One of the most fascinating arguments to me is the argument from contingency because it invites me to think carefully about the foundations of existence. But this argument has a long history and has invited many objections. I've seen hundreds of objections and what I want to do in this video for you is summarize what I take to be the eight most important objections. And many of the objections that I've seen fall in the category of these eight objections.
So I'll first summarize the argument and then go through the objections. So here's a picture that I think helps display the basic structure of the argument. The argument focuses on contingent things, things that can be absent from reality.
These things aren't absent, they're actually in reality, and the argument seeks to explain the existence of those things in terms of an ultimate foundation. which is not itself contingent, but instead has necessary existence. It exists because it cannot not be, and provides the ultimate explanation for everything else.
Now this argument picture leads to a variety of different versions of the argument from contingency. What I'm going to do is present one particular version by laying out some premises. So first a definition.
As I said, a contingent thing is anything that can fail to be. So for example, if you have some... blocks, these blocks can be destroyed with a hammer.
The parts of the blocks perhaps still exist, but those particular arrangements of those parts that make the blocks, they're gone. And so that shows that their existence, their inclusion within reality is not a matter of necessity. Okay, so here's a premise, something exists. And I don't mean anything special about existence here.
If you're reading this premise and if If you have doubts about the premise, then you exist, and your doubts exist. Somebody once asked me, how do we know that not everything is just an illusion? And, well, if illusions exist, then that's something, and that's good enough for this argument. Second premise, each portion of reality is either dependent on something beyond itself or not.
So, for example, a block of matter would depend on prior states of reality, which would then form into that block. And this premise here is just identifying two mutually exhaustive categories. It's not actually saying that there are things that don't depend on other things, just that these are the two categories, either dependent or not.
Third premise, any portion of reality that includes only contingent things, things that can be absent from reality, depends on something beyond itself. So the idea here is if you have some contingent things, and Their inclusion within reality is not a matter of necessity. So if you're wondering, why are these things in reality? You can't say, well, because they can't not be.
They can fail to be within reality. But then what does account for their inclusion within reality? Why are they in reality rather than not? And this third premise provides an answer to that.
It's that things that are contingent are included within reality because of something upon which they depend. A couple of supports. First, there's the support by experience. So we've never, or I guess I shouldn't speak for you, but I've never experienced massive objects just snap into being from nowhere.
I've not observed anything. So, for example, let's say that I want there to be a new technology, maybe the next iPhone. But I can't just hope that the iPhone appears in my hand from nothing.
Because my understanding from all that I've experienced is that somebody would have to invent the iPhone. Right? There would have to be some... prior states of reality upon which the new iPhone depends.
And so all these experiences are predicted by this premise, and that provides some support for the premise. Now here, skeptics of arguments like these are sometimes, I think, motivated in their skepticism by a kind of knockdown presentation of the argument. My goal here is not to knock you down with...
with the argument and say that you must now believe in this. Rather, I'm trying to appeal to more ordinary reasoning, the kind of reasoning that we use in ordinary life when we find data points that support a position and we can continue to look for additional data points. So let me just offer another support, and this is based on accounting for how contingent things can be within existence. There's nothing within a purely contingent reality, a reality that... includes merely contingent things that can account for the actual existence of that contingent reality.
Why are these blocks in reality rather than not? There's nothing about the nature of contingent things that accounts for their presence within reality. By contrast, a foundation that has self-existence would have an explanation for its existence within its nature because it has a nature that precludes the possibility of its non-existence. So we get some cool results. So one result is that the portion of reality that includes all contingent things depends on something beyond itself and further that the foundation upon which all contingent things depend has necessary existence.
Again, the idea here is that the foundation of all contingent things can itself be contingent because that would be circular. It's the foundation of the totality of contingent things. So that's the basic picture.
Again, there are different ways of unpacking this argument. There are different forms of the argument. But I think this is one way of just summarizing the basic elements of the argument.
