Why? The Purpose of the Universe - Part Five

Laura Knight-Jadczyk

The Cosmological Argument

 

Plato (c. 427–347 BC) and Aristotle (c. 384–322 BC) both posited first cause arguments, though each had certain notable caveats. In The Laws (Book X), Plato posited that all movement in the world and the Cosmos was "imparted motion". This required a "self-originated motion" to set it in motion and to maintain it. In Timaeus, Plato posited a "demiurge" of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the creator of the Cosmos.

Aristotle argued against the idea of a first cause, often confused with the idea of a "prime mover" or "unmoved mover" in his Physics and Metaphysics. Aristotle argued in favor of the idea of several unmoved movers, one powering each celestial sphere, which he believed lived beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, and explained why motion in the universe (which he believed was eternal) had continued for an infinite period of time. Aristotle argued the atomist's assertion of a non-eternal universe would require a first uncaused cause – in his terminology, an efficient first cause – an idea he considered a nonsensical flaw in the reasoning of the atomists.

Like Plato, Aristotle believed in an eternal cosmos with no beginning and no end (which in turn follows Parmenides' famous statement that "nothing comes from nothing"). In what he called "first philosophy" or metaphysics, Aristotle did intend a theological correspondence between the prime mover and a deity; functionally, however, he provided an explanation for the apparent motion of the "fixed stars" (now understood as the daily rotation of the Earth). According to his theses, immaterial unmoved movers are eternal unchangeable beings that constantly think about thinking, but being immaterial, they are incapable of interacting with the cosmos and have no knowledge of what transpires therein. From an "aspiration or desire", the celestial spheres, imitate that purely intellectual activity as best they can, by uniform circular motion. The unmoved movers inspiring the planetary spheres are no different in kind from the prime mover, they merely suffer a dependency of relation to the prime mover. Correspondingly, the motions of the planets are subordinate to the motion inspired by the prime mover in the sphere of fixed stars. Aristotle's natural theology admitted no creation or capriciousness from the immortal pantheon, but maintained a defense against dangerous charges of impiety. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument)

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 In the previous post, I laid out Philip Goff’s ‘Pan-agentialism’ idea which required that he dispense with Schrödinger’s Cat and Many Worlds, resulting in his adoption of Pilot-wave Theory which included ‘rational matter’.

… the stuff of the world is rational stuff.  Even when behaving in a predictable way, its behaviour is the result of a rational impulse, albeit of a very crude kind.  As matter evolves into complex forms, more and more the potential for rational thought and action begins to flower, blossoming in the reflective consciousness of a human being able to discern and respond to practical and theoretical reasons.  This is not just matter changing, but matter maturing, coming to a greater realization of its inherent rational nature.

The pan-agentialist world is, by definition, a world that embodies purpose.  Crucially, however, purpose in this sense does not imply design.  Aristotle did believe in some kind of first cause – an ‘unmoved mover’ – but not a beneficent designer who had crafted the purposes of things.  In Aristotle’s worldview, things just had goal-directed natures, regardless of their origins.  Likewise, if matter, in its fundamental nature, is directed towards reason, then matter has a goal-directed purpose or nature regardless of whether or not it was designed.  It is in this sense that consciousness points to purpose, as an essential component of the best explanation of the emergence of experiential understanding.

Goff proposes that we take pan-agentialism as established (!) and consider it in light of the fine-tuning of physics and, voila! we discover that the two mutually reinforce each other and reinforce the reality of purpose.  And so he declares that the laws of physics are fine-tuned not just for life, but also for the possibility of rational matter achieving a high realization of its nature.  That is, fine-tuning and rational matter need each other; they fit together like a lock and key!

He then launches into a series of Bayesian arguments for Pan-Agentialism. He had previously argued based on the Likelihood Principle, that the fine-tuning of physics for life supports the Value-Selection hypothesis against the Cosmic Fluke Hypothesis.  And now, he uses the same principle saying “the existence of experiential understanding supports pan-agentialism over our standard scientific worldview, as it is much more likely that experiential understanding would have evolved on the former hypothesis than on the latter.”

Goff moves through some cursory discussion about free will that is uninspiring and need not detain us.  He then plunges directly into Theodicy in order to engage with “does God exist?” He points out that there are many examples of horrific suffering in Nature, and that, in fact suffering is built into Natural Selection. He asks “Why would an all-powerful being choose to bring us into existence through such a gruesome, long-winded, tortuous process as a game of ‘survival of the fittest’? … why give us bodies that age, get sick, and fall apart so easily?  Why not instead create immortal, spiritual beings to spend eternity in loving union with God and with each other?”

He then trots out the usual arguments for review, but Goff isn’t having it. He writes:

Personally, I am unconvinced by these proposals.  I agree that there are certain goods we find in the real world – compassion, courage, adventure, scientific enquiry – that would not exist in a more perfect world.  But it seems to me to massively reduce the value of these goods if they were brought about through artificially engineering challenges and difficulties.

Did Goff forget that he just argued for “matter maturing, coming to a greater realization of its inherent rational nature” and did he not note that horrific suffering was part and parcel of Natural Selection?

Of course, Goff has set the argument up to be a Straw Man – an omnipotent, omniscient god who created the world via fiat – and who is immoral, in Goff’s opinion, for deliberately creating a world such as ours. But he slogs on toward the Cosmological argument: without a creator God, we have no explanation for why the universe came to be nor any explanation for anything at all.  He notes the atheist response: why does the universe require an explanation, but God gets a free pass?

