Contra Scott Clifton on the Principle of Causality

It’s been quite a while since I last posted an article on my blog; in fact, I pretty much told myself I was done blogging. And yet here I am…blogging again – “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” But, instead of explaining my absence, or promising that I will blog in the future, I think I’ll just jump right into my post.

I’ve looked up to Scott Clifton (also known on YouTube as Theoretical Bullshit) for a long time now, ever since I first watched him in my favorite soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. Ok not really, I’ve never watched him in a soap opera. I really looked up to him because of his videos on YouTube. I began watching Scott’s videos around 2010, when I was still a naive Christian apologist, and even though I disagreed with him more often than I agreed—though now that’s changed—I always took him very seriously intellectually, and I still do—in fact, his argument from nonbelief has helped shape my present beliefs.

Recently, to my pleasant surprise, I discovered that Scott has a blog on his website, and already has a lot of great articles. And it’s one article in particular that I have felt the need to address: an article entitled Beginning to Exist: A Critique of Kalam’s First Premise—please make sure and read Scott’s article before following along with my critique. Now, hopefully my readers (however many of them are left) know that I am not a William Lane Craig fan, in fact I disagree with him on virtually everything—and I certainly am not a fan of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA). However, I do in fact endorse the first premise of the KCA, and I do believe it to be true, and thus I disagree with Scott in this regard. Hence my motivation is manifest for the writing of this post.

So, before we jump into Scott’s criticism, I believe most of my readers are aware of the first premise of the KCA: (P1) everything which begins to exist has a cause. This is a basic form of the principle of causality (which I have defended here) and, obviously, in order for the KCA to be sound, this premise needs to be true. This is where WLC attempts to justify said premise, and Scott lists Craig’s justifications as follows:

         

         1)   Something cannot come from nothing. 

               2)   If something can come into being from nothing, it becomes inexplicable why just anything                   or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing.

               3)    Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of [P1].

Scott then begins with his criticism of (1):

It’s odd that Craig ever refers to this [sic] an “argument”. It’s not an argument; it’s a claim. And why should I, his intended audience, believe this claim? Craig’s answer is that this is a “metaphysical intuition” we all share. But what is an intuition? As an evolved primate whose cognitive abilities were naturally selected for survival and mating, why should I—an atheist for whom the Kalam Cosmological Argument is intended—take this seriously as an epistemic tool for determining the ultimate metaphysical nature of reality? What should I understand my intuitions to be, exactly, if they are not ultimately reducible to induction? How could this “metaphysical intuition” (which I don’t share, by the way) be anything other than an inference—conscious or subconscious—derived from my empirical knowledge of temporal, spatial, ex materia causality in the physical world? Isn’t (1) really just (3) in ‘metaphysical clothing’?

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, I agree that if one of Craig’s arguments for (P1) is simply to assert (1) as a mere intuition, then he has much work ahead of him. That being said, I don’t share Scott’s skepticism towards this principle, for reasons I will explicate shortly. Now, while I do agree that principles like (1) are abstracted from the spatiotemporal world, I don’t see that this hinders one from pronouncing (1) as a necessary proposition that we can be certain of.

Take, for instance, the cornerstone of logic and epistemology, the laws of logic. As I’ve argued in the past, we can be absolutely certain of these principles. Is P identical to P? Certainly. Is it the case that an existent cannot be both P and not-P  at the same time and in the same respect? Absolutely, etc. etc. Again, these logical laws are seen to be (by most logicians) logically necessary truths which would hold in any conceivable world—spatiotemporal or not—and it certainly is not a problem that these principles are abstracted from the world we observe. Now, is Scott skeptical of the efficacy of the laws of logic the same way he’s skeptical of (1)? I can’t say. But, if he is then I fail to see how this wouldn’t poke major holes in his epistemology.