Now, as I said, this argument has invited many objections. And I think that the kind of skepticism that this argument can inspire, well, we need to apply that same sort of critical analysis to the objections themselves. So that's what I'm going to do here. So here's an objection that comes up a lot. The idea here is that there is no totality.
The worry is that perhaps there are contingent things, but there's not some super big thing that contains all the contingent things, right? So there's each contingent thing, and perhaps each one is dependent on something else, but there's not this total contingent object that itself depends on a necessary foundation. And I think this is an important objection because it does successfully... undermines certain versions of the argument from contingency.
But my particular version doesn't fall prey to this objection because what I say instead is that there's a foundation of contingent things, plural. I don't assume anywhere that there is a super big object. We can talk about things. It's not just individual contingent things that depend on things. For example, it's not just a particular iPhone.
that needs to depend on something. 10 iPhones would equally not be able to just snap into being from nothing. 10 iPhones wouldn't just be able to exist without some foundation.
And so we can just give the argument then in terms of plurals. So when we're careful here, then we can just avoid this kind of a worry. Okay, but...
there's a related worry in the neighborhood and you might be thinking of this you maybe have heard of this the fallacy of composition this has a history going back at least a Hume later Bertrand Russell Paul Edwards and the idea here is that even if each contingent thing is dependent it doesn't follow that the totality of contingent things is dependent right so maybe each contingent thing is dependent and maybe the totality is not a thing but is a plural of things but why think that all plurals are dependent, all plurals of dependent things. Why think that? It's not a valid inference. It's actually just a fallacy.
You know, we don't want to be fallacious in our thinking. You know, we're truth seekers. We want to be reasonable.
We want to be humble and not leap to conclusions that are invalid. Okay, so the first thing I want to say is that actually, technically, this objection doesn't target any premise in the argument that I gave. Because I never inferred that the totality is dependent just from the assumption that each contingent part is dependent.
I didn't make use of this particular inference. Instead, I gave two arguments, one from experience, which applies not just to individuals, but also to groups of contingent things. Again, there's not going to be a group of contingent stuff, contingent iPhones, for example, that's going to appear from nowhere, it seems in my experiences at least. And also, there's nothing within.
contingent individuals or contingent groups that could explain why they're in reality rather than not. And so the arguments I gave for that dependence premise weren't really dependent on this particular inference. So I say it's a straw man, but I don't mean to say that this is not an important objection.
It is an important objection. It does help to clarify the nature of the argument and helps to invite more careful articulation of of why one might think that contingent totalities are dependent. It's not merely because its parts are dependent.
At least that's not the argument that I gave. But rather, it makes sense of everything we've experienced with parts and plurals being dependent, as well as this argument from explaining existence. Okay, and here's a second point, which is that when it comes to dependent things, From all that I've experienced anyway, they don't form independent things, rather that they form dependent things.
So I've talked about iPhones, but think here about Play-Doh. So imagine you have some Play-Doh that's dependent on a factory or whatever that produced it, and you have a bunch of Play-Dohs that are dependent in that same way. Well, by building something out of dependent things, you're not going to get something that is itself non-dependent. In fact, the totality is going to be dependent on the very things that gave rise to each individual Plato. And so it doesn't matter the size here.
Even if it's an infinite stack of dependent things, it looks like you're only going to get dependent things. From dependence, you just get more dependence. And so this would be a reason to think that actually when it does come to dependent things, this inference actually is a valid inference.
There's no counterexamples to it. matches our experience. So I don't think this objection really undermines every form of the argument from contingency. It doesn't seem to reveal that the argument that I gave is unsound.
Now here's an objection that maybe is the most popular objection. Maybe this is one of the ones on your mind, the infinite regress. So the thought here is that maybe each contingent thing is just caused by another infinite chain. And so then we don't need to appeal to some first cause. of the chain.
