Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology

God and Rational Belief

Colin Ruloff, Peter Horban, Colin Ruloff, Peter Horban

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350093874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

In recent years there has been a bold revival in the field of natural theology, where "natural theology" can be understood as the attempt to demonstrate that God exists by way of reason, evidence, and argument without the appeal to divine revelation. Today's practitioners of natural theology have not only revived and recast all of the traditional arguments in the field, but, by drawing upon the findings of contemporary cosmology, chemistry, and biology, have also developed a range of fascinating new ones. Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology brings together twenty experts working in the field today. Together, they practice natural theology from a wide range of perspectives, and show how the field of natural theology is practiced today with a degree of diversity and confidence not seen since the Middle Ages. Aimed primarily at advanced undergraduates and graduate students, the volume will also be of interest to researchers in philosophy, theology, biblical studies, and religious studies, as an indispensable resource on contemporary theistic proofs.

Part One

Revisiting the Classical Arguments for the Existence of God

1

The Argument from Contingency

Joshua Rasmussen

1. The question of existence

Why does anything exist? There are atoms. There are planets. There is you. Why are there any of these things? Why not instead just nothing at all? The purpose of this chapter is to help you investigate a possible answer.¹

Given the topic of this book, you might expect me to argue that God is the answer—i.e., God explains why anything exists. However, this answer has a puzzling consequence. God cannot explain existence unless God already exists. This explanation appears circular.

If we want to know why something exists, curiosity typically draws our attention to a broader context. For example, if we wish to understand why a particular fire exists, we might search for a cause of the fire. The cause of the fire is not the fire itself; the cause is something else, like a match or lightning strike. In the absence of a broader context that could help us see why something exists, the original mystery seems to remain.

I will seek to shed light on the mystery of existence in two stages. In the first stage, I will show how certain principles of explanation suggest that there is a foundational layer of reality, which exists without any outside explanation. In the second stage, I will investigate the nature of this foundation; in particular, I will consider how a foundation could be relevantly different from everything else that has an outside explanation, and how we may thereby avoid the problem of circularity. In the end, we will arrive at what may be the ultimate explanation of everything.

2. Why ask why?

Asking why is one of the most powerful tools for investigating any topic. I will show how we can use the question—why?—to investigate an explanation of everything.

I begin with a simple “why” principle: explain as much as you can. This principle will guide our entire inquiry.

Let us unpack the “why” principle. I offer what I call “the Principle of Explanation” (PE), which is one modest translation of the “why” principle: For any fact F, if an explanation of F is possible, then an explanation of F is expectable, other things being equal. This principle is relatively modest as far as principles of explanation go. PE is more modest than the classic Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). PSR says that everything whatsoever has a sufficient reason (explanation or cause).² By contrast, PE doesn’t require that much. Instead, PE expresses a presumption to expect an explanation; in other words, explain as much as you can.

Five clarifications are in order. First, when I say some explanation is expectable, I don’t mean that someone probably knows the explanation. Some explanations may be entirely unknown. For example, it could be that there is ash on the ground because there was a fire, even while no one knows that there was a fire. So I’m thinking of explanations as part of the world—perhaps awaiting discovery.

Second clarification: I am thinking of explanations as expressible in terms of propositions. So, for example, the proposition that there was a fire may explain the fact (true proposition) that there is ash on the ground. If we say the fire itself explains the ash, I understand this talk to be shorthand. I’ll say an explanation is real (actually obtains) if the proposition that expresses it is true.³

Third, an explanation, as I am thinking of it, provides some illumination of why or how something is the case without circularity. When I say the explanation is not circular, I mean that at least part of the explanation is external to (not wholly included in) the fact to be explained. (I leave to the side the prospect of other notions of “explanation” that allow for circularity.) Example: a theory of common ancestry helps illuminate—and so explains (to some extent)—why genetic similarities exist.

For our purposes, we may say that where F is a fact of the form the xs exist, an external explanation of F is in terms of at least one thing that is not among those same xs. For example, an external explanation of the fact that the turtles exist is not entirely in terms of those same turtles.

Fourth, by “expectable,” I mean a positive degree of expectation (what philosophers sometimes call “epistemic” probability). For example, if someone tosses a six-sided die, and if all sides look equal in size, then you can expect a 1/6 probability (expectation) that the die lands on a given side. In the same way, the expectation in PE is an expectation of a further explanation in light of the record of actual explanations one knows about.

Fifth and finally, the principle allows for exceptions. It says that an explanation is expectable other things being equal. In this way, PE can expose a reason in support of some explanation, while leaving open whether one may have counterbalancing reasons. The discovery of reasons to think something is true is itself an important part of the discovery of truth.

Now that we have some preliminaries out of the way, I will share a few reasons I think PE can help us extend sight. First, PE successfully predicts many observations. In this respect, PE is like the law of gravity. The law of gravity successfully predicts the many cases of gravitational attraction. Similarly, PE successfully predicts the many cases of explanation. Successful prediction provides evidential support for the theory.

Note that evidential support is open to defeat. For example, suppose we found a special massive object that defies gravity. Then we may have reason to restrict the law of gravity. Similarly, if one has reason to think that PE fails to apply to a particular item, then that reason may motivate an exception. Still, even if we found some weird object, that wouldn’t undermine the presumptive application to most other objects.

Consider, moreover, that science succeeds by seeking deeper explanations of observations. Without something like PE, it is unclear how scientific practice could have a solid footing, for scientific investigation relies on at least the presumption that there is a further, outside explanation for a given phenomenon (while we might not yet know what it is). Suppose, instead, there is no presumption of any explanation. Then for any given observations, there is no presumption of an explanation of those observations. In that case, every scientific explanation would be suspect.

The ramifications go beyond science. Without PE, it’s not even clear how you could infer that anything exists outside your head. For suppose there is no presumption to expect an explanation. Then why expect any external explanation of your existence or inner experiences? You might just as likely be randomly hallucinating.

Now to be clear, I am not suggesting that you must first explicitly believe PE to believe that particular things have an explanation. Rather, I think you can begin by directly witnessing clear cases of explanations, such as that your current thoughts have an explanation in terms of previous thoughts. These clear cases then provide a basis for inferring a more general principle, which is implicit in ordinary and scientific reasoning.

Here is a final, reason-based consideration that may also support PE. One may have a direct, intuitive sense that truths, in general, have an explanation. To trigger that sense, take any arbitrary proposition p out of a hat. Suppose p is true. We can wonder: why is p true? Why not false? One’s very curiosity reflects the sense that there is likely some explanation, whatever it might be.

At this point, it may help to sketch the sorts of explanations that might be available in general. So take any true proposition p. Proposition p is either contingent (i.e., not necessarily true or necessarily false) or necessary. Suppose, first, p is contingent. Then an explanation of p could be in term...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Revisiting the Classical Arguments for the Existence of God
• 1 The Argument from Contingency
• 2 The Kalam Cosmological Argument
• 3 The Ontological Argument
• 4 The Fine-Tuning Argument
• 5 The Argument from Biological Complexity
• 6 The Argument from Biological Information
• 7 The Moral Argument
• Part 2 Further Directions in Natural Theology
• 8 The Argument from Phenomenal Consciousness
• 9 The Argument from Beauty
• 10 The Argument from Certainty
• 11 The Argument from the Applicability of Mathematics
• 12 The Conceptualist Argument
• 13 The Argument from Desire
• 14 The Argument from Religious Experience
• 15 The Wager Argument
• 16 The Argument from the Meaning of Life
• 17 The Argument from Common Consent
• 18 The Argument from Ramified Natural Theology
• Index
• Copyright