John Leslie
Does the existence of our universe prove that God is real? Yes; for it is extravagant to suppose that the universe exists reasonlessly, and the sole satisfactory explanation for it involves something worth calling “God”.
First, let us look at explanations that do without God.
I. It is sometimes said that an absence of one thing is always the presence of something else instead. An absence of all things is unthinkable.
I answer that it is easy to think of things vanishing one by one until there are just two things, then a single thing, then nothing.
“Universe” is a term with no fixed meaning. It may mean Everything in Existence, even including any divine person. Often, however, it means a gigantic region, perhaps with its own Space and even its own Time. Talk of “many actually existing universes” then becomes possible. Now, physicists have suggested that universes exist as quantum fluctuations ex nihilo, fluctuations against the background of absolutely nothing. They then sometimes declare that sooner or later each universe will suddenly vanish. Imagine their amazement if you told them that at least one universe would have to remain in existence!
II. Some protest that asking “Why?” about the universe is illegitimate. One variant of this objection is that all possible scientific explanations appeal to physical laws, and these cannot operate until there is a universe. Another is that any explanation for the existence of something must point to some earlier thing that created it or that contained all the “stuff” that has now been rearranged so as to form it.
The best reply is that Plato has an explanation making no mention of physical laws or previous things or “stuff”. I shall discuss it in due course.
III. Some say an explanation for the universe at any one moment is that it existed at the previous moment. Seeking any further explanation imitates the man who, noticing that humans have mothers, seeks a mother of the entire human race. That is Bertrand Russell’s little jest.
Russell could have found it hard to explain a Big Bang that was a beginning of all things, but nowadays most cosmologists do not picture the Big Bang like that. In particular, Eternal Inflation is popular. According to this scenario, the cosmos stretches far beyond what our telescopes can see. Most of it is a scene of ceaselessly expanding violence, made possible by the fact that gravitational binding-energy is negative energy and so can balance the mass-energy of more and more light rays, material particles, and so forth. The expansion has been in progress eternally; each stage is the product of an infinite chain of earlier stages. Inside its violence there are countless Big Bangs, each the birth of a region very hot in its early moments but gradually cooling.
Note that it is standard physics to treat binding-energies as negative. When a star’s protons fuse to form deuterons the result is a mass increase; but, being negative, the binding-energy of the protons compensates for this, even liberating some energy to heat up the star.
Is there not the difficulty, though, that talk of an infinite chain of causes cannot answer why the chain exists? Leibniz imagined an infinite series of geometry books. Could they be explained by saying that each book had been copied from an earlier one? Surely not, he pointed out, for this would leave unanswered why the books were about geometry.
Much the same difficulty arises if Time is viewed as finite but circular. Could each event be explained by another preceding it in the circle? Well, would not the following story be utterly absurd? A time machine existed in the year 2010; it had traveled forwards in time from the year 2000. And why did it exist in the year 2000? Answer: It had traveled backwards from the year 2010. A self-explaining loop!
IV. Peter van Inwagen, and earlier Robert Nozick, suggested that the existence of Something, not Nothing, might be infinitely probable on the following grounds. There is only one way of there being Nothing but infinitely many conceivable ways of there being Something.
Nozick commented that this assumes the Egalitarian principle that all conceivable situations are equally probable. To me such Egalitarianism looks wrong for two reasons. The first is that, with Leibniz, I think Nothing “simpler and easier”; if there were nothing in existence, then there would be nothing to be explained. For me that is a fundamental conviction. It cannot be proved right, but this does not make it unjustified. As Hume and Kant appreciated, we must start from various fundamental convictions if we are ever to reach conclusions about the world. While fundamental convictions never can be proved right, there is nothing wrong in having them. Consider the philosophical baby that keeps crawling into the fire. The baby lacks the fundamental conviction that the past will be a guide to the future. Yes, in the past it would have done better by assuming that the past would be a guide to the future; it then wouldn’t have got burned repeatedly. But, says the baby, this supplies no logical basis for deducing that in the future the past will be a guide to the future. Well, Hume saw that logic like the baby’s is correct, yet he would have called it a foolish baby.