I have a couple things to say here. The first is that my version of the argument actually doesn't assume that there couldn't be an infinite chain. I nowhere make any statement about the size of the contingent portion of reality. And then second, the mere age of contingent reality doesn't by itself do anything to account for its existence in the first place.
So like if you have a blue ball and that blue ball has existed forever, its mere existence rather than non-existence isn't accounted for just by the length of its existence. Now maybe what's going on here is that something, you might think that something wouldn't have eternal existence, wouldn't be infinite in time, unless it had self-existence. After all, if it has this kind of existence that cannot be. absent, it has necessary existence, that would explain why it isn't absent from reality.
It's in reality rather than not because it can't not be in reality, right? But if it's a contingent reality, then it can fail to be, in which case, even if it happens to exist forever, that doesn't account for its actual existence. This is why classically the argument from contingency has not ruled out an infinite regress, but it has rather... saw a deeper, more fundamental explanation of the contingent totality, whether it's finite or infinite, in terms of some more fundamental reality that has self-existence.
Now, in a couple other videos that I gave, I expand on the infinite regress in a little more depth. So you're welcome to check those out. In one video, I consider whether the infinite regress would remove the need. for a deeper explanation or something upon which the contingent reality depends.
And then in another video, I consider whether it would in some way provide the explanation. It would constitute an explanation. It doesn't remove the need, but provides the explanation. Very briefly here, what I would say is that the infinite regress doesn't provide an explanation. In fact, it doesn't provide an explanation of existence because it presupposes that there is existence.
There's nothing... in this chain that can provide the explanation for the chain itself. The chain doesn't have necessary existence.
You can't say it exists because it cannot not. So the totality of the chain, whether it's a single thing or many things, isn't really explained at all just by reference to its own members. And then in another video, I talk about why merely adding things to the chain does nothing to explain the existence of that chain rather than some other chain or its non-existence.
So I unpack these thoughts in more detail. They're not easy thoughts, that's why there's a long history of thinking about this argument, but nothing in the infinite regress objection here targets any premise in the argument I gave. Because again, I have no premise that requires that there be a first cause and so that's an important distinction. So I think what this objection does is really actually just helps to clarify that certain versions of the argument from contingency are not susceptible to requiring a first cause.
Okay, the argument from quantum mechanics. The idea here is that the study of small particles reveals that virtual particles can literally appear from nowhere. And so I've heard this in public debates and in popular conversations.
People have asked me about this. They've said, Look, science, you know, if we're going to be up to date with our latest science, we need to really allow for the possibility that the entire universe, like virtual particles, sprang into being from nothing. Now, this is a good, this is a good objection. In fact, it destroys the argument. So we should just be done here.
I mean, you thought I was going to try to reply to each of the objections. You know, like maybe I want to defend this argument from contingency, but no, I'm a truth seeker and I just want to follow reason wherever it leads. And so reason leads me here to see that the whole argument is based on misguided silliness.
Really, I mean, you have to kind of have a pre-existing belief in the conclusion in order to even be convinced by this kind of an argument. Okay, no, that's not really what I want to say. Actually, the objection is an important objection and it invites a distinction between two claims.
So one claim is that virtual particles are not necessitated by prior physical conditions. The idea is that it's not that there's some prior state that of necessity determines the subsequent state. And this is, you might think, apparently true, or at least according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. There's still the Bohm interpretation, the Everett interpretation.
But let me just go with the standard Copenhagen interpretation on which future states are not determined. determined by prior states, and by determined I mean necessitated, but rather there's a probability description that gives a certain probability that the virtual particle will appear. Okay, but that's a very different claim from this other claim, which is that virtual particles do not in any way depend on prior conditions. And that claim is apparently false. So it's not that...
the virtual particles are known to appear from nowhere. In fact, my understanding is that there is some prior states, some prior states of the universe, which allows for the existence of the virtual particles to appear. And so I'm not aware of any evidence against the principle that things can't just appear from nowhere.
