Sunday, November 9, 2014
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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According to Hume, there is a certain number of possibilities in which something can happen. There are different permutations and combinations that allow our universe to behave in certain ways, everything must happen at some point. For this reason, I believe that it is acceptable to shrug off this strange occurrence because it was bound ot happen at some point. Also, if we spend our time trying to find the source of this occurrence, it inevitably would lead you nowhere. From this occurrence, we can extrapolate that anything can happen. There is a possibility that the strangest things will one day occur because there is a very slight possibility that it can happen. For this reason, we shouldn't stress or fuss about the things that we see in front of us since we know that somehow it is possible that it happened. There is a greater being out there in the universe that controls the things that we see. From all the permutations, that God chooses what happens as we perceive it. We can conclude that God exists because either the combination happens randomly, or someone chooses what we see. Either of these options are possible, yet we cannot surely prove that God must exist. From this case, we can conclude that from the certain fixed number of things that can happen, that number must be big enough to allow even the strangest things ot happen. Also, we can conclude that science can only go to a certain extent to explain what we see, beyond what we know of the world, the rest is based on the permutations of our planet.
ReplyDeleteDespite what Hume’s cosmological argument may claim, if I am hiking in the wilderness and see a hovering crystal sphere that emits regular pulses of different colored light, there is no explanation for this sphere. In the argument, which has the conclusion that God exists, Hume’s first premise is referred to as the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The Principal of Sufficient Reason says, “Whatever exists must have a cause or reason of its existence, it being absolutely impossible for anything to produce itself or be the cause of its own existence” (Hume 54). By this logic, the inexplicable floating sphere must have a reason for its existence, because everything must have a reason for existence. Just because the reason cannot be easily seen does not mean that it does not exist. I believe that the principle of sufficient reason is not necessarily true, and the Epicurean argument shows that nothing has a reason for existence. As one piece of the Epicurean argument, Hume writes, “A finite number of particles is only susceptible of finite transpositions; and it must happen, in an eternal duration, that every possible order or position must be tried an infinite number of times” (Hume 49). Hume means that matter, which is finite, exists in time, which is infinite. Every combination of atoms is tried an infinite amount of times. Hume concludes that all matter has existed and ceased to exist an infinite amount of times and will continue to do so forever. The Epicurean argument supports that everything exists due to randomness. A commonly used analogy to help explain the Epicurean argument is the hypothetical situation of an infinite amount of monkeys sitting at an infinite amount of typewriters. Eventually, according to the Epicurean argument, a monkey will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Also, many monkeys will produce written documents that come very close to the complete works of Shakespeare but have tiny inaccuracies such as a single missing comma. This idea of randomness can be applied to the floating sphere. For some reason, a random association of atoms came together to form this sphere purely by chance. This sphere has existed in the past, and will exist again in the future. This idea applies to anything in the universe. Nothing has a reason for existence beyond chance.
ReplyDeletePSR, parish school religion, a class that I wasn’t too fond of because I had to miss soccer for it every Monday. Wait…wrong PSR. The Principle of Sufficient Reason holds the idea that everything that exists must have a reason for existence. With this in mind, it’s claimed that everything either has its causes that go on “ad infinitum” or there is a necessary and existent being that ends this chain of events. The idea of an infinite chain is dismissed as the chain itself has no explanation. We now can say that there must be a necessarily existent being, correct? Not quite…
ReplyDeleteBy the PSR, this previously described crystal sphere must have a reason for existence. We cannot simply shrug our shoulders and say, “stuff happens”. A cause for the existence of this sphere exists. I do not dispute this idea, it is reasonable to say the EVERYTHING needs a cause for existence. But, when we say everything requires a cause, everything must be incorporated into this. The fact that a “necessarily existent being” does not require a cause for existence is rather unsatisfactory. This exception to the PSR is added in, and essentially tries to single-handedly justify the existence of God. I feel that if the PSR is used to justify this sphere, Gods existence also needs a justification. It does not work that the PSR is used for everything other than what the author of this argument is trying to prove. I’m not arguing whether or not God exists, I am arguing that this proof of God does not work due to God’s exception from the PSR.
