One day I was talking with a friend about the existence of God and our universe. I asked him to explain why the universe existed, but he told me there didn’t need to be an explanation for it, saying, “It just exists. Period. That’s it. It doesn’t need an explanation.”
I quickly concealed my bewildered expression and reminded myself that these types of strange answers are still circulating out there. Could this be the case? Is our universe simply a brute fact with no explanation as to why it exists?
Before I demonstrate why my friend was wrong about his assumptions, I first want to clarify some terms that will help us better navigate through this article. We’ll be talking quite a bit about necessary and contingent being, so let’s quickly nail down the meanings.
Necessary and Contingent Beings
In philosophy, any thing that exists is referred to as being, so I’ll use thing and being interchangeably. Philosophers J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig use arguments which suggest there are only two kinds of being in existence:
“necessary beings, which exist of their own nature and so have no external cause of their existence, and contingent beings, whose existence is accounted for by causal factors outside themselves.”[1]
We can easily imagine a universe without contingent things, that is to say, things that could fail to exist or could have been different. For example: planes, cars, computers, humans, trees, and planets are all things that could fail to exist, because at one point, they didn’t exist at all. Additionally, these are all things that could have been different sizes, colors, shapes, and so on.
Is everything contingent? Or are there some necessary things? That is to say, things that cannot fail to exist and have to be here. Philosophers Alexander Pruss and Josh Rasmussen define necessary things as,
“Something that exists no matter what possible situation obtains. Its non-existence at any time would be impossible in the strongest sense.”[2]
In other words, it would be impossible for this thing not to exist. It cannot come into being and it cannot cease to be. It never started to exist, nor will it ever stop existing. What could fit such a category?
Pruss and Rasmussen seek to demonstrate that there is a necessary concrete thing which they understand to be capable of causation, i.e., anything that is at least partially responsible for some event. Pruss and Rasmussen also leave open the possibility for things like abstract objects to fit their criteria for a necessary thing.[3]
However, I agree with many other philosophers who reject the idea that abstract objects exist. And even if they did exist, they could not stand in causal relations, meaning they’re causally inert and can’t do anything.
Abstract and Concrete Objects
Some philosophers believe that abstract objects are real things that God created,[4] while others believe they are real even if God didn’t exist. Abstract objects are a strange concept in philosophy, so I’m going to do my best to simplify and briefly explain them.[5]
Philosophers classify things as either concrete or abstract. Concrete objects are things like humans, angels, cats, bananas, pianos, and so on. Abstract objects, however, do not exist in time or space.
For example, if you counted 3 cats in a room, you would have 3 concrete objects—the three cats—but there would also be an abstract object called the number “3” transcending and representing those 3 cats. So, if abstract objects exist, numbers would be considered abstract objects.
Or if you had a concrete thing like a banana, then you would also have an abstract object, such as the property “Yellowness” because the banana is yellow. Or if a person unjustly takes the life of another and justice is served in a court of law, then there would be an abstract thing called “Justice.” These are non-material objects; we obviously can’t bump into the property “Yellowness.”
Abstract objects are considered to be incapable of causing anything to happen since they are causally inert objects. The number 8 for example, cannot cause me to do anything. If there is an abstract object like “Love” or “Hate,” then which one am I to comply with? Abstract objects cannot interact with concrete things on their own.
Later, I will circle back to the idea of abstract objects and why it’s relevant to this article. I just wanted you to be aware of the concept and the distinction between concrete and abstract things before diving into the argument from contingency.
Why This All Matters
So, could there be a concrete and necessary being whose nonexistence is impossible? In other words, could there be something out there that has always existed, will always exist, and will never go out of existence? Why does this even matter?
It invokes the question that many have pondered for thousands of years, whether it be simple-minded children or geniuses like the polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”[6]
Many are in search of an Ultimate explanation for the existence of our universe. How could our universe come into existence? Did it have a cause, or has it always existed eternally? Our deepest intuitions tell us that our existence demands some kind of explanation.
Some skeptics, like my friend, have claimed that the existence of our universe has no explanation at all and that it just exists as a brute fact, i.e., a fact that cannot be explained. There are also atheists who believe the universe can spontaneously create itself! An even stranger idea.