And we have lots of examples that support that principle. Things never do appear from nowhere, as far as I'm aware. So I think this objection, again, it's important because it reveals a distinction that is sometimes overlooked. But once we clarify this distinction, we don't find that anything in science shows that the premise at work, the causal premise at work in the argument, is false, or even that we have no good reason to think it's true. Okay, I hear this from time to time.
People say, well, maybe the first event is special. I mean, nobody was there to observe that first event. So, I mean, wouldn't it be presumptuous, really, actually, to just assume that the first event was caused rather than uncaused?
If there even is a first event. And maybe there isn't a first event. Maybe it's just an infinite regress. Now, maybe the ordinary things that we experience do have causes.
But the first event would be very unordinary. Very different from all that we've experienced. And so we need to be intellectually humble.
We shouldn't just leap to the conclusion that there's some cause of this thing. Okay, well, I have a couple replies. The first thing is, in principle, we can make inferences based on what we have observed. So, for example, nobody has observed events that will happen tomorrow, right?
Does that mean it would be presumptuous, arrogant to assume that the events of tomorrow will... depend on events rather than just be chaotic or even that there'll be a tomorrow? Well, I think we can be reasonably sure that events of tomorrow will depend on events of today. I'm assuming that you find that plausible as well. And so what I'm showing here is, I know I'm not talking here about the first event.
You might think, well, that's different. What I'm showing here is that we can make inferences based on what we have observed. In fact, this is how we extrapolate from our present experiences.
and how we can be even reasonably sure about things that happen in remote parts of the universe. Like that there are planets and other galaxies, and gravity still applies on those planets, even though nobody was there to observe it. Because that's a reasonable, again, a reasonable extrapolation from our experiences.
Now, I realize in the history of philosophy, there's various paradoxes about how you can successfully make this inference that the future will resemble the past. I actually think that the more recent theories and developments in probability provide a successful analysis. If you want to go deep in really understanding the nuts and bolts behind this kind of inference, I think that there's a Bayesian form of probability that can answer this. But in any case, I do think this is appealing to common sense.
I mean, I don't think that people are normally worried that the events of tomorrow will just happen. in a completely different way from the events of today, just randomly bugs flying into existence from nowhere, but rather that things will continue to depend on prior states, as they always have. And here's a second consideration, which is, I call this the principle of irrelevant differences.
The idea is that a dependent thing would not cease to be dependent in its nature merely by relocating it to a different time or place. I remember actually talking with a friend who brought up this. this objection, Objection 5, and this was my response to them. I said, well, you know, consider this chair. It depends on something.
It's dependent in nature. If this chair were somehow to exist at the first moment of time, would it thereby not be dependent in nature? Would it lose its dependence just by moving it to another place or time? And he was intrigued by that.
In fact, actually, that motivated him to abandon this particular objection. Going from the other direction, imagine that there is some stuff that can appear from nowhere at the first moment. Okay, well then what's to stop that stuff from appearing from nowhere at just any moment, including maybe right now, right here?
It seems like, again, we don't experience stuff appearing from nowhere, but if that could happen at the first moment, then the simplest explanation for that is that that sort of stuff just can come from nothing. It's not a dependent sort of a thing. in which case that would allow for that to happen all the time. Now, again, I'm not saying this is a knockdown proof or anything, but this is evidence. This is evidence that would seem to make good sense of the causal order that we experience.
And so if we want to build our view of the world on theories that make good sense of our experiences, then I don't see that this fifth objection really undermines the argument from contingency that I gave. Okay, here's a more... advanced objection that is common in various forms among contemporary philosophers.
It's a problem of bootstrapping, I call it. The idea here is that the cause of contingent reality is either itself contingent or not. It's necessary. But both of these options lead to a certain problem. So if the cause is contingent, then that's a problem because that leads to circularity.