My second reason for rejecting the Egalitarian approach is this. Suppose that the world had been selected randomly from among all logically possible worlds, each of which (including a totally empty world) had been blessed with an equal chance of being picked. It would then almost certainly be a scene of utter chaos, for utterly chaotic worlds form an overwhelmingly large majority of all logically possible worlds. This is the same point as destroys the Modal Realism of David Lewis.
V. Do all logically possible worlds exist? David Lewis thought so. His Modal Realism maintains (as he himself cheerfully admitted) that all the Greek gods are real just so long as there is nothing self-contradictory in it. Provided they are not like round squares or married bachelors, Zeus and Aphrodite exist somewhere but of course not locally. They cannot be found in our world.
Lewis thought this doctrine gave a useful background to counterfactuals; asking what would have happened had a rock hit a window is asking how things are in other worlds very like ours, worlds in which such a rock did hit such a window. Influenced instead by the reasons that encourage physicists to speak of multiple universes, Max Tegmark has suggested that the doctrine would make physics super-elegant. In this he is like the philosopher Peter Unger, who views it as a superbly simple doctrine. To “What exists?” it gives a superbly brief answer: “Everything that is logically possible!”
Unfortunately, the doctrine ruins inductive predictions. Can the past be a guide to the future? Not if all logically possible worlds exist! There are countless logically possible ways in which you could die in the next five seconds through the future ceasing to resemble the past. You might vanish, burst, or turn into blackberry jam, pickled cabbage, a mountain, a pencil, a lump of uranium . . . but mercifully five seconds have passed and no such disaster has destroyed you. If all logically possible worlds exist then you have just now benefited from fantastically much luck. It is better to believe that they do not.
Lewis thought he had an adequate reply. The worlds in which Induction fails cannot form a majority, he said. Those in which it fails and those in which it does not fail are equal in number since there are infinitely many in each category. However, this reply would not impress any sensible physicist. Some physicists think our universe infinitely large. It then presumably contains infinitely many puddles that boil all of a sudden through drawing heat from their cold surroundings. Thermodynamics says this would happen occasionally, and therefore on infinitely many occasions. But do not tell the physicists to expect to see it happening! In the case of each particular puddle it would be hugely improbable, no matter how large the universe.
VI. Some argue that, for instance, two added to two must always make four no matter what—completely unconditionally. They then conclude that there must always exist at least two sets of two objects, perhaps apples or atoms, to supply “an ontological foundation” for this, or that there must always be at least one mind that asks itself about two and two.
I reply that, yes, two and two must make four, no matter what. What follows from this, however, is that two and two would make four even if the realm of existing things were empty. The reality that two and two make four is the reality that if there ever were to exist two sets of two whatnots, there would then exist four such whatnots. Supplying “an ontological foundation” in the form of actually existing things that could be counted, or of an actually existing mind thinking about two and two, is the sort of error Gilbert Ryle called “a category mistake”: like saying that mathematical equations, as well as sometimes applying to racehorses, do actually watch them racing.
VII. Edward Tryon noticed that our universe could have a total energy that was zero or almost zero: its gravitational binding-energy could cancel or almost cancel the mass-energy of everything in it. [Remember, binding-energies are negative.] This led him to picture the universe as a quantum fluctuation “of some larger Space”, a gigantic, very long-lasting variant on the quantum fluctuations in which hugely many particles spring into existence every microsecond in your immediate vicinity, then vanishing quickly. “Borrowing” of the mass-energy needed for something to exist is allowed by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle just so long as “repayment” (vanishing) takes place fast enough. If a universe-sized fluctuation involved little or no borrowing, billions of years could pass without the need for repayment.
Could this truly be why our universe exists? There is the problem of where Tryon’s “larger Space” came from, but other theorists have managed to do without one. In a model developed by James Hartle and Stephen Hawking our universe sprang into existence without springing from any Space external to it, and there was even, in the quantum fuzziness of its earliest moments, no definite time and place where it was born. And Alex Vilenkin, noting that his own very different model showed quantum-fluctuational universes as able to be born from smaller and smaller Spaces, proposed that universes can quantum-fluctuate from Spaces of size zero or in his words “literally nothing”. Yet even if the Hartle-Hawking and Vilenkin models made sense quantum-physically there would still be the question, recognized by Hawking’s talk of the need for something “to breathe fire into the equations”, of why quantum physics worked.
