12 Steps to Christian Theism: Step 3, Metaphysical Realism

In our quest to show that God exists and He has shown Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, we are on step 3, which is: it is true that the theistic God exists. We have discussed both the kalam cosmological argument which argues for a creator from the beginning of the universe and the argument from contingency which argues for a necessary being sustaining the contingent universe. Now we will turn our attention to Thomas Aquinas' argument from metaphysical realism. In order to be clear and concise due to the difficulty of this argument, I'm going to quote directly from Frank Turek and Norman Geisler's booklet entitled; What if Christianity is really true? (1) This is a condensed version of their book; I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist where they lay out the 12 step argument that we are in the midst of. So, none of the following are my own words.

"By observing physical reality we can reason from effect to cause and see that even the most mundane object we encounter can lead us to the existence of God. "There is nowhere the unbeliever can hide in all reality where he is not standing on some ground that can be shown to point to its Creator." (2)
From the cosmological argument, to the design argument, to the argument from objective morality, there are many popular lines of thinking, both scientific and philosophical, showing that theism is true; that is, that there exists a God who is separate from yet active in His creation. We will look at one argument, by 13th century thinker Thomas Aquinas, built upon metaphysical realism.
The argument begins, some thing, a tree for example, undeniably exists. Essence is what a thing is, and whatever is true of a tree is because of its essence or not. For instance, to be a tree is to grow roots, sprout leaves, etc., not to be in a particular location such as a backyard. We must ask, is existence part of what it means to be a tree? The answer is no. Even if all trees ceased to exist we would still know what a tree is because its' essence and existence are distinct. For example, you can know what a unicorn is even though it does not actually exist. From where, then, does existence come? The tree either causes itself to exist, exists necessarily, or is being caused to exist by something else. Self-causation is a contradiction and thus false. Trees go from potentially existing to actually existing and thus do not exist necessarily. Therefore, the tree is being caused to exist.
Whatever is causing the tree to exist is either receiving its existence from another or it necessarily exists by virtue of its essence. Like an infinite chain of train cars with no engine, a chain of existence-receiving causes cannot account for its own existence. Hence, there must exist an uncaused cause, who's essence simply is existence, causing all other things. As Being itself, its essence and existence are identical such that it is unlimited Being while everything else only has being. Aquinas says, this everyone knows to be God. (3)"

And now I'm back. God bless.

Update: Since I started teaching the 12 steps at my church, I posted the rest of this series from those lessons. You can start here. There are 8 total lessons that cover all the steps.

Notes
1. follow the link, step 3
2. Richard Howe, "It's worse than I thought", Quodlibetal Blog: Musings from Anywhere by Dr. Richard G. Howe. http://quodlibetalblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/its-worse-than-i-thought/.
3. Edward Feser, Aquinas (Beginner's Guides) (Kindle locations 573-577). Oneworld publications (academic). Kindle edition.

12 Steps to Christian Theism: Step 3, The Argument from Contingency

So far, we have covered the first 2 steps: truth about reality is knowable and the opposite of true is false in our trek to Christian theism. Knowing that there is such a thing as truth allows us to then evaluate truth claims made by, for instance: a religion, a professor, a scientist, or a philosopher. Either the claims made by individuals such as these are true or they are false. In our process, step 3 states that it is true that the theistic God exists. This consists of making arguments for the existence of a monotheistic God that would fit the bill for Judaism, Christianity, Islam or Deism. The first argument offered was the kalam cosmological argument which argues for a universe with a beginning and thus, a beginner of that universe. In this installment we are going to take a look at the argument from contingency from the famed German, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz asked: "Why is there something rather than nothing?"  When related to the universe, the syllogism goes like this:

1. Every existing thing has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe is an existing thing.
4. Therefore the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.

This is a philosophical argument that posits the universe is a contingent entity that needs to be continually sustained by a necessary being in order for it to exist. Let's unpack this argument and see where it gets us.

Working backward, we can see that premise 3 is most certainly true. The universe is a thing and this thing does exist. Unless you want to argue that we are in some type of Matrix scenario, which would be unfalsifiable, we can agree that premise 3 is true. Premise 1 is a bit more difficult. I think we can agree on the first part no matter what worldview you currently adhere to. Existing things need explanations. It's the second part that is more tricky. A necessary being exists of its own nature and has no external cause of its existence, while a contingent being is accounted for by causal factors outside itself. Liebniz used his principle of sufficient reason to formulate premise 1. This principle states: "no fact can be real or existent, no statement true, unless there be a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise." Many philosophers and cosmologists would posit that the universe is a brute fact without explanation. Many religious folks would posit the same about God. But we want to be better informed and think through this more thoroughly. Liebniz argued that there must be a metaphysically necessary being (a being in which it is impossible for it not to exist) that is the sufficient reason for itself as well as for the existence of every contingent thing. The universe being up for discussion right now, we want to posit that it is contingent, i.e. it relies on something else for its existence. But does it, making the universe contingent?

The universe is contingent and we can see this in a few ways. First of all we have a strong intuition that the universe is contingent and not the metaphysically necessary entity. It is easy to conceive of a universe in which all the fundamental particles of the universe are different or a universe in which there are no concrete objects, only abstract ones. Both of these scenarios seem reasonable. We could also envision universes that have different fundamental laws of nature; something that scientists deal with theoretically all the time. If the universe could have been another way, formulated of different parts or laws or without certain objects that are in the known world, it is contingent. Now that we know the universe is contingent and has an explanation of its existence, what is that explanation? In premise 2 we posit that it is God that is the metaphysically necessary being that sustains everything else. But why? Well, the universe consists of matter, space, time, and energy. So, our metaphysically necessary being cannot consist of those things or, as we have seen, it would be contingent as well. What being do we know of that does not consist of matter, is nonspatial, and atemporal? Either abstract objects or God. Since we learned in the kalam argument that abstract objects do not stand in causal relations to other objects it can't be them, even if they are metaphysically necessary, like some philosophers think about numbers. They simply cannot cause anything. That leaves us with God. I will refer you to the kalam argument post, the conclusion, to discuss the attributes that we can gather from this line of thought for the metaphysically necessary being. Spoiler alert, any religion that posits a deity of any sort that is part of this universe and not transcendent to it is false based on this argument because it would be contingent. This removes from the realm of possibility that it could be: any pagan idol gods, the gods of Hinduism, the god of Mormonism, some sects of Buddhism that have a god, most New Age/Occult worldviews with a god and yes, the flying spaghetti monster. In conclusion, I will leave you with some paraphrased words from William Lane Craig: If you don't want to call the metaphysically necessary being God, you may simply call him the extremely powerful, uncaused, necessarily existing, non-contingent, non-physical, immaterial, eternal being who created the entire universe and everything in it.

Next time we will discuss Thomas Aquinas' cosmological argument which is much more philosophically dense than Leibniz's.