More to the point, all that would need to be demonstrated in order to equate the efficacy of (1) with the efficacy of the laws of logic is to demonstrate that the former, like the latter, is a necessary truth. And this is not difficult to argue—though, in order to be as exhaustive as I can to argue this point, I will be using more Aristotelian-Thomistic jargon than analytical jargon [insert eye-roll here].

The phrase “something coming from” indicates that at one time this “something”, or whatever made up this “something”, only had the potential to do this, and thus when it did in fact come from whatever it came from, it was reduced from potency to act. Just like in order for water to come from ice, the ice had to, at some point, have only had the potential to become water, and subsequently when it did become water, this potency became actual.

Furthermore, “nothing” in A-T terms just means non-actual. But, non-actuality cannot move something from potency to act because you need something actual to reduce something from potency to act in the first place, like a lighter in the case of the ice—note that the mere potency cannot move itself since potency is only potential, not actual. Since that which is non-actual literally cannot do anything, it therefore cannot possibly be that which reduces the existent from potency to act. Therefore, there is no possible world in which something can be reduced from potency to act by something not already in act. Thus, there is no possible world in which something can come from nothing, which is the very definition of what makes something a necessary truth. 

Along with claiming that (1) is not a metaphysical principle we can be certain of, Scott maintains that there are other linguistic problems with this principle:

Further, there’s some very tricky language being employed here, and it causes other problems. Ask yourself if (1) is logically equivalent to:  

          (1′) Something cannot not come from anything.

Well if “nothing” means “not-anything”, then yes, the two statements (1) and (1′) are indeed logically equivalent. However, this presents a problem, since God by definition “didn’t come from anything”. So if God exists, then this proposition is false, and vice versa. Meaning the (logically equivalent) proposition, “Something cannot come from nothing” is also false, or else theism is false.

This seems to me to be blatantly false. (1) is not logically equivalent to (1’) and we can prove such simply by explicating the corollaries of logical equivalence. One corollary of two statements being logically equivalent is that the relation of consequence holds in both directions between them, which, in other words, means that the two statements are necessary and sufficient conditions of one another. So, let’s demonstrate that (1) and (1’) are not logically equivalent by demonstrating that one is either not sufficient or necessary for the other, and this is easier to see if strip the statements of particulars and restate (1) and (1’) as follows:

           P: X cannot come from Y

           Q: X cannot not come from not-Y.

Now, consider the following conditional statements:

          (C1): If P, then Q.

          (C2): If Q, then P.

When put in this form it should be clear (based on C1) that P is not a necessary condition for Q to obtain. Likewise, based on C2, Q is neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for P. Thus, P and Q, and therefore (1) and (1’), cannot be logically equivalent, contra Scott’s claim.

Not so fast though because Scott anticipates this objection:

“Perhaps [Craig] would grant that the terms “nothing” and “not-anything” are logically equivalent, but reject that the two statements (1 and 1′) are logically equivalent. He might say—and I’m just spitballing, here—that the true logically equivalent proposition to (1) would be:   

           (1″) Something cannot come from not-anything.

Meaning we must turn our focus to the phrase “come from”. God, you may argue, didn’t “come from” anything at all, whereas an uncaused universe would have “come from” not-anything, and that’s the difference. But is that even coherent, let alone true? I think not! Why think the phrase “came from” applies to the universe any more than it applies to God? If the earliest moment of the universe was the first moment of time itself, it is incoherent to speak as if the universe did any “coming from” at all. It would simply be the case that the universe exists at all points in time, and that there exists no moment prior to its existence… just like God.”

First, Scott asks a pertinent question here, namely, why suppose that the phrase “come from” applies to the universe any more than it applies to God? The answer is that the universe is not necessary, whereas God, if he exists, would indeed be necessary. And if the universe is not necessary, then either it has a cause or it’s a brute fact—I’ve argued against the latter here. And if the universe has a cause, then this opens the door for the phrase “coming from” to at least have a possible metaphysical application to the universe, whereas God would not have this possibility.