But the cause can't be necessary either because then the effect would be necessary. You can't get Anything but a necessary effect from a necessary cause. Necessary cause can't produce an effect that has a different nature, such as being contingent. So therefore, there can't be a cause of the contingent totality. Now, I think that this bootstrapping problem, again, there's different ways of unpacking it.
I think some versions of the argument from contingency are more susceptible to this problem than others. I think the version that I gave doesn't... doesn't fall prey to this.
And in particular, this premise here, that the cause can't be necessary because then the effect would be necessary. First, let me just give a concessory point. Let me just say that I do think, as others do, that a necessary thing really can't cause the contingent effect mechanically.
So, you know, as we understand mechanical causation, the nature of the effect would be like the nature of the cause. But that leaves open another option. Which is that a necessary foundation produces a contingent effect, not mechanically, but via a spontaneous action.
And there's different ways you might understand this. Perhaps a neutral way would be to think in terms of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, where you have a cause that makes probable certain effects and unprobable other effects. It doesn't necessitate its effects.
So even if the cause is necessary itself, its effects could be contingent. contingent. And so that seems to fit with current science and it's conceptually possible. Here let me just add that I've actually seen somebody say that we have to first show that spontaneous action is possible in order to make this response to this objection.
But actually I think that the argument for the possibility of spontaneous action is the argument from contingency that I gave. Because the... premises are independently motivated and the conclusion of those premises just follows right from the premises.
And so if mechanical causation is ruled out, well then it would just follow that spontaneous action as possible. All right, here's an objection that comes up. People say the universe is necessary. Now why can't the kind of most basic elements of our physical universe be the necessary foundation? Why think that necessary foundation has to be some spooky transcendent thing that goes beyond the things of ordinary experience?
All right, so well, in my reply, let me just note that the argument from contingency has more than one stage. So philosopher William Rowe, he divides the argument from contingency into two stages. In the first stage, we focus on the existence of an independent foundation of all things.
And in the second stage, we look at the nature of that foundation. And so, so far I've only looked at the first stage of the argument from contingency, and that leaves wide open the second stage. So technically this objection doesn't target any premise in the argument or the conclusion of the argument.
It's completely compatible with the argument that I gave. I think this is important to realize because atheists and theists alike can accept the conclusion of stage one of the argument. I think oftentimes the argument from contingency is maybe presented in a sort of knockdown fashion. I'm going to knock down your beliefs if you don't believe in God.
And this inspires a certain kind of skepticism among atheists who are wanting to follow evidence wherever it leads, who are interested in the truth, and they consider the argument, and they're finding weaknesses in the argument, especially because they may have independent reason to think that God doesn't exist. And so then... I think what can happen is people can become, in a sense, overly skeptical of the first stage of the argument. Actually, atheists and theists alike can celebrate in a kind of unity about an argument that leads to a two-category view of reality where contingent things depend ultimately on a necessary foundation. And this view of the world where contingent things are dependent in their nature and that there's a foundation that is not itself dependent, this is a This is a hopeful, fruitful view of the world, no matter what other beliefs that you have about the nature of the foundation.
So I do think it's interesting to go on to stage two and look carefully at the nature of the foundation. But there's nothing in the first stage that rules out that the foundation is material. That comes later as we think about things further.
And, of course, the second stage is one where philosophers... and theorists and thinkers can debate. And so you can come away from looking at stage two thinking, okay, well...
maybe the foundation could be a supreme material thing. And so I'm not ruling that out here. All I'm doing is, again, focusing on stage one.
All right, so some people say the argument is just too lofty. The idea is that it's presumptuous to assume that you can know anything about the ultimate ground of reality. People have been investigating these things for thousands of years. And who are you to think that you, among all those people, can really have knowledge of something so deep. All right, so I've got two responses.
