Alexander R. Pruss - Necessary Existence

OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 12/1/2018, SPi Necessary Existence OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 12/1/2018, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 12/1/2018, SPi Necessary Existence Alexander R. Pruss and Joshua L. Rasmussen OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 12/1/2018, SPi Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Alexander R. Pruss and Joshua L.

Rasmussen 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954208 ISBN 9780198746898 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 12/1/2018, SPi Acknowledgments Special thanks to Nathan Ballantyne, Luke Barnes, Todd Buras, Sean Carroll, Trent Dougherty, Felipe Leon, Rachel Rasmussen, Daniel Rubio, Christopher Tomaszewski, Luke van Horn, Peter van Inwagen, and Craig Warmke for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts. We are also grateful to Christopher Tomaszewski for his work on the index, and to our families for their patience with us.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 12/1/2018, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 12/1/2018, SPi Contents OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 12/1/2018, SPi viii contents OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 17/1/2018, SPi People have at all times been talking of an absolutely necessary Being. Immanuel Kant1. Virtually everything we encounter in ordinary experience can, appar ently, fail to exist. Cars, iPads, telephone poles, towers, flowers, mittens, kittens, bricks, sticks, planets, stars, dust: none of these things have to exist, it seems. We can easily imagine a universe without such things; and there was a time before anything of this sort existed. It seems the things with which we are familiar are contingenti.e., possibly absent.2 Is everything contingent? Or, might there also be one or more things that exist of necessity? A necessary thing, as we are thinking of it, would be something that exists no matter what possible situation obtains.

Its non-existence at any time would be impossible in the strongest sense. So, for example, a necessary thing cannot be assembled or disassembled. It cannot snap into being or snap out of being. It cannot not existno matter what. Is there anything like that? 1 Kant and Mller 1907. 2 There is Williamsons proposal (Williamson 2001) that everything exists of necessity.

But even Williamson allows for contingency in the world. He says it is contingent, for instance, whether a given physical thing is physical (pp. 1213). And in general, where one might ordinarily say that objects pass in and out of existence, Williamson will say they pass in and out of a certain basic category of being (a category he calls concrete, which is to be distinguished from the category of causally-capable things, which we call concrete). Someone in Williamsons shoes could wonder, therefore, whether anything is necessarily on the side of this basic category which they are currently on. Many of the questions and arguments we raise have parallels in the Williamson setting, and we leave working out these parallels to the interested reader.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 17/1/2018, SPi introduction In this book, we are primarily interested in the prospect of a necessary concrete thing, which we take to be anything capable of causation. We intend to use the term cause in a minimal sense to designate anything that acts as an antecedent condition (or entity) that is at least partially causally responsible for some event. Causes need not be sufficient for their effects: for instance, we could say that Adams smoking caused Adams lungcancer, even though his smoking didnt have to cause lung cancer. Also, we allow substances to be causes, even if substance causation is to be analyzed in terms of event causation.3 In general, we take no sides on what sorts of things can be causes; we leave it open, for instance, whether numbers, properties, propositions, sets and other so-called abstract entities may have causal powers and so also count as concrete in our stip ulated sense. Our question, then, is this: is there anything that (i) possibly causes something (is concrete in our sense) and (ii) exists no matter what? In keeping with tradition, we will call anything that satisfies both (i) and (ii) a necessary being. We inquire: are there any necessary beings? We will set out a case for an affirmative answer.

We will lay the groundwork in Chapter 2, where we motivate a standard logic of the necessary and the possible. Then, over the course of six chapters, we will present six arguments for the existence of a necessary being. The first argument is an up-to-date defense of a traditional explanation-based argument from contingency. The next five arguments are new possibility based arguments which make use of twentieth-century advances in the logic of necessity. We aim to present the arguments as possible pathways to an intriguing and far-reaching conclusion. In the final chapter, we will address what we take to be the most challenging objections to the existence of necessary beings.

Finally, in an appendix, we will offer a number of additional arguments for a necessary being, without detailed discussion, in the hope of inspiring further inquiry. The question of necessary existence is relevant to several fields of inquiry, including cosmology, ontology, and theology. Start with cosmology. Many 3 So, for example, one might analyze John caused the fight as Johns rude comments caused the fight. OUP CORRECTED PROOF FINAL, 17/1/2018, SPi introduction physicists and cosmologists are extremely interested in questions about ultimate explanations. 77). 77).

Echoing a similar sentiment, cosmol ogist Sean Carroll writes, We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality (Carroll, 2005, p. 634). Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist, asserts that an ultimate explanation of the universe would provide the firmest foundation on which to build our understand ing of the world (Greene 1999). The search for an ultimate explanation invites a question: what kind of an explanation can be ultimate? Can contingent reality alone constitute an ultimate explanation? Physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss proposes that the ultimate foundation of contingent reality is, in a certain sense, nothing (Krauss 2012). His proposal is provocative. And it inspires curiosity: his state of nothing includes laws and conditions, and one may like to know what could explain their existence.