In other words, a lot of people don’t believe that God is required for the existence of the universe. Just listen to what the world-renowned physicist and atheist Stephen Hawking said in his New York Times #1 best-selling book, stating,
“Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing…. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”[7]
Hawking was a brilliant physicist, but certainly lacked in the very basics of contemporary philosophy. It is ludicrous to believe that “nothing” could create something. Nothing literally means “not anything,” and so there’s nothing there to possess properties or causal powers to do something.
If you asked me what I ate for breakfast this morning, but I didn’t have time and so I didn’t eat breakfast, and I replied with “nothing,” then you wouldn’t actually think that I ate something called nothing. You would know that I did not have anything.
Moreover, for the law of gravity to exist, the universe would have to exist. It seems that natural laws came into existence with the universe. These descriptive laws tell us how the universe operates—they can’t create stuff on their own.
Not to mention that the existence of gravity prevents the idea of “nothingness,” because something already exists, namely, the law of gravity! So, what about the explanation for the cause of gravity’s existence?
As you can see, atheists are desperately looking for a natural explanation for the existence of everything. They do not want a supernatural explanation. Is the existence of God completely irrelevant to the question at hand? Let’s look at the argument that points to God as the Ultimate explanation and foundation of all reality.
The Argument from Contingency
We’ve already covered the difference between contingent and necessary beings. Recall, something is contingent if that thing has a cause outside of itself for its existence, or if it could be different from what it is.
So, the Argument from Contingency will seek to demonstrate that all contingent reality (the universe), must have a necessary foundation that explains its existence. There are different versions of the argument from contingency, so I will focus on the classical and up-to-date version that Pruss and Rasmussen layout in their book which I’ve slightly modified to make simpler. It goes as follows:
- Every contingent thing has an explanation for the existence of that thing.
- Considering all the contingent things that exist, if there is an explanation of the existence of those things, then there is a necessary being.
- Therefore, a necessary being exists (i.e., God).[8]
Premise (1)
Let’s begin by looking at the first premise: Every contingent thing has an explanation for the existence of that thing (also known as the explanatory principle or principle of sufficient reason).[9] So, all contingent things have causes which account for their existence, meaning they also have an explanation for their existence.
For example, if I saw muddy footprints across my living room floor, then there would be an explanation for what caused those footprints to be there. Maybe myself or my wife (probably me) didn’t realize there was mud on our shoes and one of us tracked it across the room.
It’s not as if there is no explanation for the fact that those muddy footprints exist. And suppose neither one of us walked across the floor and we have no idea how the footprints got there, regardless, there would still be an explanation for the existence of the footprints.
The same goes with anything else you can think of that is contingent because a contingent thing is something that exists from causes outside of itself, or something that could have existed in a different way. The footprints didn’t have to be there, or they could have been bigger or muddier, and at one point they weren’t there at all; therefore, the footprints are contingent.
Here are some other examples that have explanations for their existence. There are explanations for the existence of humans and the entire world population; a blade of grass and a field of grass; a pile of dirt and a mountain; a star and a galaxy; a drop of water and an ocean; our planet Earth and our solar system. None of these things just happen to exist for no reason or without any explanation.
All our scientific understanding and universally shared human experience indicate that anything which has a cause outside of itself also has an explanation for its existence. You name it—any contingent thing you can think of—it demands an explanation as to why it is here rather than not here. Even if we have no idea how it got here.
Suppose my wife and I are eating breakfast together when suddenly a floating bright orb of light floats by my face and hovers over our kitchen table. I would freak out and ask her what could explain such a thing, but if she replied, “Oh, I’m sure it doesn’t have an explanation—it just exists,” then that would be patently false. And I would probably be just as baffled by her response as I would that floating thing. That floating thing must have an explanation for why it exists rather than not.
Or think about some of the recent UFO sightings as confirmed by the United States military. Although we don’t know what these strange things are, anyone who encounters one believes there must be an explanation for it, and they are craving to figure out what that explanation is. Are they extraterrestrials? Are they advanced military spacecraft from another nation? Whatever they are, we certainly don’t think they are simply things with no explanation.
Popping into Existence Uncaused?
Here’s another example that many philosophers have used to demonstrate that all contingent things have an explanation: The fact that we don’t observe material things randomly popping into existence uncaused out of nothing. Ever. As the ancient pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides said roughly 2,400 years ago: “Nothing comes from nothing.”
