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God Exists!
Author(s): Robert K. Meyer
Source: Nos, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1987), pp. 345-361
Published by: Wiley
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215186
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God Exists!
ROBERT K. MEYER
AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
Everything has a cause. And the cause of everything has a cause.
So metaphysics teaches. Project any of these causal sequences in-
definitely back, without limit, and the mind boggles. Whence there
is a First Cause. That all men call God.
The reader, we trust, has heard this argument before. With its
variants (for example, from motion), it is the Cosmological Argu-
ment for the Existence of God. Aquinas devised it (with hints from
Aristotle) and pronounced it valid. Later philosophers have not been
so sure. In Kant, the argument finds an equal and opposite one-
that things go back and back and back and back-and gets under-
mined in the resulting antilogism. Other philosophers-Hume, for
example-may be taken to have pronounced it simply invalid. And
this, perhaps, is today the ruling opinion.
But is this ruling opinion correct? Oddly, the Cosmological Argu-
ment these days gets a boost from Cosmology. Trace back the Ac-
tual History of the Universe-not what it could or might have been,
but what it was-and its outset, on today's common opinion, came
with a Big Bang. Physicists, not wishing to delve further into
Theology than that, do not report Who, if Anybody, said "Let there
be Light." But, if they are to be believed, all of a sudden Light
there was, in a mighty rush.
So it is at least ironic that, at a time when empirical scientists
are putting some physical teeth back into this old argument,
philosophers (by and large, and Thomists not counting) have given
it up. There is nothing particularly unusual about this. Philosophy
is rarely out of tune with the Science of the last century, and has
NOUS 21 (1987): 345-361
? 1987 by Nou's Publications
345
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346 NOUS
been known on occasion to pronounce it Ineluctable. It does take
a while to decide why things must be the way that Scientists have
told us that they are, and it would be comforting if they would take
a hundred years off (or at least fifty, given that a good many con-
temporary philosophers have by now caught up with Relativity and
Quantum Theory) so that philosophers could catch up.
But, if the Cosmological Argument is now pronounced invalid,
what is wrong with it? Various things, according to various people.'
Any argument that has been around that long has had more than
sufficient time for minute examination by philosophical counsel for
any one of several hundred positions on these questions (and, more
relevantly, for two), and it is not surprising that, it is alleged, various
loopholes have been found. The most persistent has to do with the
character of the backwards causal sequences. Aquinas, living at a
time when the natural numbers only went forward, the negative
integers not yet having been invented, did not think of the infinite
descending sequence, 0,
- 1,
-2,
.... (And, presumptively, it
did not occur to him to think of the positive integers as analogous
to a descending causal sequence, with item n + 1 identified as the
cause of item n, forever.)
Was Aquinas that dumb? We leave that question to scholarly
exhumation and examination of his old math homework. But there
is no need or reason to think that the Cosmological Argument is
itself that dumb (whence, granting Aquinas the benefit of the doubt,
the present argument should be ascribed to him, not to us). For
consider some homely causal sequence-the rolling of a ball across
the floor by a child, for example. If we view this situation from
the viewpoint of the most casual physics, the ball occupies a succes-
sion of points <xo,yo>, . . . ,
<xiyi>,
. . . on an appropriate
plane, where the xi and
y,
are real numbers. The ball's occupy-
ing any of these points is, presumptively, an item in a causal se-
quence. Yet the ordering is not of the 1, 2, 3 variety. To the con-
trary, since the real numbers are densely ordered, there is between
any two distinct pairs
<xi,yi>
and <xkyk> a third pair
<
xyj>.
So this causal sequence, at least on the most casual
physics, is already deeply infinitistic in character. The picture is
not of one item in the sequence causing the next (since there is
no next), but of the causal relation just rolling along (so to speak)
as the ball works its way through continuum many spots on the
floor, some of them mighty close together.
While the title of this paper has (somewhat rashly) asserted the
truth of the conclusion of the Cosmological Argument, we are
(naturally) concerned here only with its validity. So the premiss-
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GOD EXISTS! 347
that everything has a cause-is assumed, since we are not here query-
ing what Metaphysics teaches. (Quantum or other Indeterminism
might, of course, but this is not our present concern.) But we are
entitled to ask what the premiss means. For our homely example,
though it surely dealt with causally related items, hardly enabled us
to speak of the cause of a particular
<xi,yi>
item in the sequence.
The Mechanistic Ideal, at least, has been that, given a particular
item in the sequence, and sufficient information pertaining thereto,
the subsequent items are thereupon determined. This suggests that
what "Everything has a cause" ought perhaps to mean is that, for
every item J, there is some causal sequence C and some item I
such that, in the sequence C, I is causally anterior to J. And it is
not hard to see that, if that is what "Everything has a cause" means,
we are back in the old soup. Beginning with J, we can go causally
back and back and back and back, forever.