First, I've got a snarky response, which is that isn't it equally presumptuous to assume that you know the limits of knowledge? For thousands of years, people have been debating what we can know. And some people think you can know through reason and evidence that the foundation, or at least that you can be reasonably sure that the foundation is not dependent in nature.
but actually has self-existence. It exists because it cannot not. People think that, and others think that you can't know that, so there's a debate about what you can know, and that debate's as old as the debate over the ultimate ground. All right, so here's a gentler reply, which is that wisdom comes through a combination of intellectual humility and bold exploration. So if you do have this worry, That's presumptuous.
I think you can know these things. Let me just actually affirm you and just say, yeah, intellectual humility, that's valuable. And we can combine that with a tool of bold exploration. They're not inconsistent. We can be intellectually humble as we investigate new lines of argument.
In fact, the intellectual humility is what inspires me to look at the objections to the argument from contingency. When I was in college, one of my professors, this was early in college, said, Matter of factly, the professor didn't say this is my view, he just said matter of factly there are no good arguments that have a conclusion about the ultimate ground of reality. And I was skeptical of that claim and so I was applying, you might say, intellectual humility to that particular claim.
And so I've applied that scrutiny and analysis to the objections to the argument. I'm skeptical of... the skepticism, right? And so we can be skeptical, we can be intellectually humble, and we can also make progress in building our understanding of the world.
All right, so I think that's pretty clear. It's hard to say in principle where the limits of our knowledge lie. And I think really, when people bring this up, what they're really saying at root is that we should have a truth-seeking attitude.
And I think oftentimes, maybe they're responding to a kind of overly bold... presentation of an argument where maybe the person presenting the argument appears to be trying to knock down skeptics rather than give an opportunity for skeptics to explore further. All right, so let me just give you some final thoughts about the argument. I mean, there are other objections to consider.
Those are the eight main ones that I see, and I hope it's helpful for you to just see some further analysis of those. One thought here is that two things I see inspire skepticism of the argument from contingency and arguments in general. And that's bad forms of an argument, as well as good arguments that are badly presented.
And here, let me just focus a bit on badly presented arguments. This can happen when somebody takes an argument and they weaponize it. And they, in a sense, it seems like they're seeking to show that people who disagree with the conclusion are irrational or foolish. And this kind of presentation breeds, I think, over skepticism. The kind of skepticism that...
fails to also be skeptical of the objections brought to the argument. You sort of scan for a weakness and then you say, oh, the argument's silly. But instead of blaming the skeptic for that, I would actually want to just kind of take responsibility for somebody as somebody who's presenting the argument. I want to do a good job presenting the argument carefully and in a way that is serving people and not knocking them down.
It is, I think, easier to bash an argument than to build knowledge. And so there's many, many objections to the argument from contingency, and they're important. They're important objections because there are many versions of the argument, and the objections serve to clarify the argument and to expose problematic versions of the argument.
And so the objections are important, but I find that if I stay on the project of objecting and finding fault only, then I miss out on this other project of building knowledge, which is more difficult. It's like building a house is more difficult than knocking a house down. but it's also much more rewarding.
And so part of my purpose here is to inspire people to not merely be skeptical of arguments, but to also build knowledge, to seek to find arguments that are sound as a way of replacing bad arguments. Okay, and then finally, I just want to emphasize that my purpose here is to serve you. And if you've come across arguments of the sort, and maybe you felt like they were presented in an overly dogmatic fashion, I just want to say that my goal here is to not knock down people with arguments, but to build them up and to give them tools to think for themselves.
I'm not, I just don't care so much if you... Agree with me or if you're persuaded. I mean, I am interested in helping people to see truths that I think matter, but it's for their sake. It's because I want to serve you. And so I'm presenting this for you, for you to think through yourself.
One thing that I think is a problem sometimes when people give arguments is they appeal more to authority. And it's almost like there's this power play where people are battling over ideas. But rather than thinking of...
a battle over ideas. I want to think instead in terms of building together. And so that's my goal here, is to present this to you to help you to continue to build your own understanding of things. So I hope this serves you. And if you have further questions about the nature of the argument or you have other objections, feel free to send them to me.
I would love to learn more from you. Thank you.