We could write down an equation saying that the number of unicorns grows continually. Even if it starts at zero, the number increases by twenty-three unicorns per second. If it applied to reality, the equation would guarantee the existence of a world: one containing plenty of unicorns at least. But why would it apply to reality?
Next let us look at some theistic explanations that strike me as insufficient. They try to throw light on the existence of a deity able to create a universe.
A. Some suggest that such a deity must exist through mere logic. God is defined as perfect in power and in everything else. Now, a thing cannot possess all perfections unless it exists; or, alternatively, it cannot possess all perfections unless it has necessary existence. These are two Ontological Proofs of God.
Kant thinks the first proof fails because existence is not an attribute, something that could characterize (“be a predicate of”) something. His reasoning is odd, for surely existence is an attribute of a sort. It characterizes some possibilities (the ones that are “actualized”, the ones inhabiting not only the realm of the possible but also the realm of existing things like you and me), and it fails to characterize others. Agreed, existence is not an attribute entering into the constitution of anything, like the size of a coin in Kant’s pocket, but any defects of that first proof must be sought elsewhere.
Still, it is easy enough find one. Even if existence were one of God’s attributes, this would mean only that God would not be like, for example, the fact that two and two make four, which is a reality without being an existing thing. The “proof” would establish only that if God were real, then God would exist.
As for necessary existence, well, many philosophers think it not even a possible attribute. And at any rate we could not compel a Being to have it just by definition. Consider an Incomparably Dreadful Devil. Could we define him into possessing necessary existence? Could we support the project by saying that his dreadfulness would be perfected by possessing it, which would guarantee nobody could kill him? Surely not. For one thing, a devil could be exactly equally dreadful if nonkillable just as a matter of brute fact. And similarly with a Perfect Divine Person. He could be an exactly equally excellent reality even if he failed to exist necessarily. If he existed just as a matter of fortunate chance, but nothing could ever destroy him, then that would be quite enough.
The underlying difficulty, I suggest, is that deducing God’s necessity from God’s definition as a Perfect Being treats the necessity as a commonplace logical necessity. Yet commonplace logical necessities, affairs “logically necessary” in a sense widely accepted today, are matters simply of avoiding contradictions. Now, a round square would be self-contradictory, but the mere absence of something, God for instance, would provide nothing that could self-contradict.
This strikes me as quite an improvement on the universe-explanations I have so far discussed. Given the existence of an infinitely powerful God, the existence of everything else could be explained; Prefer Simplicity is a principle no scientist can afford to reject; and Swinburne’s grounds for calling God simple are interestingly strong. Yet Swinburne’s God, looked at from another angle, is an immensely complex being. Knowing all that is knowable would involve knowing infinitely many mathematical truths, for a start. In a good enough sense, would not this be far more complicated than knowing as much as you and I know? But, more crucially, I am very unhappy with the idea that anything could exist for no reason whatever. An absence of all existents would be so much simpler.
Still, if forced to choose between a reasonlessly existing universe and Swinburne’s reasonlessly existing divine being, then I would probably choose the divine being.
Now for an explanation I think adequate, a Platonic explanation. If, as I have tried to illustrate, other explanations for the world are unsatisfactory, and if Nothingness would be “simpler and easier” in a way that makes an explanation necessary, and if, finally, the Platonic explanation involves a reality deserving the name “God”, then this little essay of mine may merit the name I have given to it.
Suppose existing things suddenly disappeared, every one of them. In the resulting emptiness, what would there be that might act creatively?
Infinitely many affairs would still be real. It would be real that a universe had once been there. It would be real that if two sets of two butterflies were ever to come into being, there would then exist four butterflies. It could be really and immensely fortunate that the emptiness had not quickly been replaced by a world crammed with people in torment. And it would genuinely be a pity, unfortunate as a matter of reality, that there existed no good universe. Replacement of the emptiness by a good universe would be what I call ethically required; for something can be required ethically, say I, even when it is not a morally required action.