Well, so perhaps we can. But what happens after "forever"?
Consider again the infinite sequence
<x,,y,>
of ball-rolling items.
Beginning anywhere in medias res, it does go back forever, in the
sense that any item in the sequence has an infinite number of causal
antecedents. But it is not just the case, in our homely example,
that every element of the sequence of ball-rolling items has some
causal antecedent, in this sequence. The child, remember, rolled
the ball across the floor. That is, there was an item, in a larger causal
sequence, causally anterior to every item in the ball-rolling subse-
quence: namely, the impetus that the child provided to the ball,
that made it roll.
This suggests that our first try at "Everything has a cause"
(and, perhaps, the Mechanistic Ideal on which it rested) is a bit
naive. It is not simply particular items in a causal sequence that
require causal antecedents. If we are to make causal sense of even
the most mundane and ordinary items of our experience (at least
if we use the real numbers-or, these days, perhaps even Leibniz's,
and Robinson's, infinitesimals), it is whole causal sequences that
require such antecedents. This leads us to formulate the Causal Prin-
ciple (henceforth, CP) in the following manner:
(CP) For every causal sequence C, there is some item I which
is causally anterior to every item J in C.
A few words are in order about CP. In the first place, it subsumes
our earlier version of "Everything has a cause". For, where J is
any item, we may form the one-element causal sequence consisting
of J alone. By CP, there is some element I causally anterior to every
member of this sequence: namely, in this case, to J. But first-order
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348 NOUS
functional calculus fans will note immediately that, on a point of
quantifier interchange, CP is strictly stronger than the subsumed
principle. In prenex form, its quantifiers would read '(C)(HIJ)(J)'.
The weaker principle, were we to state it analogously, would come
out with prenex quantifiers '(C)(J)(HIJ)'. That is, roughly speaking,
CP stands to its weak analogue as uniform continuity does to
continuity.
Some to whom we have communicated this argument have ob-
jected at this point that the question has been begged. Since CP
does in fact suffice for the existence of God, it is at least begged
in the sense that every valid argument begs the question: namely,
if you believe its premisses, you cannot but believe its conclusion,
since it is already contained in the premisses. In this case, the claim
is simply that if everything has a cause, then God exists, which
is the traditional content of the Cosmological Argument. Since some
have found this claim startling, while others have found it false,
the question is at least not begged in a psychological sense. But
the idea behind the friendly objections seemed to be somewhat
simpler. If every time we try to project a causal sequence backward
without limit, we strike something causally anterior to every member
of the sequence, does not this mean that every causal sequence has
a First element? Whence every causal sequence that is long enough
has a first element, namely God. While what follows the 'whence'
is true enough, a delicate mathematical point is still involved. For
it is not true, at any rate, that every causal sequence has a First
element, even after CP is granted. Let us go back to the ball-rolling,
fixing items
<xi,yi>
and
<xj,yj>,
with the former causally
anterior, and let us consider now all the items in between. This
is a causal sequence, but it does not have a first element. What
it has, by CP, is an element of a larger sequence which is causally
anterior to all members of the given sequence. (In this case, clearly
the
<xi,yi>
item will do.) So, at least intuitively, it would seem
that the path to a First Cause is still blocked. We take a causal
sequence, and apply CP to find an item anterior to all members
thereof. But this item is just part of a larger causal sequence, whence,
again applying CP, we find an item anterior to all members of the
larger sequence. This too, it would seem, is on its way to going
on forever. And our task is to show that, this time, a sufficient
number of iterations (perhaps infinitely many) will, no fooling, yield
a First Cause.
The way to do this, we shall see, is to make use of a renowned
mathematical principle-the famous Axiom of Choice. We shall first
apply this axiom informally, to get the ideas down. And then we
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GOD EXISTS! 349
shall set out the requisites for a formal proof. The idea, in fact,
is the one that we have just been through. Pick any item I. If I
is not already a First Cause (that is, if we did not pick God to
start with), there will be some II causally anterior to I, by CP. Pick
an II with this property, and find by CP a causal anterior I2 to
both of IlI. Pick an I2. If we continue in this way, we may get
a causal sequence (. . .
Ii+1
J0
. . .
Jo=I),
where each natural
number i appears among the indices. Let us not be discouraged
by this, as those who faint-heartedly pronounce the Cosmological
Argument invalid are prone to do. For there is, by CP, a causal
antecedent
I.
to all these
Ii,
where X is (as usual) the first
transfinite ordinal. Picking
I,,,
we are off again. But we have by
now made an infinite number of arbitrary choices (we had already,
in fact), which is what the Axiom of Choice licenses. And we simply
continue the process until we have either exhausted Absolutely
Everything-in which case we have found a First Cause, since there
is nothing left to choose-or can quit because we have already found
a First Cause. In any event, there is a First Cause. That all call God.