But let’s imagine it’s possible. Let it be the case that unexplained things could come into being randomly and uncaused. If this were the case, then it would seem that any number of material things could randomly pop into existence uncaused and unexplained.
Just think of all the possibilities there would be for this to occur. Trees, water, frogs, insects, plants, buildings, cars, laptops, people, dirt, a grain of sand, planets, bacteria, or even different sizes and colors of the examples given. There are sooooo many more things that could exist but don’t. There’s an infinite number of different possibilities that we could imagine!
And if this were possible, then it’s odd to think there could only be a precise finite number of random uncaused things popping into existence; so, as Pruss and Rasmussen point out, if there are an infinite number of possible things that could come into existence uncaused and unexplained, then we should wonder why these unexplained things are not a common experience to us.[10]
Why aren’t we witnessing any of these things happening in our daily experience? If you say it’s because those things can’t happen, then you would agree with the explanatory principle and the first premise: Every contingent thing has an explanation for the existence of that thing.
It’s even testable and predictable. No matter what, in the next 5 seconds, nothing will pop into existence uncaused and out of nothing right in front of you. Go ahead, try it! And as Pruss and Rasmussen point out, if this were possible and happening, then we wouldn’t be able to make accurate predictions of future events based on our current understanding of the laws of nature.[11]
Another reason to believe that the first premise is true, is because it’s hard to imagine that some contingent things could have an explanation for their existence while other contingent things could not.
For example, suppose you have two material things that occupy space and time. It’s hard to imagine that one could not have an explanation for its existence while the other one does, regardless of the size, location, shape, age, complexity, and so on; Pruss and Rasmussen state,
“None of these differences in degree, however, seems to make a categorical difference with respect to requiring an explanation.”[12]
And so, if one physical object should have an explanation of its existence, then it seems any other physical object should have an explanation as well. It would be arbitrary to pick and choose some that do and some that don’t. They all have explanations!
Premise (2)
Let’s now look at the second premise: Considering all the contingent things that exist, if there is an explanation of the existence of those things, then there is a necessary being. This premise is talking about all the concrete contingent things in existence.
And just because there may be facts about contingent things, it does not follow that these facts, by themselves, can provide an explanation as to why these contingent things exist rather than not.[13]
You may see that there are facts as to why our planet is revolving around the sun, has a certain amount of water, a particular age, size, shape, and so on, but those facts do not explain why the planet exists rather than not. That explanation comes from the cause that brought forth the planet into existence.
So, if we take every contingent thing in existence, such as, trees, humans, planets, stars, all of time, space, and matter and add them up, the total of these dependent and contingent things are still contingent. They don’t magically become independent or morph into a necessary thing for which there is no explanation.
There would still need to be an explanation for the cause that brought them into existence. Concerning the reality of all the contingent things, Pruss and Rasmussen note that it
“can be explained only by the causal activities of one or more things external to the state itself.”[14]
In other words, there must be a source outside of that stuff to be the cause of it.
Since the universe is contingent, it does not exist as a necessary thing and could fail to exist, and at one point, it didn’t exist at all! We can also imagine that it could be different than it is right now, say, maybe different sets of subatomic particles, more or less atoms, or different laws of nature.[15]
Craig explains that the universe is contingent because the current elementary particles (quarks), which is the fundamental stuff or building blocks that make up everything in the universe, could have been a different set of elementary particles; stating,
“But if that’s the case, then the universe does not exist by a necessity of its own nature. For a universe composed of a wholly different collection of quarks is not the same universe as ours.”[16]
For example, my house is made from wood, but imagine if it were made entirely from bricks. Could it still be the same house? No, because it would be made of entirely different material which means it couldn’t be the same house. Likewise, a universe made entirely from different quarks, even if it looked the same as our current universe, would still be a different universe.
This means our universe could have been different, and if it could have been different, then that means a different universe could have existed and not the one we currently live in now. This means that that different universe fails to exist, and it also means our current universe could fail to exist; therefore, our universe cannot be a necessary thing!
Remember, a necessary thing exists no matter what, meaning that it’s existence could never be different than what it currently is. It cannot have any missing parts, nor can there be any parts added to it.
So why does our universe exist rather than not exist? If all of reality is contingent, then it must depend on something else for its existence, but whatever that thing is, that thing itself cannot be contingent, otherwise we are going to run into the same problem and ask what caused that thing’s existence.