To me, you see, the word “ethical” is like the word “Ethics”. It covers goodness of all types instead of good actions only. Instead of “ethically required”, say “axiologically required” if you prefer; it is what Nicholas Rescher says in this context, and what is the use of warring over language? The things I want to fight for are instead these: (1) that the existence of some situations can be fortunate as a matter of reality rather than, for instance, of people prescribing various actions without actually describing any reality (a curious “prescriptivism” once ruled the world of Oxford philosophy); (2) that the absence of good things would be unfortunate even when nobody existed to weep over it, let alone to have a duty to do something about it; and (3) that fortunateness, goodness, is not an ordinary property like redness or being spherical; it is instead a matter of being required, marked out for existence in a way I call “ethical”. Call it “axiological” if you like, but do please recognize that talk of required existence throws light on what Ethics deals with.
To understand what Ethics deals with, you have to grasp that the evolution of intelligent life on Earth could have been something good even if there had existed no deity, demigod, or extraterrestrial with a duty to bring about its evolution—just as the suffering of a dinosaur could be bad even in the absence of folk morally obliged to prevent it. You must accept, too, that a thing’s goodness is, and not just through human whim or a quirk of language, the fact that its existence is called for, needful, required. A reason for that whatnot to exist is what the goodness of any whatnot is. Yet we have to use common sense in interpreting talk of reasons or requirements here. It is not being said that ethical/axiological reasons or requirements must automatically be endowed with causal or creative success just because they truly are reasons or requirements for the existence of various whatnots: various situations, actions, minds, mental states, or whatever. So far as we can tell, they might have ethical authority yet never any actual power.
Still, it might instead be that some ethical requirement or set of compatible requirements does have creative success, bearing direct responsibility for why there is a world. When Plato thinks it, he has not wandered into idiocy.
In Book Six of his Republic, Plato suggests that The Good, a reality “beyond existence”, is “what gives existence to things”. In other words, the realm of existing things is something whose presence is required ethically and with creative effect. The ethical requirement for its presence is “beyond existence” because it does not depend for its reality on anything already existing, let alone on any person with a duty to recognize the requirement and then strive to give effect to it. This makes it a reality of at least the right sort—“in the right ballpark”, as we North Americans say—for bearing responsibility for why there is Something and not Nothing: Something, that is to say, which exists as the world does, instead of having the kind of abstract reality possessed by inhabitants of Plato’s realm of Forms.
Plato’s suggestion is tentative, and certainly he attempts no logical proof of its correctness. However, the ethical requirement that there exist a good situation might create that situation—might manage to bring about its existence if it did not yet exist, or might be responsible for its eternal existence—without this being a logically provable affair. Plato’s approach could therefore deserve the influence it has had over the years. Numerous thinkers have accepted Hermann Lotze’s principle that “the true beginning of Metaphysics lies in Ethics” since we should “seek in what should be the ground of that which is”. “The Good is that on which all else depends” (Plotinus); “Goodness is that whereby all things are” (Dionysius); “Goodness as a cause is prior to being”, and “Even non-existent things seek a good, namely, to exist” (Aquinas); “The predisposing cause of God is his perfection itself, through which he is the cause of himself” (Spinoza); “The world is so determined that its opposite implies imperfection or moral absurdity” (Leibniz); Absolute Reality, a cosmic “Idea that thinks itself”, is “not so impotent as to have merely a right to exist without actually existing” (Hegel); “Existence is the upholding of value-intensity” (A.N. Whitehead); God “is not a being” but is instead both an ethical factor, “something that has a claim upon us”, and “the power of being”, “the creative ground of existence” (Paul Tillich); “Tillich stands in the classical Platonist tradition of Christian ontology” (J.A.T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich).
Some of those following in Plato’s footsteps have pictured God as a divine mind whose eternal ethical requiredness is responsible for its existence, a mind that then creates all other things. This notion has recently attracted the Idealist philosopher A.C. Ewing, the physicist-turned-philosopher John Polkinghorne, and the philosopher-turned-theologian Keith Ward. Others, however, have stuck closer to Plato, for they see Value as directly creating all things. “God”, if that word is to be used, may then mean the creative effectiveness of ethical requirements whenever they are not overruled by other ethical requirements. Plotinus, Dionysius, many in the Greek Orthodox church, the Catholic theologian Hans Küng joining hands with Tillich among the Protestants—all fall into this school. But beware here of seeing some deep distinction between the theories (a) that God is the creative effectiveness of world-creating ethical requirements, (b) that God is the ethical requirements that are world-creating, (c) that God is the world’s creative ethical requiredness, and (d) that God is the world, considered as meriting the name “God” because it possesses creative ethical requiredness. Spinoza, for instance, will be found to have chosen (d)—when, that is to say, you read him carefully, unlike those who forget his Short Treatise and are deaf to how its Platonic creation story reappears in his Ethics. Yet he could instead have chosen (a), (b), or (c) because any differences here would be simply in how he would have chosen to use the word “God”. In each case the situation described with the help of that word would obviously have been exactly the same.