Second, is it true that if the universe did not have a first moment, then it is incoherent to speak of it “coming from” anything? Indeed it seems to be, and I actually agree with Scott here; principle (1) would not apply to the universe, if it did not have a beginning, just like it wouldn’t apply to God. Thus, I agree with Scott when he says that, “(1) could be true yet have no implications for the universe.”

However, does this actually mean that the universe, therefore, didn’t have a cause? Not necessarily, for, as I’ve argued in the past (here), there are cases of efficient and material causation which are non-temporal. If this is correct, then the universe can still have a cause without temporally coming into existence, and therefore it would still be contingent. However, let us note that, in his post, Scott did not survey whether or not the universe is contingent because it is outside of the subject matter dealt with in said post, so he can’t be faulted for not considering these responses.

At this point Scott delves into Craig’s justification for (1) based on an A-theory of time, and at this point I have no hard opinions on what he articulates. Subsequently, Scott then addresses Craig’s second (2) and third (3) argument for (P1), yet, in agreement with Scott, I don’t find (2) or (3) very persuasive, so I have little to say here. However, let it be known that in his discussion of Craig’s arguments for (3), Scott makes many comments regarding the nature of temporal causality that I would not agree with, but I feel as if the comments I’ve made above, and the articles I’ve linked to regarding causality, suffice to provide an answer to said comments.

That being said, keep in mind that Scott has not dealt with (P1) directly in his article—though he has elsewhere—but only Craig’s arguments for said premise. So, in the end, we have an interesting mashup of arguments. Most of Craig’s arguments for (P1) were poor and unpersuasive, and yet Scott’s arguments against (1)—the only “argument” of Craig’s I find tenable—I likewise found to logically invalid and unpersuasive.

Are space and time necessary?

The other day I was commenting over at DebunkingChristianity—usually not a good idea—regarding whether or not the universe could be said to be necessary. I got into a few decent discussions—which is surprising given the venue--one of which was with the very courteous Nicholas Covington, the author of Hume’s Apprentice, over at Skeptic Ink. During the discussion Nick brought up the possibility of not necessarily the universe per se being necessary, but space and time being necessary. It turns out that Nick has actually written up an article (here) defending this very thesis of his--in fact I remember reading it last year. It’s an answer to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” His answer is that the reason there is something rather than nothing is because space and time themselves are necessary and provide a necessary framework for existents. Needless to say, I don’t find Nick’s arguments persuasive nor valid, hence this post.

So, let’s see where Nick goes wrong. He begins by attempting to narrow down the definition of existence:

What is the difference between the two [a sea monster and the sun] that makes one real and the other imaginary? Well, the sun has detectable effects on ourselves and other things, but a sea monster doesn’t. […] In order to interact with other beings, or have effects on things, you must be within time. An effect takes place at a certain point in time, and you can’t act at a certain point in time if you aren’t within it.

My quibble here is with the talk of cause and effect necessitating temporality. I agree that usually causality is temporal, in that a cause usually precedes its effect in time. For example, I can hit my drink thereby knocking it over, and obviously the act of hitting my drink came before the act of the drink falling over. This is the common deterministic billiard ball type of causation. But, this is not universally the case, and this does not exhaust all types of causation, as I’ve argued in the past. There is such a thing as non-temporal and simultaneous causation. For example, if I hold my daughter, we have the cause of me holding my daughter, and the effect of her being suspended five feet above the ground. Yet, these are one and the same event, meaning the cause and effect happen simultaneously. I don’t hold my daughter and then she is subsequently being suspended, she is being suspended as long as I am holding her. The cause is simultaneous with the effect.

There are many more examples like this.  For instance, a person shaping a clay pot. The pot is only shaped simultaneously as the sculptor shapes it, not after. Or, the solidity of table. The effect of a table being solid is achieved as long as the material constituents are arranged in such a way as to be sufficient for that effect--the solidity is simultaneous with that arrangement. Or, the swinging of a hammer. The hammer’s motion is being caused by the swinging of the carpenter’s hand, and these two are simultaneous. There is no shortage of examples of simultaneous causation. But, what does this mean? Well, it means that, contrary to Nick’s claims above, a cause and effect relationship does not necessitate time.

