there are deep problems with all of Feser’s argument for why we should accept the PSR.
vjtorley:
KN:
Vincent,
I share KN’s incredulous reaction.
Also, you are conflating “has an explanation” with “is intelligible”. They are not the same thing.
Moved a comment to guano.
Since Alan omitted the customary link again:
The guanoed comment can be found here.
in fact?
Vincent, I’m not sure if you notice that you make your aliens think just like humans: they even speak in English! And, in any case, if it wasn’t clear, my point wasn’t about the way humans think, but about the world doing what IT does and thinkers doing what THEY do. What makes the world spin isn’t explanations, or as you prefer, intelligibility. So it is customary to distinguish reasons–what people (or aliens) understand from (yes, efficient) causes–the events that make other events happen. It is important to keep those separate–being from being known.
Feser, like Spinoza and other rationalists, trade on the conflation of these notions. It may well be the case that WE don’t have a good explanation of A if we must rely on referring to B in making it, but we have no good explanation of B. But nothing about A’s existence requires any EXPLANATION at all–never mind a complete one.
Ignoring “free will” and quantum weirdness, every event may need causal precursors and, for all I know, they go back infinitely in time, but whatever the truth is about that, nobody need be able to explain anything about it. Now or ever. In sum, PSR can either be a principle about things (a causal principle) or a claim about explanations (a theory of good reasoning)–but if it is both, it is saying not one thing but two.
I hope that clarifies my previous post for you.