How successfully, though, can any of this account for the evidence of our senses, the world that we see?
For a start: We see a world that has causal orderliness. This could well be considered a contribution to its goodness—though it often has nasty consequences, so that it might be better to have a dreamlike world without the causal laws that scientists find beautiful, a world without harsh struggles, needs for courage, frustrations, headaches, plagues, or earthquakes.
Next, the world seems “fine-tuned” for the evolution of intelligent life—another possibly great good. No doubt Schopenhauer was not clearly unreasonable when he wrote that Earth would better have remained like the moon, a lifeless mass, because of all those frustrations, plagues, and suchlike. Perhaps it would be good if hydrogen bombs annihilated all living things. But it is plausible that the fine-tuning makes a worthwhile world possible, and hence is something Plato’s theory could explain. And a popular alternative way of explaining it seems none too satisfactory. Often cosmologists theorize that there exist multiple universes with very varied characters. In our universe the strengths of physical forces, the masses of elementary particles, the expansion rate at early times, the degree of turbulence, and various other affairs all appear to have needed tuning, often with extreme accuracy, for intelligent life to be possible; but, say the cosmologists, such things as force strengths and particle masses vary from universe to universe. A plausible reason for this would be that physical symmetries were broken differently in the different universes by scalar fields (the Higgs field has been a popular choice) whose strengths differed randomly from universe to universe. Given sufficiently many universes it would then be no surprise that a few chanced to have life-permitting characteristics, and no surprise, either, that we living beings found ourselves in one of those few. Yet, although eager to believe in multiple universes with very varied characters, I argue (see chapter 3 of my Universes, for instance, or chapter 6 of my Infinite Minds ) that they could not by themselves suffice to explain the observed fine-tuning. For a force strength or a particle mass often needs tuning to within the same narrow limits for several different reasons simultaneously.
Consider electromagnetism. Its strength needs accurate tuning for quarks not to be converted into leptons, making atoms impossible; for protons not to decay quickly, meaning there would soon be no more atoms; for proton-proton repulsion to be weak enough to allow for chemistry; for there to be stars like the sun, burning peacefully for billions of years; and so on down quite a long list. Well, why didn’t electromagnetism need to be tuned to one strength to achieve a first fortunate result, to a second very different strength to achieve a second, to a third strength to achieve a third, and so forth? Yes, fundamental laws might lead to different force strengths and particle masses in different universes, perhaps thanks to differing scalar fields, but why is there even a single mixture of force strengths, particle masses, etcetera that is life-encouraging? Why aren’t all possible mixtures equally unsatisfactory? The problem could not be solved just by saying, “Fundamental laws themselves differ from one universe to the next, and ours is a universe whose laws do not lead to the problem”. For science, based as it is on respect for Induction, could never by itself justify accepting that laws that are genuinely fundamental (rather than matters such as force strengths, settled by factors such as scalar fields) vary from one universe to another. Our fine-tuned universe can therefore point toward something worth calling “God”: something that made fundamental laws vary or else forced them to be laws of just the right sort for producing life. And therefore, I would say, it can help show the correctness of a Platonic creation story.
There is, though, a gigantic difficulty with how stories of this general kind are typically developed. The situation typically pictured is vastly inferior to what could be expected if such stories were right.