But wait. I know I can already picture a reader making the following point: while the examples given demonstrate simultaneous causes and effects, the objects used in said examples are still in time. That is to say, the daughter, pot, carpenter, hammer etc. are all temporal objects existing in time. This is correct, but does it really call my point into question? No. For recall that Nick’s point was that in order for one existent to interact or to have an effect on another existent, time is a necessity—not that the existents themselves must be in time. But we’ve seen that this is false. If simultaneous causation is a reality then it is at least metaphysically possible for two existents to interact—i.e. one causing the other—without such an interaction being temporally ordered and without the existents to be in time itself. The point here is that causation qua causation need not be temporal.

Thus, Nick’s attempt to help pin down the definition of existence by interaction is moot so far. For if time is not a necessary condition for interaction, then one cannot infer that all that can or could exist must be within space and time—since Nick claims that interaction is fingerprint of existence. And therefore Nick has no warrant for concluding that we can define existence as space and time.

But Nick’s not finished. After (erroneously) defining existence as space and time, he continues:

Under our working definition of existence, space and time do not exist, strictly speaking. Space and time don’t have effects on things, space and time are a framework in which effects, actions, and reactions reside. As such, it makes no sense to ask whether the framework of existence exists.

There reside a few problems here. First, Nick has already made this inference off of poor reasoning when he assumed that time is a necessary condition for causality and interaction—and therefore for existing things. We saw that this was false. But even aside from this, he seems oblivious to the question-begging nature of his endeavor. For even if for the sake of argument we concede that Nick was correct that space and time were necessary for actual existents, this doesn’t give us any right to redefine existence as space and time itself. Let me put my point a bit more analytically: Demonstrating that X is a necessary condition for Y does not entail that Y is identical to X. That is to say, demonstrating that space-time is a necessary condition for existing things—something that he hasn’t even demonstrated but that we’re granting for argument’s sake—does not entail that existence is therefore defined as space-time. This is simply a non-sequitur. Nick has shown absolutely no good reason, then, for redefining existence as space and time, and to do so is to engage in blatant question-begging.

Second, if space and time were necessary, then, by the definition of ontological necessity, simply contemplating space and time would enlighten us to its necessity. Why would this be? Because something which is necessary contains the reason for its existence in its nature—that is to say, what it is would be identical to the fact that it is. Thus, if something is necessary, then contemplating its nature would be to simultaneously contemplate its existence. And a corollary of this is that you could not fail to conceive this thing existing. But space-time obviously does not satisfy this definition of necessity, since we can easily conceive of space-time not existing at all, and therefore space-time is not necessary.  However, Nick thinks that he can get around this by claiming that space-time does not “exist,” and instead claims that space-time is a framework, and that therefore speaking of its existence or non-existence is nonsensical.

However, this is might only be true if indeed existence is to be defined as space-time. But we’ve seen no good reason to think that we should redefine existence in such an idiosyncratic way. Yet, it gets worse than this, because Nick is basically engaging in explicit question-begging (again). He’s simply defined existence as X, and then claimed that you cannot question the existence of X since X is, by definition, the framework of existence—of which interaction is a corollary. But this is extremely problematic. One cannot simply a priori redefine existence as X and then claim that X is therefore necessary. In fact this is exactly what the ontological argument for God attempts to do, and Nick’s argument is fallacious for the same reasons—in fact we could call Nick’s argument the ontological argument for naturalism.