This cannot stretch into the past forever, otherwise there would be an infinite number of contingent events which means we could have never arrived at our present moment. So, the only possibility left is that all contingent reality has come from something that is non-contingent, that is, a necessary thing.
And so, if a necessary thing or being exists, i.e., God,[17] then that would be the Ultimate explanation for why our universe exists and would be the foundation of all reality. The explanations have to stop somewhere, and God fits that category perfectly.
Conclusion
And finally, let’s look at our conclusion: Therefore, a necessary being exists (i.e., God). How do we know this necessary thing is God and not something else that is necessary, say, an abstract object? Many philosophers believe that other necessary things exist such as abstract objects like numbers, sets, and propositions.
However, there’s a major problem with the idea of abstract things being responsible for the existence of our universe, thereby making it way too improbable to consider. Near the beginning of this article, I briefly explained what abstract objects are. If you recall, even if abstract objects exist, they do not stand in causal relations and therefore cannot cause anything to happen.[18]
Abstract objects cannot make decisions or choose to do anything, let alone be responsible for the existence of the universe! No matter how many numbers you have, none of them can make anything happen on their own.
The idea of an abstract object interacting with a concrete object is absurd. But if God exists, then he would be considered a concrete thing, and concrete things interact with each other all the time. For example, my mind (concrete) telling my brain (concrete) to go eat some pizza (concrete).
Your Quick Response to the Skeptic
You can use some of the information in this article to respond to your skeptical family member or friend who thinks the universe is a necessary thing, or a contingent thing that has no explanation (brute fact), or who thinks that it somehow created itself.
Now, don’t be surprised if you get the following age-old question from them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a skeptic ask me, “Oh ya, well who created God?” with a satisfied look on their face like they just asked the most profound philosophical question possible.
The question is fallacious and demonstrates that the person doesn’t have a solid grasp on the concept of the nature of God. This is because the questioner assumes God is a contingent thing that had to be created, but God can’t be created because he’s eternal and exists by the necessity of his own nature. A metaphysically necessary being cannot come into existence; therefore, this question doesn’t apply to God like it does everything else. The question is literally meaningless.
Because God is an unembodied mind or spirit, he can make a free choice in deciding to create the material universe. Whatever created time, space, and matter would have to be outside of time, space, and matter in order to be the source of it. It would have to be timeless, spaceless, and immaterial.
The only thing to fit such a description and category would either be a mind or an abstract object. Again, abstract objects can’t do anything, so inference to the best explanation tells us that a divine intellect (God) chose to create us.
So, what’s the explanation for the existence of divine mind? Remember, everything has an explanation for its existence, and the explanation for the existence of God is that he exists by the necessity of his own nature. He is a necessary being that must exist, and as a necessary being, he never started to exist, and he will never stop existing.
I have heard many atheists joke about Christians having blind faith or trusting in an imaginary god with no evidence to support our beliefs; but I must say, I don’t have the kind of faith that many atheists have in believing that our universe could pop into existence uncaused and without explanation. Now that requires blind faith.
Faith is trusting in what you have good reasons to believe is true, and we have good reasons to believe that God exists, and that Christianity is true. Another fun fact: the argument from contingency is just one of a couple hundred different arguments for God’s existence.
What Does the Bible Say?
The Bible teaches that God has existed from all eternity and that he brought everything else into existence. At one point, nothing existed except for God alone. The Bible says that God is the uncreated Creator of all things, and therefore is a necessary being.
As the uncaused First Cause that caused everything else into existence, all of those things owe their reality to God, for without him they wouldn’t be here. As renowned philosopher Brian Leftow explains: God is a concrete “necessary-being- causer” (NBC) because he causes the existence of every other being/thing apart from himself whether it’s abstract or contingent, saying,
“Thus if there is at most one possible NBC, then the concept of an NBC is such that if that being did not exist, nothing else necessary or contingent would exist either.”[19]
Here are just a few passages of Scripture, written thousands of years before contemporary philosophy and science, revealing that God is a necessary being who has existed from eternity, has created everything in existence apart from himself, and is actively sustaining the existence of those things. This is pretty awesome. Let’s begin with the famous passage revealed to us by God himself: “God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM’” (Exodus 3:14a).
