Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (14 page)

Why, though, should someone who did not grow up in one of these traditions believe in such a God, one who cares about our actions and fates? Why not the abstract and aloof God of the eighteenth-century deists, or the impersonal God of Spinoza?

“Well,” Swinburne said, “those conceptions fail to take seriously the infinite goodness of the creator. Now, what would a good God do? It’s unlikely he’d create a universe and then not take an interest in it. Parents who leave their children to fend for themselves aren’t very good parents. You’d expect God to keep a connection with his creation, and if things go wrong, to help people to straighten them out. He will want to interact with his creation, but not be too obvious about it. Like a good parent, he’ll be torn between interfering too much and interfering too little. He’ll want people to work out their own destiny, to work out what is right and wrong and so on, without his intervening all the time. So he’ll keep his distance. But on the other hand, when there has been a lot of sin around, he will want to help people deal with it, especially those who
want
his help. He’ll hear their prayers and sometimes he’ll answer them.”

I mentioned the argument of some philosophers that the universe was brought into existence not by a personal God, but by an abstract principle of goodness. That, after all, was what Plato believed.

“Philosophically, the idea of a Platonic principle of goodness is highly suspect,” he said. “But I have a particularly Christian problem with it. Such an abstract principle can’t deal with the problem of evil. There is, as we know, evil and suffering in the world. I have a theodicy—a view of why God should allow evil to happen. I think he allows it to happen because it’s logically necessary if certain goods are to be possible, the goods arising from our possession of free will. God is omnipotent. He can do anything that is logically possible to do. And it isn’t logically possible for him to give us free will and yet to ensure that we always use it in the right way.”

Swinburne paused to take a sip of tea. When he began talking again, his tone had grown almost homiletic. “Now, a good parent allows his children to suffer, sometimes for their own good, and sometimes for the good of other children. A parent who does that, I think, has an obligation to
share
the child’s suffering. Here’s an example, perhaps a superficial one. Suppose my child needs a special medicine that’s in short supply. I happen to have plenty of that medicine for my child. But suppose my neighbor’s child suffers from the same disease and also needs that medicine. If I share my supply with my neighbor, my own child will have just enough of the medicine to survive. It’s generally believed that it would be okay to make my child suffer so that the other child would survive too. But if I do this, I think I have an obligation to share my child’s suffering. And God has the same sort of obligation. If he makes us suffer for a good cause, there comes a point where he has an obligation to suffer
with
us. And an abstract principle of goodness can’t do that.”

Despite the gravity of his point, I detected a quaver of mirth in Swinburne’s voice, as if he was pleased by this intellectual twist.

“There’s also the Christian doctrine of the atonement,” he went on. “If my children do bad things to one another, they’re wronging me too, because I’ve lavished a lot of care in trying to prevent this from happening. So, in wronging one another, we wrong God too. What’s God going to do about that? Well, what do
we
do when we’ve wronged somebody? We make atonement. And there are four elements of atonement: repentance, apology, reparations, and penance. Humans have wronged God mainly by living the wrong sort of life. So how are we going to make it up? Well, we don’t have much time—or inclination—to lead perfect lives, so we can’t really make adequate reparations. On the other hand, making reparations is something that somebody else can help you with if you’re not in the position to do it. In the Christian account, Jesus lived the perfect life, the one that we should have lived. And even though we have lived bad lives, we can offer Jesus’s life in reparation for our own failings. In doing so, we show God that we take those failings seriously, so he will forgive us. That’s the Christian doctrine of the atonement—part Aquinas, part Anselm. It follows from the nature of goodness itself that God will get involved in his creation. That’s a sort of bridge between philosophy and Christianity.”

There was something numinous in his logic. The question
Why is there something rather than nothing?
had led this philosopher not just to God, but all the way to the historical person of Jesus Christ.

I became aware again of the crucifix hanging on the wall just behind him. Was Swinburne a Roman Catholic? Or was he a member of the Church of England?

“Neither,” he said. “I’m Eastern Orthodox.”

“Oh,” I blurted out, finding myself at a loss for anything to say.

But Swinburne turned out not to be orthodox in every sense. When I resumed the conversation, I raised the generally accepted theological axiom that God stands outside of time, apprehending the entire history of the cosmos at a glance from the unchanging perspective of eternity. Scholastic thinkers like Aquinas held that such timelessness was one of God’s perfections.