According to Hume's argument, typically referred to as the "Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)", everything must have a cause of existence, implicitly a cause other than itself. As we have seen through scientific innovations in discovery, we now know the cause of multiple natural phenomena which seemed inexplicable in the past. One of millions of examples is that of color; the reason why an object has a certain color is because it absorbs all light waves except for the particular wave corresponding to that color. We can go even further and describe the component of a light wave as well as what causes that specific wave to bounce off as opposed to others. Supposing this, it would not be too difficult to explain the cause of a crystal sphere hovering and emitting sequenced colors. This is essentially an example of how Hume could justify the use of PSR, and with modern physics and mathematics today, we can explain many phenomena not just in Earth, but throughout the universe.
ReplyDeleteHume next takes his PSR argument to justify the existence of God in his text. He claims that the existence of a creature or object can be traced back through infinite regress to its causes; take humans for example. People can trace their existence to their parents, who trace their existence to their parents, etc. infinintely. Yet, such an argument would be absurd, mainly because the presence of this infinite chain cannot be explained by a sufficient reason. So, that must mean that whenever an object or creature is traced back to its origins, the trail must have a stopping point. The only way it can have a stopping point is if the last item of the chain needs no reason for existence itself; that is, this last item is necessarily existent. In our society, the only thing that does not require a reason for existence is God, so God must exist.
Yet Hume points out his mistake in reasoning later on; wouldn't the fact that God requires no explanation violate the PSR, and thus God cannot exist. Although this initially appears to be a valid counter-argument, there is a major flaw with it; it never accounts for the idea that the universe is bound to laws of time and space, while God is not. In other words, the only reason we have causes of existence (our parents), is because they "existed" "before" us and without them, we would not "exist". Whenever we say "exist", we are essentially referring to space, and whenever we focus on our ancestral causes, we are essentially referring to "time". If God exists, wouldn't He, through his omnipotence, have created "time" and "space" as we know it? Potentially, He may not be subject to the laws of "time" and "space", and thus, He would not need a reason for existence. So, it is indeed possible for everything to trace back to a "necessarily existence" Deity, God.
I believe that there is an explanation for everything that happens in the universe, and that when we can, we should try to seek out that explanation. We must realize, however, that those explanations might not be readily available to us, and some may even be impossible to find. In these cases, we are allowed to say “stuff happens”, but then we should refrain from trying to justify anything or from creating an argument based on that. In terms of the existence of God, the “stuff happens” argument doesn’t work; rather, it actually goes away from the existence of God, and suggests that chance was responsible for creating the universe. Philo uses the analogy of the “stupid mechanic” who had spent millions, or even billions of years trying to invent the world, and one day got lucky and made it work. I believe though, that the world was created by chance, and that it was not created by some great designer (God). The term “order of the universe” is misleading, because it implies that everything that is in the universe serves a higher purpose. Saying that the universe is a machine is also misleading, because we have such a limited understanding of what it is and how it works.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem in describing the universe is that we only know the universe as it relates to our reference point here on Earth. There’s so much more to know about it, and who knows, maybe it is the masterpiece of a great designer. In our own societies, there are so many different explanations of how the universe was created, but we can never know for sure, because we were never there. Some say that the Big Bang was responsible; others use deities and God from religion to justify our existence and the existence of the universe. At this point, we can only come up with even more diverging theories that get us further from the real explanation that we most likely will never be able to 100% understand.