In this informal version, the argument may be no more convinc-
ing than previous versions of the Cosmological Argument. For one
thing, there are still various gaps in the argument. (The famous
question, "Who made God?" is one of them.) For another, as we
have described the "picking" process, there is still something mind-
boggling about it. To fill these gaps, and to unboggle the mind,
it is necessary to be a little more careful. Let us begin by returning
to CP. In stating it, we made use of the notion of a causal sequence,
and of a relation, "is causally anterior to". But, aside from trading
on the reader's intuitions, we didn't really say what these things
were; or, more important for our immediate purposes, what formal
properties they were supposed to have.
Let us begin with, "is causally anterior to", which we shall
henceforth abbreviate simply by 'A'. A is evidently a binary rela-
tion. And, since we don't want to presuppose what the Universe
is made up of (events, atoms, souls, or whatever) we have been
using the relatively colourless word "item" to describe what it is
that A relates. Items, intuitively, are what is real in the Universe.
Balls and falls, shirts and dirt, lights and fights, sinkings and drink-
ings and thinkings we presume either to be items, or to be con-
stituted from items in ways not here to be explained. We make
no such presupposition about what is more evidently conceptual or
abstract. For example, sets and numbers, whatever their ontological
status, do not obviously stand in causal relations to each other
(esoteric efforts at shuffling the furniture of the Universe aside).
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350 NOUS
This enables us to assume that the collection V of all items is in
fact a set, in the mathematical sense, and that A is a binary rela-
tion on that set. This enables us to invoke the ordinary apparatus
of set theory. (If this is displeasing, either because the assumptions
are already felt to be too restrictive or because the reader prefers
to do his or her mathematics on some other basis than, say, ZF
set theory, we note that these assumptions are readily transferable
to related contexts; e.g., in set theories that admit them, V could
be a proper class, provided that other assumptions are adjusted to
suit.)
What else do we expect of "is causally anterior to"? Since we
have given up (here, anyway) on the thought that A is a next-to-
next relation, relating a cause to an immediate effect, it makes sense
to think of A as transitive. If I is causally anterior to
J,
and J bears
the same relation to K, then I is causally anterior to K as well.
If, nonetheless, we wish to have some primitive idea of a causal
relation C that relates causes to their unique, immediate effects,
a relation that would not sensibly be transitive, then we may simply
identify A as the ancestral of C; that is, in this case, A bears the
same relation to C that "ancestor" bears to "parent"; or, near
enough, that a bears to successor as a relation on natural
numbers.,
This observation, perhaps, relates our work here to some more tradi-
tional metaphysical analyses of causality; whence, given CP, it will
apply to these analyses also. But, for reasons in part adduced above,
our concern here is with A, not C, and we do not think of A as
"cooked up" from any other relation.
Let us now turn to the question, "Who made God?" The only
reasonable answer, after all, is "God", if we want to speak that
way. If not, the First Cause is itself to be viewed as uncaused. So
far as the formal properties of A are concerned, this leaves us two
choices that seem plausible. Either we can make A
irreflexive,
allow-
ing nothing to be its own cause; or we can make it reflexive, count-
ing any item I (by courtesy, so to speak) among its own causes.
The former, perhaps, is closer to the usual intuitions about these
things. The idea then would be that a First Cause (and only a First
Cause) would be itself uncaused. But, so far as formal analysis is
concerned, it doesn't make much difference. (Roughly speaking, we
can think of "is causally anterior to" either as an analogue of
arithmetical <, or of arithmetical S. Either of the latter is
recoverable from the other in an obvious way, using properties of
identity; i a j if and only if i < j or i
=
j, while i < j if and
only if both i s j and i * j. Whether A is characterized as reflex-
ive or irreflexive, there will be a kindred notion definable therefrom
by the same rubric.)
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GOD EXISTS! 351
It will be convenient, accordingly, to take A as reflexive, extend-
ing to every item I the above courtesy of being counted among its
own causal antecedents. A corresponding relation PA, meaning "I
is properly causally anterior to J,
"
may then be defined as just sug-
gested by (I A J) & (I * J). PA, of course, is also taken to be
transitive, whence, since it is evidently irreflexive, it follows im-
mediately that it is also asymmetric: if I PA J then not J PA I. The
corresponding property to be imposed on A is that of anti-symmetry:
if I A J and J A I, then I = J. This corresponds, in either case,
to the thought that the causal relation has a direction, without loops.
One does not start from an item I, proceed through a change of ef-
fects II, I2, etc., and get back to I. (More sharply, one does not,
some years hence, run into one's younger self on the street.) These
assumptions, though they certainly are traditional, rule out some
esoteric possibilities that physicists, science fiction writers, and other
partisans of the imagination have wished to entertain. Since our
purpose here is to be traditional in all things, we shall, in the pre-
sent context, rule them out as well.
