| Because it doesn't last, life has value. Because it is vulnerable and transient, a quick flash of wonderful brilliance, like a sparkler across the brow of darkness; because it is brief and limited; because there is never enough of it — life is supremely valuable. —Dwight Lyman |
Contingency and Necessity June 9, 2007
Posted by Rastaban in : Cosmological , trackbackTheists say something created everything out of nothing. But was this something, this God, itself part of the nothing or part of the everything? If part of nothing, it is nothing. If not part of everything, isn’t it also nothing? On the other hand, if it is part of everything it cannot be the creator of everything since that would require creating itself. If something can create itself then everything can create itself, and there remains no way to distinguish something from everything.
Theists counter by maintaining that the something, God, is unlike everything in one very important respect. It differs from everything in that God is a “necessary being” while everything else is “contingent”. Contingent here refers to things which interact in a causal chain with other things. A creates B, B creates C, C creates D in this interaction of cause and effect. Thus A, B, C and D are “contingent”. But if A is contingent then something must have created A.
Ah, but if A is God then nothing created A. The causal chain is broken by saying that A is a “necessary” being — which means, simply, uncaused. God’s existence doesn’t require the existence of anything else.
But is this anything other than a word game?
The Two-Way Street
The first problem is that causality is a two-way street. Effects have causes, but those causes have to be the sort of thing which can make those effects happen. Causality, in short, is an interaction. Which means that for God to be capable of interacting with the physical world in a way which enables God to create and move things, God must be contingent or have some contingent component. Declaring God “necessary” makes God incapable of creating contingent things or else renders God an inexplicable being who has both contingent and non-contingent parts which can’t possibly interact.
Theism can’t escape from this dilemma. Either God has no contingent aspect and therefore can’t be the source of the world’s contingency — can’t be the Creator — or else God has both contingent and non-contingent aspects and the problem of the “impossibility” of an infinite series of causes gets shoved into God’s nature. This last leaves a God who begins as an uncaused necessary being but in some unexplainable way transforms into a contingent being capable of engaging in a causal chain.
If something unmoving could be the cause of movement, theists would have a chance. But something which doesn’t move or change can’t move or change other things.
The Logical Necessity of the Series
The only way out for the theist is to claim that with God they are talking about a different kind of causality: logical causality, not contingent or historical causality. For example, the members of a series (e.g.: “the generations of Homo sapiens”) cannot exist unless as a matter of logical necessity the series itself (Homo sapiens) already exists. God must create the series (Homo sapiens) since the series is logically necessary before the individual contingent members of the series (generations of individual Homo sapiens) can exist.
But notice that it makes no difference whether the series contains finite or infinite members: the series as a whole stands in the same logical relationship to its members either way. The series of Homo sapiens could contain contingent Homo sapiens connected in a causal chain for all infinity, and the existence of the “series” would still be logically necessary before it could be assigned any members.
Put another way, if members of a series exist (no matter how many or few) then by logical necessity the series itself must exist.
But this line of argument fails to get us to God. For if everything in the physical universe is part of a contingent series, the series itself which by logical necessity must exist is not “God” but rather “the universe”. The argument only demonstrates that by logical necessity if anything in the universe exists, the universe must necessarily exist.
The Author of the Series
But I imagine theists arguing that I have missed the point here. For their point is that there must be a mental source for this abstract category that constitutes the series itself, and this is so whether the series is “Homo sapiens” or “the universe.” A member of a series cannot be the author of the series itself of which it is a member. (The series is logically precedent to its being populated with members, in other words).
But this crashes for the theist. It crashes because we only have to imagine a series which also includes God. If God is a member of a series then God cannot — by the same reasoning — be the author of the series of which God is a member.
Do such series exist? Absolutely. There is the series of “deities and Gods worshipped by humans.” More to the point, there is the series of “everything that exists.” If God is a member of that series, then God cannot be the author of the series. If God is not a member then God does not exist.
In fact, series are only descriptions of like or related things, and the author of these descriptions and series is not God but us. Logical relationships and “necessities” apply only to our thoughts and not to the actual physical things we think about.
Consider, for example, the series which contains “the generations of Homo sapiens.” If we follow the causal chain of that series backward in time we find H. sapiens imperceptibly changing into H. erectus then H. habilis then Australopithecus. If we look back far enough eventually we find members of the series are no longer discernable even as primates but only as mammals, further back still and they are no longer mammals but vertebrates and so on until eventually we leave even the animal kingdom behind.
Physical reality is not constrained by the logical categories we choose for describing it. And those logical categories owe their existence and logical necessities not to God but to us. They prove our existence, not God’s.
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