Monday, November 7, 2016
NO Brute Facts -- The Principle of Sufficient Reason
You are hiking in a remote wilderness, miles from the nearest building or even cell phone tower. You come upon a clearing and see a crystal sphere hovering over you and emitting colorful light pulses in some seeming order: red, blue, green and the pattern repeats. Should there be an explanation for this odd phenomenon or is it acceptable to shrug our shoulders and mutter "Stuff happens"? Can we extrapolate from this case to a general principle of the universe? If so, can we prove that God (or a reasonable facsimile) exists?
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Everything must have a cause, as far as we know. This basic postulate—causality—seems to be in effect throughout every moment of our lives. The call-and-response relationship between every object, particle and person on one side and the rest of the universe on the other is so intrinsic to our existence that there is no empirical reason to doubt this notion.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of the hovering sphere, all my life's experience would direct me to think that there would be an explanation for it. I could be hallucinating or dreaming, or the sphere could be real—an alien spacecraft, perhaps, or a Pentagon experiment. However, assuming I didn’t suddenly wake up, it would be essentially impossible for me to determine the origin of the sphere. If my hallucination seemed real-enough, I would have no way of determining the falseness of the sphere. If the sphere were, indeed, real, its creators would presumably have enough power and sophistication to thwart any of my attempts to examine it sufficiently to glean any useful information. Theoretically, the sphere could be real and have an explanation that I simply cannot think of for lack of imagination. Finally, the sphere could've also magically popped into existence for no reason whatsoever, violating every physical pattern and rule known to humankind. I disregard this possibility, though, because of the overwhelming amount of empirical evidence I have in support of causality. Additionally, I have always assumed that the universe is governed by causality, and cannot imagine how to live my life if it is not. Thus, although I assume that the hovering sphere has an explanation, I still have no realistic way of determining what that might be. For this reason, it is entirely acceptable for me to shrug my shoulders and give up on ever understanding the sphere.
We can, in fact, extrapolate this approach to our universe, since we don’t understand it much better than I would understand the mysterious sphere. For the sake of Hume's argument, we assume that the universe is real, and also that it is governed by causality. If it isn't real, the entire argument is purposeless; and if it is not controlled by causality, then it could've, again, appeared randomly and for no particular reason, going against conventional logic and giving us no answers. Hume argues that almost everything is caused by something other than itself (A is caused by B, B is caused by C, and so on). In order to prevent the formation of an infinite chain of causes with no beginning, he caps it off with something that contains its reason for existence within itself: God. Nothing else has the power to cause itself, and thus God must exist for the universe to have begun, writes the philosopher. While it is important to note that this argument does not prove the existence of God as described in any religion, the existence of some initial cause—some higher power, perhaps, though it does not have to be godlike, sentient or even alive—is difficult to deny.
ReplyDeleteAs Brian Greene notes in his book The Elegant Universe, the dimensions that we live in are part of our world. Space and time themselves did not exist, as far as we know, before the Big Bang or whatever other form the beginning of the universe occurred in. The initial cause—"God"—would have had to exist before the beginning of time. It is here that our logic and cranial capacity run into serious problems. The word "before" refers to a previous location in the dimension of time. It has no meaning without the existence of time. And yet, something must have caused time to exist, and thus must have existed "before" time, but not in the temporal sense of the word. Human minds cannot conceive of any way to predate something without going back in time, but the initial cause must have done that, somehow. Also, we cannot imagine something existing or originating from *nowhere*, but the initial cause would have had to somehow do that as well. The conclusion that must be made is that the universe (and space and time) either popped into existence for absolutely no reason whatsoever (which is in itself inconceivable to the human mind), or that there was some initial cause that is so far-removed from anything in our world that we simply cannot even think about it. We can think about the existence of the initial cause, but the cause itself must be so outlandish that we cannot possibly have any reasonable ideas regarding its nature.
In the absence of any coherent understanding of the initial cause, it is tempting to write it off as something supernatural; something divine. There is no reason *not* to call it "God", for we have an equally-minimal understanding of both phenomena. However, it is crucial to understand that, were we to call the initial cause of the universe "God", the name would simply be a placeholder for "we don’t know". The existence of a generic, placeholder God—much like a dummy variable in a mathematical equation—is useful for filling in the gaps not of causality or of the universe, but rather of our own pathetic minds. In this realm of thought and abstraction which is so different from the world we live in, we can prove absolutely nothing.
Causality is something that Hume firmly believes in. His idea that there is a chain of cause and reaction is something I can understand. But I do not think we have the capability to reach that conclusion. Specifically for this object we find in the forest is an example of that. We have never seen this object or learned about this object before. Therefore we don't know anything about where it's from, what it's made of, or why it's there. We can have educated guesses based on knowledge we have or derive from previous studies, but we can't just state that this is _____ or it's from _____. Yet the belief of causality is a theory that makes a lot of sense. Without this idea, the world would be a lot more skeptical, and we wouldn't have proof that anything around us exists for a reason. I believe that this object can show that our knowledge, in truth, is minuscule when it comes to the universe. What do we actually know and does it even matter in comparison with the universe? Do we actually have even 1% of the knowledge of the universe? Through this supposed object, I believe it shows that not only do we not have the capacity to understand this object, we really do not understand the knowledge of the universe.
ReplyDeleteThrough this, we believe that there must be some superior being who must be the cause of these phenomenons we can't explain. We think that there must be a cause to everything and without a cause, we are left confused and skeptical of the world around us. Similar to Al, I think that God does not truly exist but is there to explain everything that can't be explained. We barely understand God, so we use it as evidence to prove other things we can't understand. In essence, God is really just a placeholder until we figure out why the object is there and why it exists. This happens all the time. We didn't know where we came from and came up with the idea that God created us. Now we have scientific evidence that may prove otherwise. To sum up my post, I believe that we must find the causes of everything and not shrug our shoulders. This extends to the universe which we may never truly completely figure out. With that, God does exist because he used as an easy blanket answer for phenomenons we can't explain, while we search for the real answer.