WHY THIS RATHER THAN THAT?
As any mother of a small child can tell you, any answer to a why question invites a why to that, and then another to that one, and so on, until the child either declares herself satisfied or, more commonly, loses interest. A philosopher, by contrast, is insatiable and persistent. So when he hits bedrock, as any explanation ultimately must, he’ll remain unsatisfied, but he has no choice but to turn 180 to the therefores expected from him to earn the widow’s mite. Still, for now let’s not be too quick to make that turn.
Every why question invokes (what Leibniz called) the Principle of Sufficient Reason (or PSR). Why did Tom steal Dick’s wallet? Because a) he needed the money, b) he thought he wouldn’t get caught, and c) he felt no moral constraint not to. In the absence of any one of (a) or (b) or (c), he’d’ve had reason to steal the wallet, but insufficient reason to steal it. That said, neither (a) nor (b) nor (c) need have been a necessary reason to steal the wallet. Suppose he didn’t need the money, he didn’t care if he was caught, and he did regard theft as immoral. But he stole it nonetheless just to piss Dick off.
Being born in this country is a sufficient condition of being a citizen of it, but not a necessary one. I could have been naturalized instead. Being a citizen is a necessary condition of being entitled to vote but not a sufficient one. I also have to be eighteen. Conditions that are both necessary and sufficient are relatively rare. But when it comes to explanations, they’re the gold standard. Let’s see if we can pan some of that gold.
In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger wanted to know, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Just as an aside, Rudolf Carnap would have called this a pseudo-question, not because we can’t answer it – there are legions of legitimate questions we can’t answer – but because he doubted anything could count as an answer to it. But putting Carnap’s worry aside, at least for now, I think I do have an answer, albeit a tad facetious one. Of the nigh-infinite ways a world can be, there’s only one consisting of the null set, i.e. of nothing. So it would be mind-numbingly surprising if there weren’t at least something. (Well no, because if there weren’t anything at all there wouldn’t be any minds to be numbed. But you know what I mean.) So the real question is not, Why is there something rather than nothing?, but rather, Why is there this something rather than something else?
But perhaps what Heidegger meant was How is there something rather than nothing? That is, how could anything have come to be? That’s not a mystery if something always was. That’s why the theist thinks God must have always been. But one needn’t think it’s God that’s always been, just as long as it’s something.
Moreover, that it’s something is a better answer than it’s God, because we’re familiar enough with things arising out of antecedent things, but we have no idea how God could bring something into being ex nihilo. Why is “He can do it because He’s God!” not an answer? Because even if the meaning of God includes the capacity to create ex nihilo, we can still meaningfully wonder how He does it. Miraculously, to be sure. But by a miracle is just meant, “Damned if I or anyone else knows!”
But skepticism about causation is not confined to creation ex nihilo. Along with David Hume, you and I are empiricists, according to which all knowledge comes from experience. But we can’t experience causation. We can only induce it. And since we can only induce a regularity, and since any regularity is notoriously underdetermined by data, we can’t rule out the possibility, as the fatalist would argue, that there’s no causal connection between events at all. So damned if any of us knows how any A event can bring about any B event.
I think this tu quoque saves theism, at least with respect to God’s creating what He did ex nihilo. Whether it can survive other difficulties we’ll have to see.
Okay, we hit bedrock at something has always been, be it God or something else. So now we can return to why that something gave rise to this rather than to something else. And the answers to that question, be it from the theist or the atheist, are surprisingly similar. The theist wants to say it’s because this is the way God wanted it to be. Why did He want it this way? Because this reflected His values better than that would. And, thought Leibniz, we can read those values off Creation by reverse-engineering it. Why is there plenty of stuff? Because He values plenitude. Why is Creation radially asymmetrical? Because He values variety. And what if anything constrains those two values? Sustainability, as captured and confirmed by His having rested on the seventh day. So input plenitude, variety, and sustainability, and what you get is (what Leibniz famously argued was) the best of all possible worlds.
By what measure is the atheist account any different? The so-called Big Bang couldn’t have been a singularity, because a singularity can’t explain the radial asymmetry of the world. So whatever the atheist’s non-divine something might be, it already had constituents. Any reading of the world reveals that its constituents were plentiful and varied, and that those two features were constrained by sustainability. That is, the world is such as to preserve itself. So were plenitude, variety, and sustainability its values? Clearly not, since values require a valuer, and in the absence of God there isn’t one. So the only difference between theism and atheism is that for the theist the world is infused with intentionality – what Charles Taylor called the Enchantment view – whereas for the atheist intentionality has been gradually replaced, a replacement accelerated by Darwin, with mechanisms bereft of any such teleology.
As it happens, I’m an atheist. But I call myself a sympathetic atheist, in the sense that I don’t think one has to be an idiot to believe in God. But I’m sympathetic in a second wise. And that’s that I’m an instrumentalist about beliefs. What gives a belief its warrant is that it gets us through the night better than its denial. So I’m convinced that chess program is ‘trying’ to fork my rook and king because I don’t have the time and computational capacity to predict its behaviour absent that ascription. And (what Daniel Dennett calls) this intentional stance has, does, and always will, do us yeoman service when that service is unavailable from what might really be going on, in whatever sense of ‘really’ the realist might have in mind. So, is it sometimes useful to think inshalla? As often as it’s sometimes useful not to.
We’ve already seen that the regularities we observe don’t govern the sequence of events making up the world, they report on that sequence. And that report is what we mean by causation. So why is the world configured this way rather than that? Because its antecedent conditions, and the regularities we’ve noted in the sequencing of events, ’caused’ it to be configured this way rather than that. That’s just a duh. And that duh is pretty much all that can said on the matter.
Well, not quite. Though there may or may not be a God imposing His will on the world, there’s no doubt that you and I are imposing ours. In fact many, if not the lion’s share, of our why questions are about why human authored arrangements are the way they are. And we tend to ask these questions when we’re not entirely happy with the way they’ve been arranged. Why are there sidewalks? we don’t ask. Why are there taxes on milk? we do.
Most of the ways things are – including taxes on milk – make sense once we understand the thinking that went into them. Governments need the wherewithal to fund the services we demand they perform for us. Taxes on the exchange of goods and services – that includes labour, by the way, hence income tax – is as good a source as any and better than most. You might prefer the government tax goods and services others consume but you don’t. But these others would prefer it taxes goods and services they don’t consume but you do. So you won on the income tax front and lost on the milk. Live with it. Which is not to say you shouldn’t whine about it. But try, if you can, to cut down on the high dudgeon, and especially the knee-jerk reference to “the injustice of it al!”
But there are arrangements that accrue to no one’s advantage. And those are what everyone should rail against. Such as? Such as tax-adding rather than tax-embedding. Such as airport farewelling and queuing on the boarding ramp. The list goes on. But not on and on. These are stupidities, to be sure, but they’re not legion. Outrage is precious. So don’t squander it.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Philosophy of Religion, pure philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
Thanks, much appreciated.
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