“I don’t endorse that view,” he said, “and I don’t think the Biblical writers did either. They thought of God as being within time, and I do too. The idea that there’s a
before
and an
after
for God, that there’s a sense to saying, ‘He did this first and then that,’ is coming back into fashion.”

Why, I wondered aloud, did philosophers of religion so often fail to agree on such fundamental matters? And why was there such a vast metaphysical gulf between Swinburne, who thought the God hypothesis furnished a scientifically viable explanation for the existence of the world, and philosophers like Grünbaum, for whom the very idea was absurd?

“That in itself is an interesting question,” Swinburne said. “And it’s not confined to the philosophy of religion. You find such radical disagreement in every branch of philosophy you can name. And it can have practical consequences. People change their views about the morality of war, of capital punishment, a whole range of moral issues, based on philosophical arguments. But philosophy is a
terribly difficult
subject, and sorting out the hardest questions in the finite time of a human life is asking a lot. And we’re not only finite, we’re imperfectly rational. Our prejudices creep into our philosophical thinking, especially when it touches on our lives. They cause us to look at certain arguments more carefully, more sensitively, and perhaps to overlook others. Many philosophers were brought up in strictly religious households. As adolescents, they found their religion in conflict with things that were obviously true, and they rebelled against it. Then later, when someone shows them a more appealing sort of religion, they’re not going to grasp it.”

For Swinburne, God was not only a supernatural being to be worshipped and obeyed, but also the terminus of an explanatory chain. One could go no further than God in the quest to resolve the mystery of existence. Swinburne was not a believer in the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He did not think there was an explanation for
everything
. The metaphysical task, as he saw it, was to find the right stopping point in explaining the world, the one that would minimize the part of reality that was left unexplained. And that stopping point should be the simplest hypothesis that can encompass all the evidence before us.

Still, I could not resist raising the question of why God himself exists. Swinburne had conceded that the “most natural” state of affairs was absolute nothingness: no universe, and no God either. He also thought that a reality consisting of a universe and no God—the kind of reality that atheists believe in—was at least conceivable. Here Swinburne was at odds with many of his theological allies. From Anselm to Descartes to Leibniz on down to present-day philosophical theists (like Alvin Plantinga, of Notre Dame), they have viewed God’s existence as a matter of necessity. Unlike our contingent universe, they held, God could not fail to exist; he contains within himself his own sufficient reason. Indeed, they insisted, his existence could be proved as a matter of logic. Swinburne dissented on this point. Where other philosophical theists talked of
necessity
, he talked of
simplicity
; and simplicity, as he saw it, made a hypothesis only
probable
, not undeniably certain. One could gainsay God’s existence, he held, without being convicted of illogic.

But would Swinburne go so far as to say that God’s existence was a “brute fact”?

“Yes, I would,” he replied. “I would say that. It’s not merely that there is no explanation for God’s existence. There
couldn’t
be an explanation. One of God’s properties is omnipotence. If anything happens to him, it’s because he allows it to happen. Therefore, if something else brought about God, it could only be because God
allowed
it to bring about God.”

Here was a line of reasoning I certainly hadn’t heard before. “So you’re not personally puzzled,” I said, “about why God exists—or, I don’t know, maybe you
are
puzzled.”

Swinburne chuckled—out loud, for once—and said, “I don’t think that
anyone
thought that God was a logically necessary being, not at least until Anselm came along with his ontological proof. And that’s halfway through the two millennia of Christianity. Anselm’s ontological argument was a bad, unnecessary turn for theology. Even Aquinas didn’t really believe in it. So I’m not alone in thinking that God does not exist as a matter of pure logic. But I do think that God is a necessary being in the sense that he does not
depend
for his existence on anything else. And in that sense he’s ontologically ultimate, the ultimate explanation of all other things.”

I asked Swinburne to consider, just for the sake of argument, another possibility: that the universe exists as a brute fact, without any God to sustain it. Would the universe itself then be necessary in his sense, since it would not depend on anything else for its existence?

“That’s right!” he replied.

So the God hypothesis—even if it is accepted as more probable than the alternative, that of a complex universe which exists uncaused—does not fully resolve the mystery of existence.

“I must admit,” Swinburne said, “that part of me wants to know, wants some guarantee that there couldn’t
not
be a God. But I understand that it’s not logically possible to explain everything. You can explain A by B, B by C, and C by D, but in the end all you can do is find the simplest hypothesis that explains as much as possible of reality. That’s where explanation
has
to stop. And that intellectual stopping point, I claim, is God. As to why God exists, I can’t answer that question. I can’t answer that question.”