We can sum up our assumptions with some familiar
mathematical terminology. Any transitive, reflexive, antisymmetric
relation R is called a partial order. Given such a relation R defined
on a set S, S is called a partially ordered set, under the relation R.
So our assumptions on the "causal anterior" relation A amount
to the following.
(PO) The set V of all items is partially ordered under A.
We need now merely to spell out what we mean by a causal sequence.
But, in the light of the assumptions that we have made on A, all
that is required for some set S of items to be a causal sequence
is that, when confined to S, the relation A be total; i.e., a subset
S of V is a causal sequence provided that, for all I, J in S, we have
either I A J or J A I. Such a subset of a partially ordered set X
is called a chain in X. And so the causal sequences are just the chains
in V, under the partial order A.
We introduce some further familiar terminology (at least it will
be familiar to those who are familiar with it) to restate our Causal
Principle CP. Let X be a partially ordered set, under a relation
R. A member J of X is minimal provided that, if I R J then
I
=
J. (Less formally, thinking of R as a
<
and defining the
corresponding < as suggested above, J is minimal if there is no
I < J.) Nothing prevents a partially ordered set, though, from having
many minimal elements; or, for that matter, from having no minimal
elements (e.g., in the latter case, the negative integers again, under
the usual a). But, if a partially ordered set X has exactly one minimal
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352 NOUS
element
G, under
R,
such that G bears R to every member of X,
we shall call G first in X. What the Cosmological Argument, view-
ed as an Existence Proof for God, establishes is that the set V of
items, partially ordered by the causal relation A, has a minimal
element G. Monotheism requires also a Uniqueness Proof, whose
conclusion is that there is only one minimal element G in V, which
is first in V under the ordering A. We note that Aquinas'
Cosmological Argument is an Existence Proof, and that further argu-
ment for Uniqueness is required. (In fact Aristotle, whose argu-
ment to Prime Movers formed the rubric for the analogous argu-
ment of Aquinas, ended up with 47 or so of these. So, as Aquinas
knew, uniqueness does require further argument.)
Let again X be a partially ordered set, under a relation R. And
let S be any chain in X; i.e., by definition, S is a totally ordered
subset of X. An element I of X is a (lower) bound for S provided
that, for every element J of
S,
I bears R to J. Note that a bound
I for a chain S in X may belong to
S,
but it need not do so; all
that is required is that I belong to X. Another way of saying that
I is a bound for S is to say that I is first in S U {I}, considering
the latter as a partially ordered set on its own. Finally, the partially
ordered set X has the bound property provided that every chain S in
X has a (lower) bound. It is now evident, checking definitions, that
CP may be restated as follows.
(CP) (Second version) The set V of items, under the (causal)
partial order A, has the bound property.
We have now almost proved the existence of God. What is
required
is an appropriate version of the Axiom of Choice, which we used
in our informal proof. The one appropriate in this context is Zorn's
Lemma, which we state as follows:
(ZL) Let X be a partially ordered set, under a relation R.
Suppose that X has the bound property. Then X has
a minimal element G.
(Note: Zorn's Lemma is usually stated in a dual form, where the
bound property is characterized using upper bounds, and the con-
clusion is that X has a maximal element.) Our Main Theorem now
follows.
Theorem. God exists!
Proof. By PO, the Universe V of items is partially ordered under
the causal relation A. By the causal principle CP, V has the bound
property. By Zorn's Lemma ZL, V has a minimal element G. That
all call God. Q.E.D.
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GOD EXISTS! 353
It will be readily observed, by those familiar with our familiar
terminology, that we have in fact done very little work at all, out-
side of our remarks motivating CP and our observation that, on
a straightforward understanding of "is causally anterior to", it is
indeed a partial order. The rest is humdrum, and almost trivial.
If it fails to be completely trivial, it is because the Axiom of Choice-
and, accordingly, its equivalent ZL-has had itself a somewhat con-
troversial history. It has been the sort of principle that most
mathematicians have used, not knowing how to dispense with it,
but that many of them have wished that they didn't have to. Some
of the equivalents of this principle seem crashingly obvious. For
example, though 2 * 0, 2 x2 * 0, 2 x2 x2 * 0, and so forth,
one requires the Axiom of Choice to show that, if one multiplies
2 by itself an infinite number of times, the result is still non-zero.
But other equivalents have seemed decidedly miraculous: e. g.,
Zermelo's famous proof that every set can be well-ordered. Rosser,
in his book Logic for Mathematicians, puts in the mouth of a character
who objects to the Axiom of Choice, "You're doing theology, not
mathematics." It is now clear, by our Main Theorem, that this
is exactly correct. We also note the unfortunate decision in some
universities, a number of years ago, on which mathematicians were
no longer required to take Holy Orders. Save, perhaps, in Holland,
this would seem to have been a mistake.
