David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

If God is one, he is one absolutely, the Hebrew Bible affirms, because not only does he exist, he must exist. The five simple words of the declaration in Exodus—“I am that I am”—suggest that God’s existence is necessary. Being what He is, God could not fail to be who He is, and being who He is, God could not fail to be.

This is the heart of a second cosmological argument. It draws a connection between the existence of the universe and the existence of the Deity. The argument is not simple, and it is by no means conclusive.

Everything that exists has a precarious hold on being. Here today, gone tomorrow is more than an adage; it is a principle of metaphysics. We have an uncommon ability mentally to shuffle things in and out of existence; but applied so easily to others, this power cannot be self-applied. No matter with what determination we stare into the void, the staring itself makes the effort an exercise in irrelevance. Who is staring? If we cannot imagine a world without us (and so in my case a world gone mad with grief), we can give our reluctant assent to the proposition that things might continue in our absence.

Aquinas applies this argument to the universe, because he can see no reason to suppose that its existence is guaranteed. If it might not exist, why, then, does it exist?

Why indeed?

There now follows a remarkable, a bold, but a problematic step in the argument: If it is possible that something might not exist, Aquinas asserts, then it is certain that at some time it did not exist. In this, Aquinas was reprising a view of possibility that may be traced back to the Greek philosopher Diodorus.

But if the universe did not exist at some moment of time, then it emerged from absolutely nothing. The universe is everything that there is. What beyond nothing is left to explain its promotion from inexistence to existence?

This, Aquinas observes, is incoherent. Ex nihilo nihil fit. From nothing, nothing, as ancient writers said. Because it is impossible to understand the emergence of something from nothing, Aquinas concludes, something must have acted to bring the universe into existence. That something, the argument continues, could have been contingent or necessary. If contingent, we are no further advanced. We have simply chased perplexities into the past. If not contingent, then necessary. When it comes to things that exist necessarily, it is wasteful to assume more than one. What could the others do? Thus there is one thing whose existence is necessary, and if necessary, by the very same argument, eternal. Since it is eternal, it has no cause. Questions about its origins are pointless.

What is God if not an infinite and necessarily existing being?

This argument is by no means foolish. It is spacious. It has a certain grandeur. But it remains only as strong as its weakest premise: If the universe might never have existed, then for sure at some time or other it did not exist.

When this premise is placed in hot type on cold paper, suspicions arise that it covers an inference that Aquinas cannot support. The steps involved in passing from I exist to I might exist —they are fine. The additional steps that carry the metaphysician from I might not exist to at one time I did not (or will not) exist —they are fine too. They are as fine as metaphysical inferences ever get. But to suppose that precisely the same steps carry the universe from it might not exist to it did not exist suggests the fallacy of composition at work, as when the set of turtles is said to be a turtle on the grounds that its members are all turtles. One for all and all for one is not a principle of metaphysics. A universe of perishable things is not necessarily perishable. This objection does not by itself close the case. No case in metaphysics or theology is ever closed. But it does indicate that some further argument is needed, and this Aquinas does not provide.

Let us suppose, then, that the universe passes sedately from the everlasting to the everlasting. It has been there forever and it will be there forever. This is the universe that Einstein championed before he appreciated the explosive nature of Big Bang cosmology, and it is a universe that has always induced a sense of calm in those who contemplate it. If it does not appear to be the universe and thus our universe, a great many cosmologists in the twentieth century have regarded that as a defect in the plan of creation. A universe of this sort makes a busy, causally imperious God unnecessary; what is worse, it makes him incoherent. A cause must precede its effect, and if the universe is eternal, there was no moment in which God could have brought about the creation of the universe. In a world with so much time, it is odd to think that God—of all people!—would have no time in which to work. The best he could do from the outside would be to barge into the universe occasionally and cause a great deal of commotion.

Nonetheless, an eternal universe leads to a question very similar to the question that Aquinas asked, and it allows us to recapture some of the force of the second cosmological argument without the affliction of a very doubtful premise. The reformation strikes for a deeper level of doubt and perplexity than the original argument and for this reason carries an emotional burden that the original argument lacks.

“If the universe was always there and will always be there, why is it there at all?”

There is no point in answering this question by assuming that our own fond familiar universe must exist. With all due respect to the universe, this is an assumption no one wishes to make, because no description that we can offer of the universe suggests that its existence is necessary. But if the universe does not exist necessarily, then plainly it might never have existed at all, even if it has existed for all time.

And that is precisely the problem. With the possibility of inexistence staring it in the face, why does the universe exist? To say that universe just is, as Stephen Hawking has said, is to reject out of hand any further questions. We know that it is. It is right there in plain sight. What philosophers such as ourselves wish to know is why it is. It may be that at the end of these inquiries we will answer our own question by saying that the universe exists for no reason whatsoever. At the end of these inquiries, and not the beginning.

No matter how cheerfully physicists may endorse this conclusion, it is dreadful.

This is something we know too.

Two arguments are now at work. The first is due to Aquinas.

Its first premise:

If the universe is contingent, then at some time it did not exist.

Its second:

At that time, it emerged from nothing.

Its conclusion:

This is crazy.

And the second argument, derived from a mixed salad of philosophical greens of my own devising:

Its first premise:

If the universe is contingent, there is no saying whether it existed forever. Maybe. Maybe not.

Its second:

If anything might not exist, then it is reasonable to ask why it does exist.

Its conclusion:

Well, why does it exist? No, I mean really?