Axiarchism is my name for the doctrine that Value is creatively influential, either directly or else thanks to the benevolence of a Creator perhaps himself existing reasonlessly. Axiarchists often rather oddly suggest that there exists only a single universe, but this could easily be remedied. Leibniz, for instance, although insisting that by “world” he means “the whole succession and whole agglomeration of existing things”, appears never to have considered that there might be infinitely many huge realms of the type cosmologists now call “separate universes”, yet a reincarnated Leibniz could quickly incorporate this idea into his axiarchistic world picture, arriving at a “best possible world” far better than the one described in his Theodicy. The gigantic difficulty lies elsewhere. It is this. If Value were creatively influential, then what would be created? Only the very best, presumably. However, no possible existent would seem better than a mind worth calling “divine”, a mind contemplating everything worth contemplating—this including, we might well think, every detail of possible universes in infinite number and endless variety. Well, then, why would there exist anything except a mind or minds of that supremely desirable sort? Why do axiarchists so very typically believe in hugely many other minds, each with an existence fully separate from that of its companions, whose experiences are so immensely inferior that Schopenhauer could judge them worse than worthless?
For anybody like me, not just an axiarchist of some kind but a defender of creative ethical requirements, the only plausible answer is that there in fact exists nothing outside divine thinking. Pantheism much as defended by Spinoza will have to be accepted; the order and succession of the world’s things must be nothing but the order and succession of ideas in a mind worth calling “divine”. Your thought patterns and mine, together with the patterns of all the things and events surrounding us, are carried by the mind in question.
This involves no conflict with science or with the evidence of our every conscious moment. Think of John Barrow. Professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge, Barrow has speculated that conceivably our world is a pattern inside an enormous artificial mind, a computer of cosmic complexity. How could this ever be refuted by any physical experiment, let alone by what every child knows about its own consciousness? Physics studies only the world’s structure. It has no use for talk of “good, solid stuff that could not possibly be nothing but a computer’s information-processing, or nothing but divine thinking”. Physicists working at physics describe the complex patterns of our universe and the laws that control their development over time. They never discuss whether those patterns, including of course the patterns of our thinking brains, exist inside a mind that, contemplating them in all their details, thereby gives them all the existence that they ever have—a mind whose infinite complexity could make it worth calling “divine”.
But when able to contemplate absolutely anything worth contemplating, why would a divine mind contemplate our world with its frustrations and plagues? Might it not be much better to contemplate beautiful mathematics, music finer than Mozart’s, scenes of the sort we would call “hallucinatory splendors”? The answer is that such things, whether or not much better, could also form part of what that mind contemplated. All that pantheists need claim is that our universe would be among the things deserving a place inside such a mind. It might not even be particularly fine among possible universes. There might be infinitely many others that were better. But then the patterns of those other universes would be contemplated also, in all their details, with such universes therefore existing side by side with ours inside the mind in question.
How, though, could any pantheist explain a world of perpetual change? Spinoza’s Short Treatise tells us that the all-inclusive divine mind must be changeless “because never able to change into anything better”; now, how could this be compatible with a world of falling apples and speeding bullets? Einstein supplies an answer. He writes that our world is without “sections which represent ‘now’ objectively”, making it “natural to think of physical reality as a four-dimensional existence instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three-dimensional existence”. In Einstein’s eyes, change is always only a relative matter. The world certainly changes in a sense, yet so does the pattern of a carpet’s interwoven threads. It changes at successive points along the carpet.
Einstein found this comforting. As he explained to the mourning kinsfolk of his dead friend Michele Besso, life never was lost in any absolute way. I think we could describe this view as follows. Although no longer among things existing in the present, Besso’s life remained in existence “back there along the fourth dimension”. In an important sense, everything ever in existence is something that exists forever. “Forever in what sort of Time?” you ask. Well, why not reply, “In a Time in which absolute changes might be taking place, although in point of fact such absolute changes never occur”? In Einstein’s world, as in Spinoza’s, no situation is ever replaced by another in an absolute fashion, yet presumably such replacement would be logically possible nonetheless. Even if a four-dimensional continuum formed a whole that never in fact altered, it could be altering so far as Logic was concerned; it could even vanish entirely.
