EXPLANATIONS OF THE COSMOS
Gottfried Leibniz was a German philosopher who developed a new form of the Cosmological Argument. Leibniz moves the focus away from causes and beginnings and focuses on the nature of explanation itself. He argues that, as rational creatures, we are entitled to seek a rational explanation for the universe:
nothing takes place without a sufficient reason - Gottfried Leibniz This is the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). It goes against the idea of "brute facts" - the idea that there are things which just can't be explained and have to be accepted. For Leibniz, it's simply irrational not to look for an explanation of things.
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Leibniz isn't saying that we can always know the sufficient explanation of something. We may not have the evidence or the intelligence to work out the sufficient explanation. But he argues that, whether we can solve it or not, there always IS a sufficient explanation and, as rational creatures, we are entitled to seek it. Indeed, perhaps we have an obligation to look for it.
There's a link here to William Paley's "Watch on the Heath" analogy for the Design Argument. Paley insists we are entitled to ask, How did the watch come to be here? This is also using the PSR (although Paley doesn't make that link himself).
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Bertrand Russell famously said: "The universe is just there and that's all." But this goes against the PSR.
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Think about what doctors do. If someone has died and the doctor tells you, "It's because his heart stopped beating," that would be an incomplete explanation. We want to know why his heart stopped beating. We want a sufficient explanation.
Even "His heart stopped beating because he had a virus," is also incomplete. We want to know which virus, and why it stopped his heart, and how he caught it. |
Leibniz (who was a brilliant mathematician) uses the example of a geometry text book. You might ask, "Where did this geometry book come from?" and an answer might be, It was copied from a previous geometry text book. Leibniz imagines an "eternal" geometry book - a set of geometry text books stretching into the past forever, each one copied from the one before. If you ask, "Where did this geometry book come from?" you would not be satisfied with a proximate answer (it was copied from the previous book) - you want a sufficient reason, you want to know why ALL the books exist, why there is such a thing as geometry text books at all.
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What is true of the books is also true of the states of the world. If you suppose the world eternal, you will suppose nothing but a succession of states and will not find in any of them a sufficient reason - Gottfried Leibniz
YES
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NO
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The other arguments get bogged down in infinite regress and whether there is cause-and-effect in the singularity at the start of the Big Bang. PSR avoids these problems. It goes to the heart of what it is to be a rational creature: we look for explanations and it is rational to demand an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.
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Other versions of the cosmological argument (like Aquinas' 3rd Way and the KCA) also avoid the debate about infinite regress or the conditions at the start of the universe. Our human tendency to look for rational explanations might be what David Hume calls a "custom" or "habit". Just because we want an explanation doesn't mean there is one.
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The Principle of Sufficient Reason offers a stronger deductive proof of God's existence, which isn't at the mercy of new scientific theories or challenges to the "Big Bang" Theory. God remains the only sufficient explanation for the universe regardless of proximate explanations offered by science.
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By detaching itself from science, the PSR is actually weaker than the other arguments. Scientific evidence can make arguments for God more persuasive. By refusing to "get its hands dirty" with factual evidence, the PSR misses out on something that would make it attractive to many people.
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