But it gets even worse than this for Nick’s thesis. For let’s grant for argument’s sake that Nick was correct in his arbitrary redefining of existence as space-time and that space-time is indeed the framework for all existents. Is it still true, as he stated above, that we cannot speak of this framework’s existence or non-existence? No it’s not, because space-time, in order to be distinguishable from literal non-being, must have certain properties and actualities. The fact that it is a framework does not absolve it from harboring these things. For example, in mathematics the set of integers is itself a framework that is completely different in nature from its elements. But the set itself--again in order for it to actually be something as opposed to nothing—must have certain distinguishing properties—e.g., it is infinite, and thus we see that a framework can have properties. So space-time, though it might be a framework, still is manifest in certain actualities and properties—and who would even argue that space-time does not have properties? But why is this important? Well, if space-time has certain properties—e.g., being n-dimensional—then it will always be possible to conceive the absence or lack of these properties, and therefore the lack of space-time itself. But this means that talk of the existence or non-existence of space-time is not nonsensical. And more importantly it means that, by the definition of necessary given above, space-time is not necessary and could metaphysically fail to exist. And thus space-time cannot be existence itself.

In conclusion we’ve seen that Nick’s bold thesis is extremely problematic. First, it assumes a faulty view of causality. Second, it engages in question-begging and non-sequiturs. And most importantly we’ve seen that even if we were to grant his argument and erase all previous objections, his conclusion is still not justified, and is false. It would seem that space-time, then, is not necessary.

 

 

Why science cannot (ever) explain the existence of the universe

Can the universe account for its own existence? Can we find, within physics and cosmology, the reason for why physical reality exists at all? Cosmologists and physicists are hopeful that finding an answer to these questions is at least possible and maybe even plausible. For the cosmologist’s job is to search out the origin of the universe—or find out if it had an origin at all—to find out why it exists in the first place, and why and how it came to exist in its current state. Now cosmology has come a long way in the last century and it continues to advance in leaps and bounds. But despite the advancements of physics, I maintain that physicists will never in principle be able to explain the existence of physical reality.

I realize that in promulgation of this statement I am shouldering a great burden of proof, and that such a statement can even come across as arrogant. However, please note that it is borne out of careful logical study of the philosophy of science, and not from a petulant view of science or scientists. In fact, I have found that it is “skeptics” who arrogantly fail to recognize the explanatory limits of science, and by doing so would only take my aforementioned statement as arrogant because their vision is dogmatically colored by the lens of positivism. However, since this is not the time to get into the hypocritical creeds of the freethought community, let us return to the thesis at hand: science cannot explain why the universe exists. (Note that by “universe” I include any possible meta-universe or multiverse.)

Now, what gives me the right to assert such a blanket statement like this?  Well, the nature of scientific inquiry itself does. You see, as I’ve pointed out before, science operates on inductive conditional statements like “if p, then q”. This is why scientists can run an experiment a finite amount of times and then generalize a conditional statement as a law. (Note again that such an exercise would be moot unless we took things to have shared essences.) And this takes us to the nature of scientific laws themselves. Scientific laws are mere descriptions of the way things tend to behave given certain ideal conditions. These laws are not prescriptive, in that they don’t inform substances on how to behave. Rather, substances behave the way they do and our formulated laws are informed by such behavior.

The pivotal point here is that scientific laws are ontologically dependent on existence, not the other way around. That is to say, scientific laws don’t obtain unless you first have something which actually exists and behaves in some way. That’s why the conditional statements of scientific law start with “if p,” meaning “if some state of actual affairs obtains in reality”.  Now, what exactly does this have to do with science explaining the existence of the universe? Well, if existence logically precedes scientific law, then the latter cannot itself ever explain the former. That is to say, scientific law first needs something already in existence to describe the behavior of—it doesn’t describe non-existence—therefore science is reliant upon existence, and thus existence will always be a higher member in an explanatory chain.  But in order for science to explain the universe it would itself need to be the higher member in an explanatory chain, and since this is logically impossible then it follows necessarily that science cannot in principle explain the existence of the universe.