Could even Swinburne’s God, if we were able to ask him, answer it? “I am who am,” the voice from the burning bush announced to Moses. But did that voice ever ask, “Whence then am I?” If there were an explanation for God’s existence, then God, being omniscient, would know it. But if there really was no explanation—if he is indeed the Supreme Brute Fact—then he would know that too. He would know that his own existence as a contingent being was, in Swinburne’s words, “
vastly improbable
.” Would the divine mind be puzzled by its inexplicable triumph over the perfect simplicity of Nothingness?

I didn’t pursue this potentially impious line of questioning. I had made enough demands on Swinburne’s hospitality, on his supply of tea and biscuits, and perhaps on his intellectual patience as well. The windows of his study had grown dark with the early sunset. It was time to go. I thanked him effusively, and he gave me some advice on which restaurants I might try that evening in Oxford.

The birdsong had long since quieted down when I left Swinburne’s apartment building. Ambling back onto the main road, I noticed again the prominent Eastern Orthodox Church that loomed nearby. It seemed an odd intrusion of Byzantium into North Oxford. Swinburne had told me he was an Orthodox communicant. Did he worship there? With his sacerdotal manner and his elongated, slightly severe features, this Oxford philosopher of science and religion could almost take his place in an Eastern church mosaic, right next to the other Byzantine divines:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall …

Say, was that “a great cathedral gong” I heard in the distance?

No, it was just the bells of Oxford summoning me back toward the High Street. On reaching this destination, I went into one of the restaurants Swinburne had recommended, the Quod Brasserie. It was half full and fairly lively, provincial in an academic way that contrasted with the cosmopolitan Café de Flore back in Paris. Taking a table by myself, I ordered smoked haddock and a tomato salad, along with a split of champagne and a full bottle of Australian Shiraz, and mindlessly read that day’s issue of the
Guardian
as I ate and drank. By the time I left the place, it was close to midnight. Walking down the almost deserted High Street back toward my hotel, I was engulfed by a diffuse sense of contentment, and I temporarily ceased to care about the mystery of existence.

Interlude

The Supreme Brute Fact

R
ichard Swinburne seems to have solved one mystery at the price of introducing another. He purports to explain the world’s existence by positing a God who created it. But he concedes that he can find no explanation for God himself, whose existence, compared to the stark simplicity of Nothingness, strikes Swinburne as “vastly improbable.” Is this the best that theism can do—cap off its cosmic explanation with an inexplicable being, a Supreme Brute Fact?

Traditional philosophers of theism have not thought so. They have held that God, unlike the world, exists by his very nature. He contains within himself the principle of his own being. There are many technical terms for this. God is
causa sui
, the “cause of himself.” He possesses
aseity
, the property of being self-existent. He is the
ens realissimum
, the most real being, and the
ens necessarium
, the necessary being.

But is there any justification for all this verbiage?

Consider, for example, the term
causa sui
. It seems to suggest that God somehow caused himself to exist. But even medieval theologians refused to go that far. No being, they held, could possibly bootstrap itself into existence. Regardless of how powerful the being in question might be, it would have to exist before it could exercise its causal powers.

To say that God is
causa sui
is really to say that he is uncaused. His existence needs no cause because it is necessary. Or, to put the point somewhat differently, his existence needs no explanation because it is self-explanatory.

And how might the existence of such a self-explanatory being be demonstrated? One traditional route is the
cosmological argument
for the existence of God. This argument goes back to Aristotle, but the most sophisticated version of it is due to Leibniz, and it goes like this.

The universe is contingent. It might not have existed. Given that it does exist, there must be an explanation for its existence. It must have been caused to exist by some other being. Suppose that this being, too, is contingent. Then it requires an explanation for its existence as well. And so on. Now, either the explanatory chain eventually comes to an end, or it does not. If it does come to an end, the last being in the chain must be self-explanatory. If it goes on
ad infinitum
, then the entire chain of beings stands in need of an explanation. It must have been caused by some being outside the chain. Then the existence of
that
being must be self-explanatory. In either case, the existence of a contingent world must ultimately be explained by something whose existence is self-explanatory.