According to Hume’s claims in the Principle of Sufficient Reason, every occurrence, anomalous or mundane, has a cause. For this reason, if I were to encounter a situation as described above, a floating crystal sphere emitting pulsing light patterns, Based on the PSR I would only be able to conclude that the reason behind this event exists, however allows the possibility this reason or cause could be unknown to me. This principle itself seems to make sense, but it also develops into over-simplified reasoning, seeing as it also accounts for the all-encompassing “chain” idea. The main arguments states the if everything must have a cause, and nothing can be a cause to itself, “Whatever exists must have a cause or reason of its existence, it being absolutely impossible for anything to produce itself or be the cause of its own existence” (Hume, 54). Using this reasoning, one can also conclude that the causes are events themselves, and demand an even further cause, concluding further that everything that appears today has a traceable chain of causes back to either one of two options, Infinity or God.
ReplyDeleteInfinity in this case means that this chain continues forever with no clear start or end; although the concept seems slightly far-fetched, it also doesn’t have a definitive argument against it besides the baseless statement “infinity is impossible”. This also happens to be the argument used against an Infinite Chain to eliminate it as an option when Hume was using PSR to make the “Cosmological Argument”, weakening the argument as one of the premises (“Infinity is impossible”) has no undeniable proof, but I digress.
The other option is God, a being of immense power who is both a creator of all chains of events, but also a creator of himself. This is, like many arguments for God, a very convenient solution to difficult problems. To start off, it is difficult to justify saying “it being absolutely impossible for anything to produce itself or be the cause of its own existence” (Hume, 54) and then continue by making one of the bases of God’s existence; for God to be an inherent cause to himself and everything else. I understand that God is, in the nature of an all-powerful being, excluded from many premises that may apply to the material world, but it weakens the conclusion immensely when the requirement for the argument to be true involves God defying one of the premises made just earlier in the same argument. Furthermore, as a contradiction later presented by Cleanthes stated, it is too simple to just refer to everything as a leading end of continuous chain of events. Many occurrences could be easily seen to have two or more causes, and many causes could be observed to generate multiple occurrences. In this way, the “chain” of events quickly becomes more of a web; harder to decipher, more interconnected, and certainly less applicable to the “infinite chain vs. God created chain” argument, as the amount of layers added to each cause/effect become much more dependent on a far greater scale of explanation.
In conclusion, many attempts at proving God make sense on the surface, and in the end, it may be a comfort to some people to have even shaky justifications for their beliefs. Personally, I feel like if the claim of an argument has very serious implications, something that involves a great deal of daily life, then the evidence for it must be similarly serious and have fewest possible holes. As a principle, having poor structure or foundation for a claim whose conclusion may affect the lives of many people is a dangerous path, and has historically led to very massive and widespread misinformation, further leading to damaging or limiting group-mindsets, and even violence. PSR and the Cosmological argument have their good claims and their flaws, but it is the flaws that make them dangerous, and as a rule, should be avoided until these flaws are eliminated, which may very well be indefinitely.