There’s another point to be made here, however. It should also be noted that science cannot even account for its own laws. That is, science itself cannot determine why the laws are the way they are as opposed to being another way. Here’s why. Either (i) the reason scientific laws are the way they are is to be illumined by another scientific law, or (ii) the reason scientific laws are the way they are is to be illumined by an explanation not susceptible to scientific description. (i) is not a viable option because explaining scientific law by another scientific law just pushes the question back a step and doesn’t answer anything. Moreover, the question was to explain the set of scientific laws, and this cannot be done by another scientific law not in the set since the set already contains all scientific laws. Thus, option (i) isn’t even possible. (This is why arriving at a scientific Theory of Everything is not possible as well.) If one chooses (ii) then we arrive at an explanation not susceptible to science, which only proves my point, namely, that scientific law cannot explain itself.

Implications for naturalism

Now all these points actually have important implications for naturalism as well. For most ontological naturalists naturalism seems to imply physicalism—note that I’m not claiming that naturalism necessarily entails physicalism, only that most naturalists are physicalists. The reason for this is that if all that exists is the natural world and the natural world contains all matter, energy, space and time, then all that exists in the natural world is physical—or it at least supervenes on the physical—and therefore all that exists is physical.

But this means that physics itself should be able, in principle, to arrive at a theory of everything and thereby explain the existence of the physical world. But we’ve just seen above that this is what physics and science cannot, in principle, do. And thus physicalism and naturalism are false—again, based on those who would derive physicalism from naturalism. David Bentley Hart articulates the point numerous times in The Experience of God:

Physical reality cannot account for its own existence for the simple reason that nature—the physical—is that which by definition already exists; existence, even taken as a simple brute fact to which no metaphysical theory is attached, lies logically beyond the system of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, “hyperphysical,” or, shifting into Latin, super naturam. This means not only that at some point nature requires or admits of a supernatural explanation (which it does), but also that at no point is anything purely, self-sufficiently natural in the first place. (p. 96)

To drive the point home one last time, physics and science are at a loss to explain exactly why the physical world is the way it is, and why it exists in the first place. Science is explanatorily inert here. And this should not be the case if physicalism were true. Thus, because of the nature of the universe and the explanatory limits of physics, physicalism is false. What implications should this entail for naturalism? I’ll let the reader decide for themselves.

 

Richard Carrier on the God hypothesis

Richard Carrier’s book Sense and Goodness without God is one of the best defenses of metaphysical naturalism that I have read. He is very well-read, especially when it comes to philosophy and science, and even though I don’t agree with many of his conclusions, one can infer that his position, as he presents it, is warranted.

That being said, there are a few places in Carrier’s book where he surveys the justification for belief in God, and (shockingly!) finds said justification wanting. Obviously since I’m a theist I vehemently disagree with Carrier, and (also shockingly) I found his reasoning to be a bit sloppy and confused. As such, this post is my attempt to demonstrate where exactly Carrier goes wrong, and why what he says actually points towards God, instead of away from him.

First, Carrier considers the idea that God could be an explanation for the universe. He claims that this explanation isn’t a “good one,” and articulates a few points attempting to demonstrate such:

[T]he idea that there was a God around before there was a universe—in other words the idea that something existed when there was no place for it to exist, that something acted when there was no time in which it could act—does not make much sense[.] (p. 72)

A few problems here. First, remember that God is claimed to be provable via logical deduction, and thus if this is indeed true (see e.g. the argument from contingency) then the existence of God is logically necessary., and therefore quibbling about how hard it is to fathom such an existence would be irrelevant. Let me demonstrate this with an example—from math! A math professor once showed me a proof that attempted to demonstrate that the sum of all positive integers equaled one-half. Hopefully it’s obvious that this conclusion seems absolutely absurd, since common sense clearly dictates that the sum of positive integers would converge to infinity.  Yet the fact that this proof infers something that is hard to fathom does not itself refute the proof. The proof still stands, and the only way I can refute such an inference is to find a mistake in the proof itself. Similarly, even if we couldn’t explain logically how God exists outside of space, time, and physical existence, this wouldn’t call the conclusion of such proofs into question, and thus it wouldn’t call God’s existence into question. Of course, remember that God’s existence would first need to be demonstrated in order for my answer here to be valid.