Might Einstein’s world then give us something worth calling immortality? Einstein himself resisted using that word, but I see no strong reason to avoid it. The kind of immortality Einstein could be said to offer us is the immortality of lives that never become wiped out in an absolute manner. When we had died we would not exist then, yet we would exist “back there”. Still, we might also have immortality in a more generally accepted sense. Suppose that the divine mind, thinking about a man, considered his earthly death, the point at which the working of natural laws destroyed his body. Why would not that mind think of this man’s consciousness as continuing onward, perhaps coming to share progressively more of the wonders of divine knowledge? It would necessitate no miraculous breakdown of how those natural laws operated inside our universe. And if it would be a good for it to happen, then Creative Value would make it happen.
Would there be only a single infinite mind? The suggestion strikes me as weird if a Platonic creation story is accepted. We must not argue that a situation containing a single infinite mind would have infinite goodness and therefore could never be improved on. For suppose there existed two infinite minds, each filled with infinitely many worthwhile thoughts. Would it be quite all right to annihilate one of the minds “because Reality would continue to have the same infinite worth as before”? Surely not. That would be like saying, “It would be quite all right to kill your wife, for Reality would afterwards still contain God’s wondrous infinitude and so would be in no way worse”. Yet if the annihilation of one of those two infinite minds would be a misfortune, then its never having existed would have been a misfortune also, and, similarly, it would be a misfortune if there had not been three such minds, and if there had not been four, and if there had not been five, etcetera. In short, if the realm of existing things owes its reality to its creative ethical requiredness, then it must contain not just one infinite mind but infinitely many. Each contemplates absolutely everything worth contemplating. Or, if what philosophers call “Identity of Indiscernibles” is correct, then there exists just one mind that contemplates absolutely everything worth contemplating, plus infinitely many other minds each failing to contemplate some little something that is contemplated by that first mind: a different little something in each case so that Identity of Indiscernibles is not violated.
Identity of Indiscernibles is the principle that says that if angels have no extension (like the “point particles” imagined by some physicists) and are identical in all but their spatial positions, then no two angels can be brought to the very point of an infinitely sharp pin. The principle would allow the existence of two separate universes, each in a Space of its own, just so long as those universes differed with respect to a single atom. Logic, the principle says, would prevent any such last trivial difference from disappearing. Rather than the logical catastrophe of having it disappear, one or both universes would have to vanish, or perhaps they would have to fuse. Believe in such logic if you can!
As I hope to have shown, talk of creative ethical requiredness can lead to a very attractive world picture. It is tempting to treat this as reason enough for rejecting all such talk. (“Wishful thinking carried to fantastic extremes!”) However, anything markedly less attractive would be flatly incompatible with a Platonic creation story—and if such a story is wrong, then how else could we explain why there is Something and not Nothing?
We do, though, need to look carefully at the concept of creative ethical requiredness. May it not contain some absurdity?
Obviously, this objection has some force. Plato’s creation story might be far more evidently correct if the hungry, instead of needing to be fed by the charitable, always found meals materializing out of thin air. Superb cathedrals that were self-constructing, or superb music without any composer, might be dramatic evidence to support the story. Still, exactly how would the absence of such evidence destroy it? Though we may lack firm knowledge that ethical requirements create things, do we not see things that could well have been created by them? (i) Is there not a universe instead of a blank? (ii) Do we not witness elegant causal orderliness? (iii) Are not causal laws “fine-tuned” with startling accuracy in ways making life’s evolution possible? (iv) Is not our world in many respects a wonderful place, making many of us feel fortunate to be parts of it? No doubt it cannot be known that these four matters are results of ethical requirements acting by themselves. Yet which philosophers cry out most vigorously that ethical requirements “never are seen acting”? In my experience, by far the loudest cries come from folk who treat these very same matters as visible evidence of a deity’s benevolent actions. Well, why cannot we instead view them as what ethical requirements have produced without help from anybody’s actions? And when those same folk protest that they never see meals appearing out of thin air or self-constructing cathedrals, do they not deserve a tu quoque, a cry of “You’re in the same boat”? The absence of self-constructing cathedrals is no better at dismissing Plato’s approach than it is at refuting Swinburne’s God, a deity whose benevolence has not produced self-constructing cathedrals or an absence of evil men and destructive earthquakes.