Once the existence of a self-explanatory being is deduced, just a little logical tinkering is needed to show that this being has the properties traditionally ascribed to God. (It was Samuel Clarke, an English theologian and friend of Isaac Newton, who supplied the details.) Start by observing that a self-explanatory being must exist as a matter of necessity. And if it exists necessarily, it must exist always and everywhere—that is, it must be
eternal
and
infinite
. It must also be
powerful
, since it caused the contingent world to come into existence. Moreover, it must be
intelligent
, since intelligence exists in the world and therefore must exist in its cause. And since it is also infinite, it must be
infinitely powerful
and
infinitely intelligent
. Finally, it must be
morally perfect
. For, being infinitely intelligent, it can never fail to apprehend the truth as to what is good; and, being infinitely powerful, it can never be prevented by any weakness of its own from acting in accordance with that truth.

The preceding reasoning, intended to show that the necessary being deduced in the cosmological argument must be God-like, is obviously rife with fallacy. But how about the cosmological argument itself? How valid is it? In essence, Leibniz was attempting an inference from contingency to necessity:
if
there is a contingent world, and
if
everything has an explanation,
then
there must be a necessary being that explains the existence of this world. Leibniz’s first premise looks okay. There
does
seem to be a world, and it
does
seem contingent. The second premise, which is Leibniz’s famous Principle of Sufficient Reason, is more dubious. Even Swinburne denied that there was an explanation for absolutely everything. And without that premise, the cosmological argument collapses.

But, valid or not, there is something peculiar about the cosmological argument. It is supposed to take us from an empirical premise—arising from our experience of the actual universe—to a necessary being. But if there
is
such a necessary being, why do we need this empirical premise to deduce its existence? Why can’t we infer its existence directly, through pure reason?

There is, as it happens, a notorious bit of reasoning which attempts to do just that. It is called the
ontological argument
. Unlike the cosmological argument for the existence of God, the ontological argument has no need of the premise that a world exists, or of the premise that there is an explanation for everything. The ontological argument purports to establish God’s existence through logic alone. God must exist as a matter of logical necessity, it says, since he possesses all perfections, and it is more perfect to exist than not to exist.

The ontological argument was invented in the eleventh century by Saint Anselm, an Italian monk who eventually became the archbishop of Canterbury. The gist of it seems to have come to this monk one day during his morning prayers. God, reasoned Anselm, is by definition the greatest and most perfect thing that can be conceived. Now, suppose God were merely an object of thought—something, that is, which existed only in our imagination. Then it would be possible to conceive of another being exactly like God except that this being existed in reality too. And since it is greater to exist in reality than merely in the imagination, this being would be greater than God—which is absurd. Therefore, God’s nonexistence is a logical impossibility. “
So truly, therefore
, dost thou exist, O Lord, My God, that thou canst not be conceived not to exist,” concluded the prayer in which Anselm expressed his argument.

Could the ontological argument possibly be valid? Even those who believe in God may feel it is too good to be true. Aquinas did not accept it. Descartes did, although he put it into a somewhat different form. Leibniz felt it needed an extra premise, namely, that God is a
possible
being—which premise Leibniz easily supplied by showing that God’s various perfections were all compatible with one another. Schopenhauer dismissed the ontological argument as “
a charming joke
.” Bertrand Russell, by contrast, describes in his autobiography how as a young man he was struck by its seeming truth:

I remember the precise
moment, one day in 1894, as I was walking along Trinity Lane, when I saw in a flash (or thought I saw) that the ontological argument is valid. I had gone out to buy a tin of tobacco; on my way back, I suddenly threw it up in the air, and exclaimed as I caught it: “Great Scott, the ontological argument is sound.”

Later in his philosophical career, Russell decided that the ontological argument was not sound after all. Still, he observed, “
it is easier
to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies.”

Russell’s observation has been borne out by contemporary anti-theists, whose critique of the ontological argument often boils down to mere mockery. For instance, Richard Dawkins, in
The God Delusion
, dismissed the ontological argument as “
infantile
,” a bit of “logomachist trickery,” but he did not take the trouble to identify the defect in its logic. The very idea that “a grand truth about the cosmos should follow from a mere word game” struck Dawkins as simply ridiculous, and that was the end of the matter as far as he was concerned.

