Contending For The Faith---Part 7

 

In St. Jude 1:3, we read, "Dearly beloved, taking all care to write unto you concerning your common salvation, I was under a necessity to write unto you: to beseech you to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints." [Emphasis mine]. Contending For The Faith is a series of posts dedicated to apologetics (i.e.,  the intellectual defense of the truth of the Traditional Catholic Faith) to be published the first Monday of each month.  This is the next installment.

Sadly, in this time of Great Apostasy, the faith is under attack like never before, and many Traditionalists don't know their faith well enough to defend it. Remember the words of our first pope, "But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect..." (1Peter 3:16). There are five (5) categories of attacks that will be dealt with in these posts. Attacks against:

• The existence and attributes of God
• The truth of the One True Church established by Christ for the salvation of all 
• The truth of a particular dogma or doctrine of the Church
• The truth of Catholic moral teaching
• The truth of the sedevacantist position as the only Catholic solution to what has happened since Vatican II 

In addition, controversial topics touching on the Faith will sometimes be featured, so that the problem and possible solutions may be better understood. If anyone had suggestions for topics that would fall into any of these categories, you may post them in the comments. I cannot guarantee a post on each one, but each will be carefully considered.

The Cosmological Argument

(In last month's Contending For The Faith post, I wrote about the modern attack on religious belief. In this month's post, I will be writing about one of the proofs for the existence of God; the Cosmological Argument. Psalm 14:1 tells us, "The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” The fool's mind doesn't say such, for as the Vatican Council of 1870 teaches,  "Canon 1.  If anyone saith that the One, True God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema." It is, therefore, a dogma of the Faith that God's existence can be known by human reason alone. Romans 1:20 says, "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." 

The Cosmological Argument comes in many forms. It has been championed by such illustrious philosophers as St. Thomas Aquinas, Alexander Pruss, Timothy O’Connor, Stephen Davis, Robert Koons, William Lane Craig, Edward Feser, and Richard Swinburne, among others. This post comes from the work of the aforementioned philosophers, and I take credit for none of it. I give full credit to those philosophical giants, whose intellects far exceed mine. All I did was take their expressions of the argument, and compress them into the main ideas that can fit in a post.---Introibo). 

A Simple Formulation of the Cosmological Argument

Here are the three (3) basic premises and conclusion:

1. Everything that exists 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 exists. 

Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God. 

Logically speaking, this is an airtight argument. That is to say, if the three premises are true, then the conclusion is unavoidable. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like the conclusion; nor does it matter if you have other independent objections to God’s existence. So long as you grant the premises, you have to accept the conclusion. So if you want to reject the conclusion, you have to say that one of the three premises is false.

Which one will the atheist reject? Premise 3 is undeniable for any sincere seeker after truth because, obviously, the universe exists. Therefore, the atheist is going to have to deny either premise 1 or 2 if he wants to remain an atheist and be rational. The whole question comes down to this: Are premises 1 and 2 true, or are they false?

Premise 1: Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.

At first, premise 1 might seem vulnerable in an obvious way. If everything that exists has an explanation of its existence and God exists, then God must have an explanation of His existence. However, that seems absurd, for then the explanation of God’s existence would be some other being greater than God, and God is defined as the "greatest possible Being." Since that’s impossible, premise 1 must be false—some things must be able to exist without any explanation.

 The believer will say that God exists inexplicably, while the atheist will say, “Why not stop with the universe? The universe just exists inexplicably.” It seems to be a stalemate. This obvious objection to premise 1 is based on a misunderstanding of what is meant by an “explanation.” According to premise 1, there are two kinds of things: (a) things which exist necessarily, and (b) things which are produced by some external cause.