Evil men and earthquakes? The sad fact is that the need for some goods could often overrule the need for others, it being impossible to have all goods simultaneously. It could, for example, be good that not everything was done for us, as in a dream world, a world without the causal laws that lead to earthquakes, and that we could sometimes decide for ourselves what to do instead of being mere puppets. It could then sometimes be the case that various ethical requirements would be satisfied only if we decided to give our support to them, and that sometimes we would decide not to give it—the need for the requirements to be satisfied then being overruled by the need for us not to be puppets. Reasoning of this sort is commonplace in philosophy of religion. Why must followers of Plato be banned from using it? Why cannot Genghis Khan and the Lisbon Earthquake exist in a world created by ethical requirements, just as much as in one produced by Omnipotent Benevolence?
It need not be held that absolutely every causally ordered universe would contain destructive earthquakes. Some universes among the infinitely many that existed inside an infinite mind might have causal orderliness without any disasters whatever. But could it not be good for that mind to contain, as well, universes like the one we inhabit? (Suppose that our universe did exist inside such a mind. Ought we then to do our best to annihilate it “so as to improve the goodness of the whole”?)
That last point is crucial. It could not be, for example, that one state of mind happened to be good intrinsically—good when considered in itself and without looking at its “instrumental” goodness or badness, the goodness or badness of its consequences—while another exactly similar state of mind was intrinsically bad. The language of good and bad can guarantee that much, whether or not good and bad are fictions. (Whether or not dragons are fictions, the language of talk about dragons guarantees that any dragon breathes flames.) Intrinsic worth could never be a mere matter of chance. It would be a necessary matter. And similarly with Plato’s suggestion that some ethical requirement or requirements acted creatively. Either that is right, or it is wrong. Logic cannot prove that it is right or that it is wrong. But if it is wrong, then this is no matter of chance; it is a necessary matter. And if it is right, then this is no matter of chance either; it, too, is something necessary. The creative power of some ethical requirement or requirements could not be an affair of pure happenstance. Not being logically necessary is fully compatible with being firmly necessary: necessary absolutely but in an other-than-logical way.
Such an idea should not be found too difficult. Think of how phenomenal red—the color red as experienced, for example, in the afterimage of a bright light—is nearer to phenomenal orange than to phenomenal yellow. That is not a matter of chance, but neither is it like the fact that every bachelor’s son has an unmarried father. It is no mere result of defining the word “orange” with the words “reddish-yellow”, for even cavemen without language would have seen that strawberries looked more color-similar to oranges than to lemons. It is a matter of firm necessity nonetheless, necessity that forces us to accept “reddish-yellow” as another way of saying “orange”.
Could these arguments have proved God’s reality, in some suitably weak sense of “proved”? My position is heavily Spinozistic, and Spinoza has often been called an atheist. His God differs greatly, at any rate, from what is preached from many a pulpit, so call him an atheist if you wish, and then call me an atheist as well. Still, his ideas about why the universe exists strike me as rather closely allied to fairly standard theological Platonism. And his ideas about our place in the universe call to mind prayers to a deity “in Whom we live and move and have our being”. Though not myself religious, I see sense in those words.
Am I going too far, though, when I claim that an ocean of infinitely many infinite minds, something than which nothing better could be conceived, could justifiably be called “God”?1
1. For more ideas like these, please see my Value and Existence (Blackwell: Oxford 1979); Universes (Routledge: London 1989); chapter four of The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (Routledge: London 1996); Infinite Minds (Oxford University Press: Oxford 2001); Immortality Defended (Blackwell: Oxford 2007); and ‘How Many Divine Minds?’, in Consciousness, Reality and Value, editors P. Basile and L.B. McHenry (Ontos Verlag: Frankfurt 2007), 123–34; also my edited Modern Cosmology and Philosophy (Prometheus: Amherst, Mass. 1998). Important recent works developing Platonic creation stories are A.C. Ewing, Value and Reality (Allen and Unwin: London 1973) (in chapter 7, Ewing uses such a story to explain why a divine person exists); Mark Wynn, God and Goodness (Routledge: London 1999); a book by Hugh Rice with exactly the same title, God and Goodness (Oxford University Press: Oxford 2000); and books by Nicholas Rescher including Nature and Understanding (Oxford University Press: Oxford 2000) and Axiogenesis: An Essay in Metaphysical Optimalism (Lexington Books: Lanham, Md. 2010).