Contingency and creation

If you are an atheist or an agnostic, you have probably heard God offered as the explanation for whatever science has not yet explained: the origin of life, the first moment of the universe. You are right to distrust that. Arguments of that kind keep losing ground as science advances, and they treat God as one more cause competing with physics.

This argument is different. It accepts every explanation science gives and expects more. Science explains one state of the world by an earlier state, one thing by the forces and conditions that produce it. It disputes no link in that chain. It asks why there is a chain at all. The philosopher Gottfried Leibniz put it as the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

No experiment could answer that, because every experiment studies something that already exists. That does not make it a meaningless question. You can decide it has no answer; that view is taken up below. It is still a question, and Christianity offers an answer to it.

Philosophers call a thing contingent when it exists but might not have. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the starting point of the classic argument in those terms: “A contingent being (a being such that if it exists, it could have not-existed) exists.”

That premise is hard to deny. You are contingent: had your parents never met, you would not exist. So is the Earth, the sun, and every galaxy. So, as far as we can tell, is every particle and field physics describes. Each of them is in some state that could have been otherwise, and each depends on conditions outside itself.

The laws of physics look the same way. Physicists can write down consistent equations with different constants and different forces. Nothing we know shows that the laws we have are the only ones that could have held. A universe with different laws, or with no universe at all, involves no contradiction.

None of this is a religious claim. Most atheists would accept it as a description of the world.

The natural reply is that each contingent thing is explained by an earlier one, so nothing is left over. Every particle has a cause, every event a prior event. What else is there to explain?

The trouble is that the whole collection is contingent too. Picture a train in which each car is pulled by the car in front of it. Every car’s motion is accounted for. You still have not said why the train is moving, and adding more cars, even an infinite number, does not help. The philosopher David Hume objected that once you have explained each part you have explained the whole. That works for some properties. It does not work when the property in question, being contingent, belongs to the whole as well as the parts. A flock made only of sheep that might not have existed is itself a flock that might not have existed.

The argument does not depend on the universe having a beginning. Standard cosmology traces the observable universe back about 13.8 billion years to a hot, dense state, and a related argument defended by the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig starts from the claim that the universe began to exist. Whether it had an absolute beginning is debated. Even an infinitely old chain of contingent things would still need an explanation for why it exists rather than not.

There is a serious answer to all this, and many thoughtful atheists hold it. Debating the philosopher Frederick Copleston on BBC radio in 1948, Bertrand Russell took the position that the universe is there, and that is all. On this view the existence of the universe is a brute fact: true, but with no explanation.

That view is coherent, and logic alone does not rule it out. So the choice is this. Either reality as a whole has no explanation, or it depends on something whose existence is not borrowed from anything else, something that exists by its own nature. Philosophers call that a necessary being.

The second option is the stronger one, because everywhere else you expect explanations. If you found a glowing sphere in a forest, you would not accept that it has no explanation. Science proceeds on the same expectation, sometimes called the principle of sufficient reason: whatever exists has a reason, either in its own nature or in something else. Philosophers debate how strong a version of that principle can be defended. Setting it aside only for the universe as a whole, the one place where it points beyond the universe, needs a reason of its own.

Could the universe itself be the necessary being? It is made entirely of contingent parts, it changes, and its laws could have been different. It does not look like something that exists by its own nature.

Taken by itself, the argument gets you less than Christianity claims. It points to a reality that exists by its own nature and on which everything else depends. That reality cannot be one more physical thing, since physical things are contingent. The argument does not show that it is personal, good, or the God of Israel. Those need other evidence.

Some philosophers argue that it must at least be capable of something like choice. A necessary reality that produces a universe which did not have to exist looks less like a mechanism than like an agent. That step is debated, and you can weigh it on its own.

The conclusion does match closely what Christians have always said about God. The Bible opens, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). God gives his name to Moses as “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Paul tells the philosophers of Athens that God is not “served by human hands, as if He needed anything,” and that “in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:25, 28). For Christians, God is the reason there is a chain, rather than its first link.

That also answers the question of who made God. A necessary being is the one thing that does not need a maker, because it does not exist on loan.