Moreover, classical theists have always posited what is known as the Doctrine of Analogy, which states that attributes predicated of God can only be attributed analogously, instead of literally. So when we say that God acts or thinks, for example, we don’t mean these words in the same way—nor in a completely different way—that we predicate them of ourselves or of natural things. Thus, Carrier’s claim that predications of God make no sense is only a problem if we are thinking strictly univocally. Now, this isn’t an ad hoc attempt to avoid the implications that Carrier has postulated. That is, the Doctrine of Analogy wasn’t formulated specifically to answer objections like those of Carrier. Rather, this doctrine is seen as a direct entailment of the doctrine of divine simplicity. Because if God cannot be composed of parts—as the doctrine of divine simplicity states--then there can be no parts in God that are distinguishable from each other. Thus since our predications of God are in fact distinguishable, then this must only be because our predications are analogous and not literal. So, when seen in light of these two points, Carrier’s problem here loses efficacy.

Carrier continues his explanation for why the “God hypothesis” does not constitute a good explanation:

And even if we can come up with an intelligible theory of creation, it still isn’t the best logical inference to make. Can we infer from what we see as a completely natural universe that a sentient Creator is behind it? Not really. Given the lack of any clear evidence for a god, and the fact that everything we have seen happen, which was not caused by humans, has been caused by immutable natural elements and forces, we should sooner infer the opposite: that immutable natural elements and forces are behind it all[…]Since we can explain everything by appealing to only those things and their properties, then (all else being equal) such an explanation is the most plausible one around—leaving no need and no sound reason to go beyond them and invent all manner of unproven entities, like gods and spirits and miraculous powers. Hence, even if the ‘god hypothesis’ were plausible, it would not by any means be the most plausible. (p. 72)

Again, we run into some complications. Carrier is viewing the “God hypothesis” through the lens of abductive reasoning here. That is, he’s comparing theism with other explanations (e.g., naturalism) and attempting to determine which provides the best explanation for the evidence we observe. “So what’s the problem?” you might ask. For isn’t reasoning to the best explanation a good thing? Indeed it is, depending on what’s attempting to be inferred. If you’re attempting to determine what a fossil is doing in the Cretaceous period, then abduction is perfect. But if you attempting to infer that the square root of negative two is an irrational number, then deduction, and not abduction, is your best tool. You see, if theists used abduction to try to reason to God—think of William Paley—then I would agree with Carrier’s claims. For Occam’s razor would entail that the God hypothesis multiplies entities extraneously and makes too many unnecessary assumptions. However, classical theism makes no use of abductive reasoning—and shouldn’t--but rather makes use of deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning doesn’t use inference to the best explanation. Rather, deduction attempts to prove that something is necessarily the case. You see, classical theists didn’t argue that God is the most plausible explanation for the universe, rather they argued that God is a necessary condition for the existence of anything at all. And abductive reasoning cannot ground such a claim, but only deductive reasoning.

So Carrier’s claim that God would not be a good hypothesis is only efficacious if we follow him in using abductive reasoning to determine the ontological foundation of reality. But this is neither necessary nor logical. For if we can utilize logical deduction to infer what the ontological foundation of reality must be, then punting to abduction is superfluous here. The conclusions of deduction, if true, are necessarily true, and thus Carrier’s talk of best explanations is simply a category mistake regarding how the existence of God is usually arrived at. All this is to say that theists are playing chess while Carrier is playing checkers. If he wants to attack theism, then he needs to attack theists on the actual grounds that they utilize to make their arguments, otherwise he’s attacking a strawman.