But the question will naturally arise (in fact, it has been raised
by J. M. Dunn) whether there is a constructive proof for the ex-
istence of God-i.e., one that does not make use of the Axiom of
Choice. Faith, which is no doubt the usual (and, on most accounts,
the most satisfactory) route to the assertion that God exists, presump-
tively doesn't count here since we take it that Dunn had in mind
a proof by the Light of Natural Reason, and that he would count
appeal to Special Revelation as cheating in this context. (But next,
we fear, he will be asking for a proof of the existence of God which
is relevantistically valid.)
But, assuming that the God whose existence has been established
by the Main Theorem has His Familiar Properties-Omniscience,
Omnipotence, and All That Stuff-we can confidently assert that
no such shallow and trivial proof will be forthcoming. For
Corollary. The Axiom of Choice is true.
Proof. By the theorem, God exists. But the axiom of choice has
as its content that an infinite number of choices can be made. God
can do anything. Accordingly, He can make all those choices. Q.E.D.
Our theorem and corollary state the truth of the matter. But
the invincibly ignorant might be reduced to the claim (given cer-
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354 NOUS
tain subsidiary theorems that we have not proved here) that what
we have shown is that the Existence of God and the Axiom of Choice
are in fact equivalent. The former should thereupon find its place
among the long list of mathematical equivalents of the latter. And
indeed, since it is sound mathematical practice to name a principle
after its discoverer, the usual ascription of the Axiom of Choice
to Zermelo should in fairness, we think, be replaced by its ascrip-
tion to Aquinas. But is it possible nonetheless to prove the existence
of God without appeal to the Axiom of Choice? Certainly not. For
Cohen, in a famous paper, showed the Axiom of Choice independent
of just about everything else (the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis
and other even more theological hypotheses not counting). By the
argument of our Corollary, it is not independent of the Existence
of God. So, conversely, any argument for the Existence of God must
use the Axiom of Choice, or something that implies it. Or face the
wrath of Cohen.
While not everything in the last few paragraphs need be taken
as totally serious (though some of it should be taken as at least par-
tially serious), there is a definite moral to all this. (In addition to
the moral that we might draw from Gddel's equally famous work
on this topic: namely, the Existence of God is consistent with the rest
of mathematics.) Even philosophers must sometimes confront the
World in wonder. It is, surely out of this sense of wonder that the
traditional arguments for the existence of God, and on the other
Great Questions of philosophy, came to be. Nor is such wonder
any enemy of the impulse to be rational. To the contrary, the
development of a narrow logic-chopping style, as a preferred in-
strument for philosophical discourse, has little to commend it. In
this style, it has sometimes been held that the Great Questions (or
some of them) have been solved-usually, we fear, in the negative.
The traditional arguments for the existence of God have had par-
ticularly hard going (not always undeservedly). But that they have
done so has, to say the least, depended on a less than sympathetic
reading of these arguments. If you think that the causal order of
the World, projected back, is like the negative integers, of course
you aren't going to end up with a First Cause. But, if that sort
of mathematical sophistication is allowed the opponent of the
Cosmological Argument, it is equally (and perhaps more) permissi-
ble to its defender. Adopt weak premisses about what the Causal Order
of the World is like, and of course one won't do much Theology.
But, as we have seen, one won't be able to do even humdrum Physics
either.
We return to what has to count as a most significant omission-
namely that, although the argument given above does establish
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GOD EXISTS! 355
(granted its premiss) that there are First Causes, in the sense that
there are items which themselves have no extrinsic cause, it leaves
some further possibilities open. One can be quickly disposed of.
Consider a particular item J. Let G be an ultimate cause of J provided
that G is causally anterior to
J, and G is itself a minimal element
in the causal order. Our theorem, fairly read, establishes that some
items have ultimate causes. It does not yet establish that J in itself
does. But this is quickly repaired.
Theorem. Everything has an ultimate cause.
Proof. Like the previous theorem, but beginning with the set VJ of
items causally anterior to J. This is a subset of V, and it is partially
ordered by the causal relation (since any subset of a set is partially
ordered by the same relation). Moreover, since VJ contains J, VJ
is non-empty. We need to show that any chain in VJ has a bound,
whence VJ will have the bound property. But any chain in VJ is
a chain in V, whence by CP such a chain has a bound in V. Let
I be such a bound, and let K be an arbitrary element of the given
chain. Since K is in
VJ,
by definition K bears A to J; and, since
I is a lower bound for a set that contains K, we have I A K as
well. By transitivity of A, I A J. This suffices that I should be in
V and shows that VJ has the bound property. Now applying ZL,
there will be a minimal element G in VJ. G is also minimal in V;
for, if not, there would be a G' distinct from G such that G' A G,
whence since G A
J, we would have again G' A
J,
whence G'
is in VJ and G is not minimal therein after all. So any arbitrary
item J has an ultimate cause. I.e., everything does. Q.E.D.