But what exactly
is
wrong with the ontological argument? Anselm’s reasoning, succinctly put, runs like this:

1. God is the greatest imaginable being.

2. A being that exists is greater than one that is merely imaginary.

Therefore:

3. God exists.

Premise (1) can scarcely be disputed, since it embodies the very definition of God. Premise (2), though, looks a little funny. Just how much greater is it to exist in reality than to exist merely in the imagination? Am I, by dint of my reality, greater than the imaginary Emperor of Ice Cream?

Think for a moment about the phrase “exists merely in the imagination.” While it’s a familiar enough locution, it has distinctly odd implications if taken literally. It suggests that the being in question is real, yet somehow confined to a tiny piece of territory—our heads. And clearly such a cerebrally confined being is less great than one that is free to manifest itself in the cosmos at large. But that can’t be right. What is in our heads is not the thing itself, but the
idea
of the thing. And the idea is nothing like the thing. (You can ride a unicorn, for example, but you cannot ride the
idea
of a unicorn.) To say that a being “exists merely in the imagination” is really a
façon de parler
. It does not entail that the being in question exists in some limited way. Rather, it asserts that we have a certain idea/concept/image in our minds, but that no being corresponds to this idea/concept/image. An idea of God is not a kind of God, albeit less perfect, any more than a painting of a piece of fruit is a kind of fruit, albeit less nutritious.

Suppose, however, we forget about “imaginary existence” and simply concede that it is more perfect to exist than not to exist. Then God, possessing all perfections, must exist, mustn’t he? So what is wrong with Anselm’s reasoning?

The most celebrated objection to the ontological argument was brought by Kant. Existence, Kant claimed, is not a real predicate. In other words,
being existent
is not an ordinary property of things, like
being red
or
being intelligent
. This objection is routinely cited by all who would dismiss the ontological argument—Dawkins, for example. If existence is not a property of any sort, then it can’t very well be a perfection.

Is Kant’s dictum—existence is not a predicate—valid? Existence certainly seems a peculiar property in one sense: it is universal. Unlike the properties of
redness
or
intelligence
, absolutely everything has it. Just try to name something that does not exist. Santa Claus? To say “Santa Claus does not exist” is not to attribute nonexistence to some entity; it is merely to say that nothing satisfies the description
jolly fat man who lives with elves at the North Pole and who distributes toys to children the world over on Christmas Eve
. Even to say, “There is something that does not exist,” is self-contradictory, since the “there is” part asserts the very existence that the “does not exist” part denies.

It is not obvious why the mere fact that
existence
is universally possessed should disqualify it from the honor of being a property. But Kant evidently had something different in mind when he said “existence is not a real predicate.” His point seemed to be that existence adds nothing to the content of a concept. “
A hundred real dollars
do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible dollars,” he wrote, adding, “My financial position is, however, affected very differently by a hundred real dollars than it is by the mere concept of them.”

And here Kant is certainly right. Suppose I take a concept like
current member of the United States Senate
. There are precisely one hundred individuals of whom this concept is true. Now suppose I add
existence
to the concept, getting
current existing members of the United States Senate
. Lo and behold, this new concept is true of the same one hundred individuals that the old one was!

So adding
existence
to a concept doesn’t give it any extra heft. Nor does it fortify the existential chances of the would-be object defined. Otherwise, we could bring into being all sorts of wonderful things merely by defining them in the right way. This point was made by Saint Anselm’s earliest critic, a fellow eleventh-century monk called Gaunilo of Marmoutier. By Anselm’s logic, Gaunilo observed, we could demonstrate that somewhere on the ocean there must be an ideally pleasant “
lost island
,” since actual existence necessarily numbers among this island’s perfections.

What happens, from a logical point of view, when we deny God’s existence? Well, suppose we define God in the same theologically orthodox way that Saint Anselm did, as an infinitely perfect being. And, just to give Anselm’s side the advantage, let’s explicitly build
existence
into his definition:

x
is God if and only if
x
is infinitely perfect and
x
exists.

Then to say, “There is no God,” is to say:

There is no
x
such that
x
is infinitely perfect and
x
exists.

But this is equivalent to:

For every
x
, either
x
is not infinitely perfect or
x
does not exist.

And there is nothing inherently self-contradictory about that proposition. Indeed, it would be true of a world in which every entity fell short of infinite perfection—which is precisely the sort of world that atheists claim we live in.

Still, there is a reason why Anselm felt it was self-contradictory to deny the existence of God. That is because we use “God” not just as shorthand for a description—
infinitely perfect being
—but also as a name. If God is infinitely perfect and therefore existent, how could he
fail
to exist?