Ever since Christianity began, great theologians and philosophers like Augustine, Jerome, and Thomas Aquinas to name a few, all interpreted this declaration in Exodus as God revealing himself as the eternal self-existent being. The additional passages compliment this revelation by God regarding his self-existent nature:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1-3).
God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist“ (Romans 4:17).
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
“I am the Lord, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself” (Isaiah 44:24b).
“Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:6).
“You are the LORD, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you” (Nehemiah 9:6).
“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16).
“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:36).
“He [Jesus] is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3) … “For whom and by whom all things exist” (Heb. 2:10).
“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:2).
“The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24-25).
Thanks for reading!
Blessings,
Andrew Drinkard
[1] J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 479.
[2] Alexander R. Pruss and Joshua L. Rasmussen, Necessary Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1.
[3] See Pruss and Rasmussen, Necessary Existence, 2; they leave open the possibility for abstract objects like numbers, propositions, and properties to have causal powers, thereby making them, in their stipulated sense, to be a kind of concrete thing. However, because I don’t believe that abstract objects have causal powers, I am going to exclude that possibility from my article.
[4] See Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel, “Absolute Creation,” American Philosophical Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1986): 353-362.
[5] See J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 169.
[6] G. W. Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace Based on Reason, 4, https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/leibniz1714a.pdf.
[7] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (NY: Random House Publishing, 2010), 180.
[8] See Pruss and Rasmussen, Necessary Existence, 34; they point out that by “concrete thing” they mean “something that possibly causes something.” In other words, it has causal powers and can produce an affect. I take this necessary being to be God based on the supporting arguments I give throughout this article.
[9] See Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, 479; This is a modest form of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and is compatible with the existence of brute facts about the world. Moreland and Craig add that this modest PSR “is compatible with there being brute facts about the world. What it precludes is that there could exist things— substances exemplifying properties— that just exist inexplicably. This principle seems quite plausible, at least more so than its contradictory, which is all that is required for a successful argument” (479).
[10] Pruss and Rasmussen, Necessary Existence, 41.
[11] For a more detailed and sophisticated look at this reasoning, see Pruss and Rasmussen, Necessary Existence, 41-44.
[12] Pruss and Rasmussen, Necessary Existence, 44.
[13] See Joshua Rasmussen and Felipe Leon, Is God the Best Explanation of Things?: A Dialogue (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 17; See Pruss and Rasmussen, Necessary Existence, 46.
[14] Pruss and Rasmussen, Necessary Existence, 46.
[15] See Bruce A. Hedman, “Cantor and the Infinity of God,” in The Infinity of God: New Perspectives in Theology and Philosophy, eds. Benedikt Paul Göcke and Christian Tapp (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), 178; Hedman says, “To say that the universe is ‘contingent’ means that it need not be the way it is…. A contingent universe does not contain within itself a sufficient explanation of itself.”
[16] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed (Wheaton: Crossway Publishing, 2008), 109.
[17] If God is a necessary being who exists in every possible world (a possible world is simply the way reality is or could have been), then any other necessary being that exists in that world would either be identical with God, or its existence was caused by God. So, it seems that if there is such a thing as a Perfect being, i.e., God, then it would have to be a necessary one; see Pruss and Rasmussen, Necessary Existence, 5-6. Also see Brian Leftow, “A Leibnizian Cosmological Argument,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 57, no. 2 (1989): 147.
[18] There are many theistic philosophers who do believe that abstract objects exist, however, they just have to harmonize their eternal existence with God’s eternal existence. If these objects did exist, they would still be dependent on God in some way, say, maybe God has been creating from eternity since there are an infinite number of abstract objects. Or it could be that these abstract objects are eternal and necessary concepts grounded in the mind of God as Leibniz believed. Renowned philosopher Brian Leftow takes the position that necessary abstract objects exist, arguing that these abstracta are dependent upon a Necessary Being Causer (NBC), stating that an “NBC causes the existence of all abstract necessary beings. An NBC is necessary, yet it is also a cause of some sort. Hence plausibly an NBC is a concrete rather than an abstract necessary being. Thus, it may seem, there is no reason to say that an NBC creates itself;” see Leftow, “A Leibnizian Cosmological Argument,” 151. Either way, abstract objects by themselves could never be an efficient cause (i.e., source/initial cause) to produce an effect to create a material cause (i.e., universe).
[19] Brian Leftow, “A Leibnizian Cosmological Argument,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 57, no. 2 (1989): 148.