 Those things which exist necessarily exist by a necessity of their own nature; it’s impossible for them not to exist. Many mathematicians think that numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities exist in this way. They’re not caused to exist by something else, they just exist by the necessity of their own nature. By contrast, things that are caused to exist by something else don’t exist necessarily; they exist because something else has produced them. Familiar physical objects like people, planets, and galaxies belong in this category. So when premise 1 states that everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, the explanation may be found either in the necessity of a thing’s nature or else in some external cause. 

Nevertheless, the objection now falls to the ground. For the explanation of God’s existence lies in the necessity of His own nature. As even the atheist recognizes, it’s impossible for God to have a cause. Therefore, the Cosmological Argument is really an argument for God as a necessary, uncaused Being. Far from undermining the argument, then, the atheist’s objection to premise 1 actually helps to clarify and magnify who God is. If God exists, He is a necessarily existing, uncaused Being.

So what reason might be offered for thinking that premise 1 is true? Well, when you reflect on it, premise 1 has a sort of self-evidence about it. Imagine that you’re hiking through the woods and you come across a translucent ball lying on the forest floor. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there. If one of your hiking partners said to you, “Don’t worry about it! It just exists inexplicably,” you’d either think that he was crazy or figure that he just wanted you to keep moving. No one would take seriously the suggestion that the ball existed there with literally no explanation.

Now suppose you increase the size of the ball in this story so that it’s the size of a car. That wouldn’t do anything to satisfy or remove the demand for an explanation. Suppose it were the size of a house. Same problem. How about the size of a continent, a planet, or the entire universe? Same problem—merely increasing the size of the ball does nothing to affect the need of an explanation. But couldn't the universe always have existed, that it is eternal? How do we know it's all not simply "just here"? 

There are two very strong evidences of the universe NOT being eternal, but having a beginning, and therefore, needing a Creator. One evidence is philosophical, the other scientific.

From philosophy:

If the universe never began to exist, then there have been an infinite number of past events prior to today. But an infinite number of things cannot exist; therefore, the series of past events must be finite. That is to say, the universe began to exist.

In order to appreciate this argument, we must understand the difference between a potentially infinite number of things and an actually infinite number of things. When we say that something is potentially infinite, infinity serves merely as an ideal limit that is never reached. For example, you could divide any finite distance in half, and then into fourths, and then into eighths, and then into sixteenths, and so on to infinity. The number of divisions is potentially infinite, in the sense that you could go on dividing endlessly. But you would never arrive at an “infinitieth” division; you would never have an actually infinite number of parts or divisions.

By contrast, a collection is actually infinite if the number of members in the collection is greater than any natural number 1, 2, 3… Now the argument under discussion raises no objection to the existence of merely potential infinites, for these are just ideal limits. But if an actually infinite number of things could exist, then various absurdities would result. If we’re to avoid these absurdities, then we must deny that an actually infinite number of things exist. It’s frequently alleged that this kind of argument has been invalidated by developments in modern mathematics. In modern set theory, the use of actually infinite sets is commonplace. For example, the set of the natural numbers {0, 1, 2…} has an actually infinite number of members in it. The number of members in this set is not merely potentially infinite, according to modern set theory; rather, the number of members is actually infinite. 

However, these developments in modern mathematics merely show that if you adopt certain axioms and rules, then you can talk about actually infinite collections in a consistent way, without contradicting yourself. All this accomplishes is showing how to set up a certain universe of discourse for talking consistently about actual infinites; it does absolutely nothing to show that such mathematical entities really exist, or that an actually infinite number of things can really exist. This universe of discourse may be regarded as just a fictional realm, like the world of Sherlock Holmes in the Conan Doyle stories, or something that exists only in your mind.