But, although everything has an ultimate cause, it does not yet
follow that all things have the same ultimate cause. In fact, what
we have showed so far is consistent so far with everything being
its own cause, and nothing being causally related to anything else.
(This is reminiscent, perhaps, of the "windowless monads" of Leib-
niz.) But this last possibility would not seem to be in the spirit of
the Causal Principle. The idea behind this principle, one presumes,
is that we find ourselves, and the happenings within our purview,
involved in real causal relations, which lead from one to another.
We have made some assumptions about these relations, since we
have ruled out the possibility that, where I and J are distinct, each
can be causally anterior to the other. And we certainly don't wish
to assume that the causal order is a total one. What is going on
on ae Centauri at this instant is, presumptively, neither causing nor
being caused by what is going on here now. But there are, certain-
ly, causal relations between what goes on on ae Centauri and what
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356 NOUS
goes on here. (Indeed, it is not at all unusual for photons that have
been emitted from that spot while a paper was being written to
strike the earth before it reaches its readers. But we hope, in this
case, that the same cannot be said of the Magellanic Clouds.)
What is a reasonable assumption in this situation, to account
for causal interdependence of a familiar sort? It would seem to be
that, given any two items J and K, there is some item I which
is causally anterior to each of them. Note that this is far from iden-
tifying such an I as "the cause" of J and K. For given items will
presumptively have lots of causal anteriors, most of which will not
be shared between them. What seems not unreasonable is that, if
one goes far enough back, one will find some common causal antece-
dent that J and K share. While the Big Bang might be taken to
suggest that this is cosmologically true, the present assumption is
considerably more modest; what it is in our minds to postulate,
in addition to the CP, is not that all things have the same cause,
but merely that any pair of things has at least one causal antece-
dent in common to each member of the pair.
We shall trot out some further jargon to state this assumption,
taking it as already informally clear. Let S be a partially ordered
set, under a relation R. S is directed (down) if, for any two elements
J and K in S, there exists some item I which is a (lower) bound
for bothJ and K; i.e., both of I RJ, I R K hold. (It is not assumed
that this I is in any sense unique; for given J,K, there may be many
lower bounds. Moreover, as we have been at some pains to point
out, it is certainly not asserted that any I which bears R to one
of J,K will bear it also to the other.) We assume now a directedness
property DP on the causal order.
(DP) V is a directed set under the relation A.
We now observe that any directed set with the bound property has
a (unique) first element.
(FE) Let D be a directed set, under a partial order R, such
that D has the bound property. Then D has a first ele-
ment F.
Proof. By ZL, there is some minimal element F of D. To show
that F is first in D, we must show, that F R J for every element
J of D. So let J be an arbitrary element of D. Applying, essentially,
the proof the technical argument of the last theorem, there is at
any rate some minimal element G of D such that G R J. But, since
D is directed, there is some H in D such that both H R F and
H R G. By definition of minimality, H
=
F and H
=
G; whence
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GOD EXISTS! 357
F = G; whence since G R
J,
F R J as well. The reasoning is quite
general, so F is first in D.
So, given the DP, we have monotheism also.
Theorem. There is exactly one God!
Proof. If the theorem is thought to overstate the case, what we shall
show is there is one First Cause, which is causally anterior to ab-
solutely everything. (That all call God.) But, as before, by PO and
CP the Universe V of items is partially ordered under the causal
relation A, and it has the bound property. By DP, V is directed.
Whence by FE, V has a first element G. Q.E.D.
Again, the question arises whether an assumption weaker than
the DP will do. In a psychological sense, this may no doubt be
true; though, in a strictly mathematical sense, the DP, being strictly
finitistic, is already considerably weaker than the CP. But note again
that, given the theorem, the DP will hold most certainly. For, given
a First Cause G, G will of course be a lower bound for any pair
IJ of items. Still, unlike the CP, it does not seem fair to consider
the DP part of the content of "Everything has a cause". It is another
assumption. While it does not seem an implausible one-it is far
weaker than some principles like "action at a distance", which used
to be taken with the utmost seriousness-making it underscores what
was traditionally clear but which has become somewhat muddled
in more recent times; namely, showing that God exists and show-
ing that the God that exists is One are different problems.
But, however plausible our assumptions in clarifying what may
be taken to be the traditional content of the Cosmological Argu-
ment for the Existence of God-brought up to date to eliminate
some gratuitous holes that philosophers found (and other philosophers
sometimes themselves inserted) in the argument-may they not be
themselves out-of-date anyway? We spoke at the outset of bringing
the Cosmological Argument up to date, given recent cosmology.
But the argument here has been metaphysical, not physical; it does
not depend on any cosmology, save that, to be sound, its assump-
tions must be true of the World. (They need not, however, be true
of all possible worlds, since no claim is entered here that God is
a logically necessary being-as though it were somehow below the
divine dignity that He should fail to exist in non-existent worlds.