Carrier then moves from talk of God as an explanation, to explaining God himself:

If everything must have an explanation, then you do not really get anywhere by explaining the universe by proposing a god. For then that god needs an explanation. Why does a god exist at all? Why that particular god and not some other? And where did this god come from? […] So either there is an eternal string of endless explanations, in which case there is no “ultimate” explanation because the explanations never end (and so the universe remains ultimately unexplained), or else there is something that has no explanation, something that just “is,” what we would call a “brute fact.” There are no other possibilities. (p. 73)

On the contrary, there is another possibility--something can be self-explanatory. Remember that classical theists believe, deductively, that God is a necessary being. The very nature of a necessary being is that its essence just is existence. That is to say, a necessary existent cannot possibly fail to exist. Therefore, when we ask “Why does the necessary being exist?” we’re really asking “Why does that which must exist, exist?” And such a question is self-evident and therefore self-explanatory—it answers itself. So, there is a false dichotomy here that Carrier is presenting between infinite explanatory regress and brute facts—which are impossible. An explanatory chain can end in something which is self-evident and explains itself—in fact this is done in mathematics! Now, Carrier (sort of) anticipates this answer:

 Thus, the question for us really is: Where do we stop [the explanatory chain]? What is the one, ultimate “brute fact” that needs no explanation? Certainly, most people say this is God, that God is self-explanatory, having no origin, that God exists necessarily as the one brute fact. But that requires resting on a huge number of assumptions. Why not just stop with what we actually know—the natural world? Certainly this is just as viable. After all, if god needs no explanation, then why does nature need one? (p. 73)

Many problems here. First, Carrier is conflating a brute fact with that which is self-explanatory. A brute fact is something which admits of no explanation, at all, while something self-explanatory explains itself, and thus does in fact have an explanation--this explanation is simply contained within the existent’s own nature. So when theists say that God is self-explanatory, they are not claiming that God is therefore a brute fact.

So, Carrier is confused by claiming that extending our existential understanding to include God violates Occam’s razor due to the fact that we could just as easily stop at another brute fact that requires less assumptions, namely the universe. Since God would not be a brute fact, then Carrier’s appeal to parsimony here is misplaced.

Second, there is a perfectly logical reason why we can stop the explanatory chain at God but not at the universe, as Carrier wants. For remember that something is contingent if we can conceive of it failing to exist—that is, if it’s nature does not contain the reason for its existence. Because if Y is part of the nature of X, then you cannot have X fail to be Y. The contrapositive is that if X can fail to be Y, then Y is not part of the nature of X. Thus, if we can conceive of something failing to exist, then existence cannot be part of the nature of that thing. And it should be obvious that the universe—including a multiverse—satisfies the definition of contingency. That is to say, we can easily conceive of the universe failing to exist in its current state, or at all, and thus the universe is indeed contingent. But this entails that the universe does require an explanation, since to be contingent is to be contingent upon something else. We see then that the universe cannot be a brute fact—especially since they’re impossible—and therefore we cannot possibly stop at the universe in an explanatory chain.

Carrier still tries to avoid this conclusion and claims that “The multiverse explains everything that exists,” but we’ve seen that this is false. For the multiverse does not explain itself, nor does it explain why anything at all exists in the first place. For this we need a necessary existent, and the universe is not it, since it satisfies the definition of contingency. Carrier again anticipates this objection:

Of course one could ask why the multiverse exists at all, and why it has the exact properties it does. But as we’ve already shown something must exist without any explanation at all, so it may as well be the multiverse. (p. 82)

On the contrary, we’ve seen that an explanatory chain need not—and cannot possibly—end in an unexplained brute fact. It can, and must, end in that which explains itself and which exists necessarily. And unfortunately for Carrier this cannot be the multiverse, for it is contingent and therefore necessarily entails an explanation outside of itself.

So Carrier did not accomplish his goal in this part of his book. He did not show how God is an unnecessary and extraneous hypothesis. His thesis rested on surveying the wrong type of reasoning method when put forward by those attempting to prove God’s existence. Then his thesis rested on conflations regarding the nature of explanatory chains and how these relate to the ontological foundation of reality. So while I admire Carrier’s attempt to vindicate naturalism in a systematic nature, I believe he ultimately fails.