Moreover, the question is not whether the existence of an actually infinite number of things involves a logical contradiction, but whether it is really impossible. Two points: if there were an infinite amount of events prior to this moment in time, how did we get here? You can't get to the end of an infinite. Second, if you take all the whole counting numbers {1,2,3...}; mathematicians say it's infinite. Now, consider the set of all even whole counting numbers {2,4,6...}; mathematicians say this is also infinite when it only contains half the numbers of  the first set.  How can half of infinity still be equally infinite? Subtract all the even numbers from the original set, and you have {1,3,5...}, and it is still infinite. So infinity minus infinity equals---Infinity?? It doesn't work in the real world. Imagine having an infinite number of red books. Your neighbor has an infinite number of green book. If the books were combined (red and green) you would still have an infinite set of books, the same as when there was half as many! It is therefore probable that an actual infinite number of events is impossible, so the universe had a beginning.

From science:

During the 1920s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgian astronomer Fr. Georges Lemaitre decided to take Einstein’s equations at face value, and as a result they came up independently with models of an expanding universe. In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, through tireless observations at Mt. Wilson Observatory, made a startling discovery which verified Friedman and Fr. LeMaitre’s theory: He found that the light from distant galaxies appeared to be redder than expected. This “red shift” in the light was most plausibly due to the stretching of the light waves as the galaxies move away from us. Wherever Hubble trained his telescope in the night sky, he observed this same red-shift in the light from the galaxies. It appeared that we are at the center of a cosmic explosion, and all of the other galaxies are flying away from us at fantastic speeds! The result is the Big Bang Theory, now accepted by almost all scientists: the universe (matter, energy, and space-time itself) began about 13.8 billion years ago from a singular event. Therefore, the universe began to exist. It follows that if the universe has a cause of its existence, that cause must be a non-physical, immaterial Being beyond space and time… something or someone “out there,” beyond the universe’s limitations.

 The 1st premise is shown to be much more probably true than not, which is all that is needed for a good argument.

Premise 2: If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.

What about premise 2 then? Is it more plausibly true than false? What’s awkward for the atheist at this point is that premise 2 is logically equivalent to the typical atheist response to the cosmological argument. Two statements are logically equivalent if it is impossible for one to be true and the other one false. They stand or fall together. So what does the atheist almost always say in response to the cosmological argument? The atheist typically asserts the following:

A. If atheism is true, the universe has no explanation of its existence.

 This is precisely what the atheist says in response to premise 1: that the universe just exists inexplicably. Logically speaking, however, this is equivalent to saying:

B. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, then atheism is not true.

Therefore, you can’t affirm (A) and deny (B).

However, (B) is virtually synonymous with premise 2.  So when the atheist says in response to premise 1 that the universe has no explanation, he is implicitly admitting premise 2—that if the universe does have an explanation, then God exists. Besides that, premise 2 is very plausible in its own right. Think of what the universe is: all of space-time reality, including all matter and energy. Once more, it follows that if the universe has a cause of its existence, that cause must be a non-physical, immaterial Being beyond space and time… something or someone “out there,” beyond the universe’s limitations.

Now there are only two sorts of things that could fit that description:

Either an abstract object, like a number, or an unembodied mind. Abstract objects can’t cause anything; that’s part of what it means to be abstract. The number 7, for example, can’t cause any effects. So the cause of the existence of the universe must be a transcendent Mind, which is what believers understand God to be.

A Necessary Conclusion

Given the truth of the three premises, the conclusion is logically inescapable: God is the explanation of the existence of the universe. Moreover, the argument implies that God is a necessary, uncaused, timeless, space-less, immaterial, personal Creator of the universe. This conclusion is as staggering as it is necessary. 

Conclusion

The Cosmological Argument, in its many forms, is a strong, rational proof of the existence of God. It would be good for Traditionalists to study this argument well, so they know it. Then, should a skeptic challenge your belief in God because "there is no evidence," you can say, "Really? Have you heard of the Cosmological Argument? It gives good evidence that God exists. Would you like me to tell you about it?" If he is good-willed, he will hear you out and may rethink his position. If he refuses to hear your answer to him and walks away, he stands condemned unless he repents before his life ends. Those who cannot (will not) see the proof of God in the things of Creation "are without excuse."