For, while that question may divert philosophers, it seems somehow
of less moment.)
But has not modern physics passed such causal assumptions by?
Everybody recalls Russell's famous quip-that causality, like the
monarchy, persists because it is erroneously thought to do no harm.
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358 NOUS
And Russell himself suggested that what used to be understood as
causal is best understood in terms of relations of functional
dependence-which, it was claimed, is the Modern Way. Similar-
ly, everyone recalls Einstein's uphill fight against the purported
acausality of quantum mechanics; he is not often judged to have
won it; to the contrary, quantum mechanics has often served as
a beacon for those who would defend human values (including
religious values) against their remorseless undermining by relentless
scientific Law. But, on the former point, it is far from clear what
"functional dependence" means, unless it means that some things
are dependent upon other things in a way that it still makes sense
to call causal, while other pairs of things are not so related. Of
functions in the sheerly mathematical sense, the problem is certain-
ly that there are too many of them. And it has been a pleasant
exercise, in which many thinkers have engaged, to determine on
which of these functions the Universe is Lawful, and on which it
is Unlawful (though not necessarily Illegal). The most definite of
these speculations-e.g., no partial differential equations allowed
of order greater than two-have not particularly commended
themselves. And, otherwise, the speculations seem to bog down into
something very much like, "Pleasant functions are those that reflect
the fact that the Universe is causally ordered," which does not im-
prove the conceptual situation a great deal. (This used to put a
premium on properties like continuity and differentiability; but, these
days, it probably only means that Cray can build something that
will crunch the resulting numbers.) At any rate, not even Russell,
by Human Knowledge, had done with causal relations. So, like the
monarchy, the sense that their days were numbered may have been
a bit premature.
Acausality, despite its rapid dismissal above, is of course a more
serious problem for the Cosmological Argument. But it would be
at least ironic were this argument to fail not because we live in
a Mechanistic Universe of Iron Law, but because we live in one
that, on the description of one naval historian, is reminiscent of
Japanese battle plans in World War II- with fleets and armies
popping up in unexpected places at unexpected times". This was,
no doubt, inconvenient for those at the time on the other side; and,
failing their absorption in some wider system of regularities (which
does seem to be the case in practice, if only because taking a Gallup
poll of elementary particles appears to get even more decimal places
right than did the old assumptions that each of them was just follow-
ing orders), it would seem even more inconvenient for science if
the basic items of the Universe are similarly inclined toward pro-
viding surprises.
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GOD EXISTS! 359
However, none of this has anything to do with the validity of
the Cosmological Argument. Like any argument, its premisses must
be granted if its conclusion is to follow. There is even a counter-
argument, as Smart notes in his paper on this subject.2 If it is false
that there are first causes, then the CP must be false. (Or perhaps
ZL is false.) And, if our first argument was correct, but there is
no unique First Cause, then the DP must be false.
But it is not the purpose of this paper, at least, to defend any
of these anti-metaphysical positions. For such positions would have
to have as their premiss that God does not exist, and knock-down,
drag-out arguments to this effect have, deservedly, fared even worse
than the traditional arguments that God exists. For, having now
done enough logic-chopping of our own, let us return to the intui-
tions which one takes to have been the ultimate source of the tradi-
tional proofs. While the Cosmological Argument has come in many
variants-we have stuck here to its causal one, but evidently similar
remarks may be made if the Universe be ordered by a relation of
contingent dependence, and so forth-but one takes each of them
to result from our sense, whether built in in an a prior way or just
a fact of life, that what there is grows out of what there was. (We
speak temporally, since English is well-equipped to do so; but the
root notion seems to be "depends upon", not "comes later".) There
is nothing nonsensical in this holding in a transfinite sense as well
as a finite one; to the contrary, if we take seriously the infinite col-
lections admitted to our physics, through our mathematics, something
on the order of CP seems necessary to do justice to this sense of
dependence. This is not, to be sure, ineluctable; we might find
grounds on which to assume some instances of CP, but not all in-
stances. But, far from this being the natural course, the exceptions
would then demand justification. Nor does this "growing out of"
have to mean "determines", in the sense of "makes inevitable".
(To the contrary, it would be presumptively offensive to traditional
theology if it did, since it holds that God is Creator without holding
that human wickedness is rendered inevitable thereby.) Projected
far enough back, our individual genealogies find points of intersec-
tion. (It is claimed that almost everybody with European blood is
a direct descendant of Charlemagne. In that, Royal Cousin, the
DP would seem to have some confirmation, at least in our small
sphere.) If the galaxies do likewise, nihil obstat.
So what is being claimed here, at least, is a sound argument
to a true conclusion. It is only reasonable to add the usual disclaimers.
All that the argument seeks to establish is that there is a First Cause.
Readers will have to join the churches, mosques, temples, or cells
of their choice to ascertain what other properties, if any, God might
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360 NOUS
have. But let us return to wonder. Smart, the critic of the
cosmological argument whom we have cited, finds the argument
itself incredible, but what he takes to be the premiss, namely that
something exists, rather wonderful. For he goes on to say, "That
anything should exist at all does seem to me a matter for the deepest
awe.' ' He also says, in the same place, that any argument along
the lines of the cosmological argument can be pulled to pieces by
a correct logic. Well, the present one can't. What Smart had in
mind, one senses in reading his paper, is that it is a theorem of
logic, standardly, that something exists. (This need not be the case
from less standard viewpoints, such as the free logics of Lambert
or the Meinongian ontology espoused, e.g., by Sylvan.) But it is
scarcely a theorem of logic that God exists. Whence Smart was cer-
tainly correct in doubting that a result so remarkable could be derived
from a
premiss
so minimal.
But there is more to be in awe about, so far as the World is
concerned, than simply that it is. Or that we are. It is, if anything,
even more remarkable that, when we project our memories
backwards, they run out. And, for that matter, if we project our
expectations forward, they will run out also, in the same sense. Even
tenure, that academic facsimile of immortality, pales beyond the
real thing (though several people of our acquaintance would, just
now, settle for the facsimile). Nothing in logic tells us that, although
we are here today, we were not here yesterday; and shall be gone
tomorrow. (While most people seem to view the former with more
equanimity than the latter, the cases would seem to be symmetrical,
with any repugnance that one has about ceasing to be matched by
equal repugnance for not having been).
So if there is anything more remarkable than the existence of
you, dear Reader-and of your friends, loved ones, house, rocks
in your vicinity (not to mention the starry skies above or the moral
law within)-it is that you and all these things come embedded in
a causal nexus. Let us forget the old easy arguments, to the effect
that, since we all come from somewhere, the World as whole must
have done so also. (These arguments have, nonetheless, some con-
tinuing plausibility.) And let us forget also the ease with which we
have adjusted to the Mathematics of the Infinite. (Well, for one
thing the arithmetic does tend to be simpler than in the finite case.
This information must be kept from the Treasury, lest the Govern-
ment becomes aware that, if it already owes continuum many dollars,
it will be no worse off if it borrows as much again-a principle
that actual Governments seem to apply anyway, though in what
would seem to be an Arithmetic inappropriate for the purpose.)
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GOD EXISTS! 361
Let us ask simply about the character of the causal nexus in which
we are embedded. In assessing whether this nexus leads anywhere,
it certainly does not suffice that it is logically possible that it should
not. Arguments from the logical modalities work both ways, and
it is no more satisfying to assert that what might not be is not than
to assert that there is anything which, on logical grounds alone,
must be. (Certainly there is some deep aberration in the thought
that the old theological sense that God is a necessary being should
now be encompassed in the thought that LI(God exists) ought to
be a theorem of S5. One detects a fallacy of equivocation here
somewhere.)
But, more seriously, our own lives are presented to us, in
memory and expectation, as an open interval, not a closed one.
The terminal points of this interval are not experienced, but infer-
red. And the greatest wonder of all is that this should be the case;
that, while consciousness provides no bound on our individual
histories, reason supplies one. That is, the Causal Principle, in what
had been taken to be its prohibited, fallacious form, is one that
we in fact apply to our own lives. It is nothing to conclude that
what we are most immediately acquainted with, Out There, is
enmeshed in the causal nexus. This is humdrum, from our first
new toys, and old ones that wore out. It is everything to have become
aware that among the things which have been new but which wear
out are we ourselves. There is the Causal Principle, in the stuff
of our own lives, with a bound anterior to an infinite summing
up. A ball rolling across the floor, if one does not wish to be so
dramatic, provides the same. It is customary to assert of God that
He does not exist in Time. Of course. The Cosmological Argu-
ment (in this form and speaking loosely) locates the First Cause
before forever, and the Final Cause, though we have not dwelt on
it here, in the same sense, after forever. So God exists! which was
to be demonstrated.
NOTES
'Adolf Grunbaum once spent six weeks of a course on the philosophy of science ex-
amining the Cosmological Argument and what was wrong with it.
2J.J.C. Smart "The existence of God", in New essays in philosophical theology, A. Flew
and A. Macintyre eds. (London; SCM Press 1955).
3Ibid., p. 46.
4My thanks are due to Professor Hilary Putnam, who suggested in conversation several
years ago that stock objections to the Cosmological Argument (that, for example, Aquinas
lacked the wit to conceive infinite descending chains) were a bit heavy-handed. The view
that he expressed then, to the best of my recollection, was that one could meet these objec-
tions (at least formally) by suitable appeal to principles of transfinite induction. I am, of
course, solely responsible for the form of the argument given here, and for the conclusions
drawn.
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