In this universe, there is absolutely nothing that comes completely random and separate from all other things; the world is one gigantic chain of causes and effects that come together to create something truly incredible and coincidental (the world is exactly how it is because of every little cause and effect). Although it may seem like some things are totally random and don’t have a reason for existing, Hume argues that everything is part of this massive chain and, in order to exist, every effect must have a cause. This brings the reader to the cosmological argument of David Hume. The starting idea of this argument is the aforementioned statement that everything (every effect) exists because of its cause. Then the argument moves to the statement that nothing can be its own cause. Third, Hume says that the whole chain is not caused by anything, but at the same time that the chain requires a cause. Since chance and random occurrence doesn’t exist, and something cannot come from nothing, there has to be a being that started the chain. This being, Hume concludes, is God. This entire argument essentially says that everything in the universe must have and does have a cause, and everything is part of a huge chain that was put into motion by God. This argument, while it does make sense within its own parameters, is actually quite flawed in its fundamental idea; the next question for any reasonable philosopher to consider would be where God came from. As the argument says, something cannot come from nothing and a thing cannot be its own cause. As a result, there has to have been something that created God. However, this is contradictory because God was supposed to have been the original being that created everything. And even if the philosopher comes to the conclusion that some being did come before the one that we know as God (even though this contradicts the idea of God), where did that being come from? And how about the being that created the being that created God? The chain goes on forever, and this chain becomes infinite and therefore can’t really exist because there has to have been something that started the chain. However, since even a truly fundamental being needed a creator, a fundamental being cannot exist. Therefore, the chain cannot exist. Therefore, the argument that God started the chain doesn’t really hold up. Additionally, however, people that argue that God didn’t start the chain also cannot be correct; using the Big Bang Theory as an example, this logic still cannot provide any valid explanation for the beginning of the chain even when used in a secular, scientific context. Conclusively, there really is no way to explain through a causal chain (or any other method in my opinion) why the universe is the way it is. For that matter, there isn’t really a way to explain how the universe exists. Even people that believe in scientific theories that attempt to explain how time and space came into being still need a reason for why this happened, and as time and space (in their theory) didn’t exist before this moment, a cause cannot exist and therefore the theory doesn’t work. Needless to say, I am a bit of an agnostic as I see no way to explain the universe’s existence or the existence of anything in it; however, I still do believe that anything that exist needs a cause, even if I can’t logically use this to explain the universe. The best that humans can do with our limited brain power is try to understand the world around us to the best of our abilities, and it seems like everything on Earth has a cause. So, this “crystal sphere” with “colorful light pulses” definitely has a cause, even if I can’t figure out what it is. Although there might be a cause for every effect, I still don’t think that we can use this to understand God or the universe; no matter what I do, every theory of the universe just leaves me confused, so I choose to be an agnostic and ask the simple question “why bother?”
ReplyDeleteHumans are curious. We like to try and understand certain parts of the world that do not make sense to us. This curiosity has driven technological and scientific findings since the beginning of time. When we observe something that does not make sense to us, it is difficult to just accept that “stuff happens”. I believe that we should be able to provide information and evidence to back up our claims and explain phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteHume makes a similar argument, known as The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). He argues that everything in the world has a reason for being there, “Whatever exists must have a cause or reason if its existence, it being absolutely impossible for anything to produce itself or be the cause of its own existence” (Hume, 54). The PSR’s main point is that every effect must have a cause, or something must have created something and that thing creates another thing. This argument is also known as infinite regress, that everything has a cause. The argument of PSR is referenced throughout Hume’s dialogues. During the argument for God’s existence, the PSR questions, what would have created God? This argument is a big problem for Hume later in the book. An objection to the PSR is the question of whether or not everything happens by chance. One of the arguments is that if you give a monkey a typewriter with infinite time and infinite monkeys, the monkeys will eventually write Shakespeare. In my opinion, this is a bit far-fetched; to argue that every physical attribute about animals, plants, or even the universe is all from chance is very unlikely. A more likely solution is that all of these attributes have a cause and that attribute is the effect.
There are two distinct parts to evolution which provide evidence against god. First is the concept of a designer. Initially it would seem that evolution completely contradicts god in the sense that god did not create anything; rather it developed by random chance. A fully acceptable counter argument to this is the possibility that god created a universe designed to develop into the one we currently live in; however this presents a second problem. We discussed examples of this problem when discussing the panda’s thumb. Essentially, evolution created many solutions to problems that appear perfect, or close to perfect, for example eyes. It also created a lot of solutions that are far from perfect, the panda’s thumb being an example. The problem is that if god designed a universe that would evolve into the current universe, he would have designed a universe that developed perfect solutions to problems; there would be no panda’s thumb. This only proves that god is not omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, similarly to the problem of evil. The second piece of evidence brought forth by evolution is the fact that it says that our world evolved by virtue of random chance. If we were developed by random chance there is no reason for gods existence, he is just extra details we don’t need; this is Occam’s razor. Evolution provides a simpler solution to life than god does, and one with more proof.
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