·       The Kālam Cosmological Argument:  The crucial difference between God and the universe is that the universe began to exist whereas God did not.  Things that begin to exist require causal explanation, whereas things that are timeless, do not.  See: Kalām cosmological argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument

·       The Contingency Argument:  the reason the universe cries out for explanation is that it is contingent, which means that it might not have existed. If something exists but might not have existed, then we need to give some explanation as to why it does exist.  God, in contrast, is not contingent; God is a necessary being, a being that has to exist. See Aquinas Argument from contingency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument

Goff tells us that Cosmological arguments proceed in two stages.  First, the argument tries to establish that a timeless/necessary being has to exist to complete the Great Chain of Explanation.  Second, the arguments try to show that this timeless/necessary being must have the characteristics of the Omni-God: omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good.  Goff then makes an eminently rational remark: “If we are rationally compelled to accept the existence of a timeless, necessarily existent entity, why not suppose that the entity is the universe itself, rather than postulating something supernatural outside of the universe?” Good idea, in my opinion. He then says something more: “… at best, these arguments prove that the universe’s existence as a spatiotemporal entity is contingent and began at a finite point in the past.  A possibility rarely considered in these discussions is that the universe, prior to the Big Bang, existed in a non-spatiotemporal form.  … once we have committed to the existence of a necessary and timeless foundation of existence, we face a choice between two theoretical possibilities:

Option 1: The necessary and timeless foundation of existence is distinct from the universe and brought the universe into being.

Option 2: The necessary and timeless foundation of existence became the universe a finite period of time ago, undergoing a radical change analogous – although obviously more extreme – to a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.

That is, the basic cosmological argument of either type merely establishes that a first cause exists, not that it has the attributes of a theistic god, such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. 

However, some cosmologists and physicists argue that a major challenge to the cosmological argument is the nature of time:  The Big Bang theory states that it (the Big Bang) is the start of both space and time. The claim of the cosmologists and physicists is that the question "What was there before the Universe?" becomes meaningless when considering a situation without time. Some even say that asking what occurred before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole?  (Gott III, J. Richard; Gunn, James E.; Schramm, David N.; Tinsley, Beatrice M. (March 1976). "Will the Universe Expand Forever?" Scientific American. p. 65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24950306).

Getting back to Goff.  He notes that Ockham’s razor enters and eliminates option 1 since option 2 postulates fewer entities. Fine. Goff then brings to our notice the ideas of Joshua Rasmussen who argues that “the Ultimate Foundation of all reality cannot involve arbitrary limits.  … The Ultimate Foundation, by definition, must leave nothing to be explained.  The Ultimate Foundation cannot have a certain amount of power, knowledge, and goodness, whilst not being all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good.  For it would then cry out for explanation why the Ultimate Foundation has precisely that level of power (and not more or less), that level of knowledge, and that level of goodness – and these explanatory demands would undermine its putative status to be the point where explanations come to an end.”

Goff agrees.  Arbitrary limits demand explanations. He then says: “We would still want to know why that maximally perfect exists rather than the even simpler hypothesis of nothing at all existing… And the Omni-God hypothesis, even if it is very simple, is not compatible with the data of evil and suffering.  …Those who deny cosmic purpose cannot explain cosmological fine-tuning, believers in the Omni-God cannot explain the evil and suffering we find in the world.”

Goff next engages with Theists, sceptical theists, etc. He allows that the sceptical theists’ way of defusing the problem of evil is at least somewhat effective: “If God did have a reason for allowing suffering, would I likely know about it?”  And the answer is “no” because the cognitive gap between humans and God is so vast that there is no comparison, no way humans could understand any such reasons.  But then, Goff diverts to his own idea: the ‘Cosmic Sin Intuition.’  That is, “it would be immoral for an all-powerful being to deliberately create a universe like ours.” He writes:

I cannot rule out that there might be all sorts of goods and evils I have no clue about, and maybe if I took them into account, the Cosmic Sin Intuition would lose its force.  But we do have substantial knowledge of morality, and no reason to think that this knowledge isn’t up to the task of assessing the Cosmic Sin Intuition.

Following a few desultory feints, he then concludes that the only rational position to take is to conclude that the Omni-God does not exist and that “we have very good reason to accept the Cosmic Sin Intuition.  And the Cosmic Sin Intuition entails that the Omni-God does not exist.” His case is as follows:

The standard line in the philosophical literature goes as follows:

In the old days, atheist philosophers tried to demonstrate that God’s existence is logically incompatible with the existence of evil and suffering, and hence that, given evil and suffering exist, God’s non-existence can be logically demonstrated.  This approach is known as the logical version of the argument from evil.

Nowadays, most philosophers on both sides of the debate accept that the logical version of the argument is too strong.  Even if we can’t think of any good reasons why God might have allowed suffering, we can’t logically demonstrate that there are no such reasons.  Thus, contemporary atheists tend to argue not that evil and suffering logically entail God’s non-existence, but rather that they are good evidence for God’s non-existence. 

·       The Cosmic Sin Intuition.  It would be immoral for an all-powerful being to deliberately create a universe like ours.

·       Therefore, if our universe has a creator, She (sic) is either not all-powerful or not perfectly moral (or both).

·       Therefore, there is no such thing as the Omni-God.

By defending the inherent plausibility of the Cosmic Sin Intuition, we can build a very strong – although not logically certain – case against the existence of the Omni-God, one which avoids the sceptical theist critique.

Goff then announces that he is going to propose “Cosmic Purpose Without God.”  That will be the next post. But before I end this one, I’d like to just mention that there is an old solution to the problems that Goff and so many others appear to be struggling with, and not very successfully in my view: the ‘Unity of Being’ theory of 13th century Andalusian mystic and philosopher Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi.  But, I will come to that eventually.

Poet in a Garden, by Ali of Gloconda, c.1610-15, via Wikimedia.