Francis Ayles 1,453 Words

Evaluate some arguments for why there is something rather than nothing

Philosophers have pondered the question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ for sometime. In fact there has been commentary on whether or not an empty world is possible as far back as Parmenides in the fifth century B.C. Most recently arguments have been put forward by philosophers such as Leibniz and Inwagen attempting to explain why something does exist instead of the empty world alternative.

Leibniz argues based on the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’ which states that ‘every state of affairs must have a reason why it is the way it is rather than some other way’. This principle is a very important part of scientific methodology and Leibniz thinks that it is essential to rational thought. Although I agree with this for the most part I feel that the principle of sufficient reason does have its shortcomings and should not be accepted totally and without question. The weakness of the principle comes from the fact that Leibniz believed that the world was physically deterministic, i.e. if you had complete knowledge of the world at one point you could predict its state at any other point in time with total accuracy. However, recent developments in quantum mechanics and chaos theory have shed a certain amount of doubt on this view and suggest that the world may in fact be chancy. In quantum mechanics two identical situations may produce different results and this goes against the principle of sufficient reason. In this case there is no sufficient reason for one outcome or the other, just a certain probability of each one occurring.

Leibniz uses the principle of sufficient reason in his cosmological argument, which goes as follows;

  1. There are contingent things in the world.
  2. For contingent things to exist there must be other things to explain their existence, i.e. they are dependant.
  3. Therefore the world is not its own cause; there must be something else upon which it depends.
  4. Therefore there must be a necessary being; something for which it’s only reason for existence is itself. I.e. supposing it did not exist would be a contradiction.

I find the most immediately unintuitive part of this argument to be the idea of a being whose reason for existence is itself. Existence is not a property and therefore the concept of a necessary being is a contradiction. Leibniz attempts to reply to this argument by giving the examples of abstract objects such as numbers that must necessarily exist. He says that this shows that although being is not necessarily a property there can be necessary beings. I do not personally think that numbers are real entities in their own right, and this view is also held by many philosophers who study mathematics. For example one branch of the philosophy of mathematics, known as Logicism, holds that mathematics is built upon logic and all mathematical statements are necessary logical truths.

Another objection to the cosmological proof is that if all contingent truths are explained by the existence of a necessary being then they must also be necessary. This objection was put forward by Lowe and also Inwagen along very similar lines. Leibniz accepts this but proposes a distinction that can be made in order to still maintain the idea that there are both necessary and contingent truths. He says that necessary truths have existence as part of their essence while contingent truths do not. Although I think that this is probably the best route for Leibniz to take in salvaging his argument I simply do not agree with the separation of truths into necessary and contingent. I think that the objection posed by Lowe and Van Inwagen is a very strong one, and I think that this coupled with the argument that a necessary being is in fact a contradiction overpowers Leibniz’s argument.

Inwagen offers a rather different argument than Leibniz. He argues for why there is anything at all while Leibniz argues for the existence of a necessary being which therefore explains the existence of the kind of world which we now inhabit. Inwagen’s argument has four premises;

  1. There are some beings.
  2. If there is more than one possible world there are infinitely many.
  3. There is at most one possible world where there are no beings.
  4. For any two possible worlds, the probability of them being actual is equal.

Inwagen argues that there are an infinite number of ways the world might actually be. By the principle of sufficient reason all of these ways should be equally likely, there is no reason that one should be chosen over another. He states that there is no way to distinguish between the worlds either internally or externally in order to assign different probabilities to them. Inwagen then says there cannot be more than one world which is empty and contains no beings. He asks us to imagine that the world is created by an infinite number of switches and that for an empty world they must all be set to the ‘off’ position. This would be one possibility out of infinitely many. Inwagen is using the principle of identity of indiscernibles here which states that indistinguishable possibilities are one and the same possibility. It follows that if the probability of there being nothing is zero then the probability of there being something is therefore one.

I think that Inwagen’s argument is stronger than the one put forward by Leibniz. Inwagen does not rely on a necessary being and I find the argument generally stronger and less open to criticism. However the fourth premise of Inwagen’s argument is open to doubt. The problem is that we know nothing about the totality of creation. It is therefore presumptuous to assume that the engine behind creation has the property that every world it could possibly create has an equal probability. If a necessary being did exist we would think that they would be more likely to create a world which contained beings such as those in ours. As Albert Einstein was famously quoted as saying, ‘God does not play dice’. The fact that beings such as us exists seems to support this point. According to Inwagen the possibility of each world being actualised is infinitesimally small yet ours does and contains intelligent beings such as ourselves. However Inwagen’s argument is not really attempting to explain why our world exists rather than another, just why anything exists at all. Also, it may be possible that there have been an infinite number of worlds before ours and it is only in the very small minority of them that intelligent beings emerge and ask the question ‘why our world rather than another?’.

Another question which arises when considering Inwagen’s argument is whether nothingness is a real possibility. Lowe argues that a world devoid of concrete beings is not possible. Lowe uses the idea of sets, he suggests that a set with no members is no longer a set as the existence of a set is dependant upon its members. It may be useful here to consider the concept of absolute space. Leibniz used the principle of sufficient reason to argue against the concept of absolute space. He argues that if absolute space did exist there would be no reason for creation to occur in one spot rather than another and therefore creation could not happen. This view is now supported by modern science, although based on other evidence. Referring back to Inwagen’s analogy of the world being created by an infinite series of switches, it seems plausible that having all the switches turned off may result in a world which does not contain concrete beings but still contains empty space. Thus if absolute space does not exist, a world which contained space that could support spatial relations between concrete beings would not be an empty world.

In summary, Leibniz fails to prove the existence of a necessary being and also cannot escape the fact that by the principle of sufficient reason all truths are in fact necessary. His attempt to separate truths based on intuition does not save his argument. Inwagen’s argument is stronger and more useful, and does not require the existence of a necessary being. Its main shortcoming is due more to our limited scope on creation than anything else. I think that this reflects the extreme difficulty of addressing this question, which in reality may never be answered convincingly.

Bibliography

Van Inwagen, P., Why is there anything at all?, (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1996)

Van Inwagen, P., Metaphysics, (Oxford, 1993)

Lowe, E.J., Why is there anything at all?, (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1996).

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics