One crisp winter evening, I remember looking up into the night sky, enamored with the bright stars and planets that stretched as far as I could see. It was a moment where the vastness and beauty of our cosmos left me stunned.

We’ve all admired our beautiful Milky Way Galaxy at some point growing up, and it’s a shame we don’t admire it more often! That said, I also remember wondering how people could deny the existence of God after experiencing this kind of splendid reality.

Why does any of this stuff exist? I don’t mean the process in how it developed over time or its primary functions or purpose, but rather, what is the explanation for why they exist at all?[1] Why don’t they not exist? There must be an Ultimate Foundation that all this stuff depends on for its existence.

Let’s think about this. It’s not like all of reality snapped into existence from nothing uncaused or without explanation. That’s literally impossible. Being cannot come from non-being. As the ancient pre-Socratic, Greek philosopher Parmenides said roughly 2,400 years ago: “Nothing comes from nothing.”

Necessary and Contingent Things

This ultimate foundation that all of reality depends on is often referred to as a necessary thing. A necessary thing is something that cannot fail to exist. Its existence is impossible. It never started to exist, nor will it ever stop existing. It never came into existence, nor will it ever go out of existence.

To be a necessary thing means it doesn’t rely on anything else for its existence. It is completely independent of everything else and is not dependent on anything for why it is here rather than not.

Contingent things, on the other hand, are dependent upon other things for their existence. These things are not necessary. This is stuff that doesn’t have to be here, or stuff that could be different from what it is right now. Therefore, it’s possible for these things to come into existence and go out of existence.

Here are some examples: 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. These contingent things all rely on other things outside of themselves for their existence. They depend on something else.

Additionally, these are things that could have been different. The examples I gave could be different sizes, colors, shapes, and so on, meaning they don’t have to be exactly the way they are right now.[2]

So, what would the explanation be for the existence of this necessary thing? It doesn’t rely on anything outside of itself for its existence, otherwise, it wouldn’t be necessary.

Therefore, the explanation for the existence of the necessary thing is that it exists by the necessity of its own nature. Its very nature requires that it exists, and it would be impossible for it not to exist.

Is there a necessary thing out there? Or is everything in existence contingent? If everything is contingent and depends upon something else for its existence, then what happens when we add up all the contingent things in the universe?

Trees, rocks, humans, animals, oceans, planets, stars, and every other particle in the universe are all dependent upon something else for their existence. We know they didn’t just suddenly pop into existence without some type of cause.

It’s important to understand: the total of these dependent things does not magically become independent after merely adding them together.

Philosopher Josh Rasmussen helps illustrate this point by stating,

“Suppose some clay is dependent in nature. Then packing together more and more dependent clay would not thereby produce some clay that is independent in nature. The size of the clay makes no difference. An infinite bunch of purely dependent clay bits would equally fail to include anything within it that could account for how the total bunch could be independent in nature.”[3]

We can think of our universe in a similar way that we think of this clay. Our universe cannot magically become independent just because we’ve added up all these dependent things like trees, rocks, planets, and stars.

The totality of these things would still rely on something else for their existence. An independent reality cannot develop from purely dependent realities.

Therefore, it makes much better sense to believe there is a necessary, independent, and ultimate foundation which explains the existence of all the dependent things. And if you ask what the cause or foundation of this independent foundation is, the answer would be nothing.

This independent foundation exists by the necessity of its own nature. In other words, it doesn’t rely on anything outside of itself for its existence, and it would be impossible for this thing not to exist. It is a necessary thing as described earlier and would be the ultimate foundation for all reality.

There cannot be an infinite regress of past events, otherwise we wouldn’t be here today because today would never arrive. Before this moment happened, you’d have to a have a trillion other moments happen first, and before those moments happen, another trillion would have to happen, on into infinity.

The necessary foundation has to stop somewhere. Something brought us into reality. This uncaused and eternal necessary thing is responsible for the rest of reality. As philosophers Alexander Pruss and Rasmussen note,

“Our argument makes sense of why the totality of all things has no external cause of its existence. There is no external cause of all things because a ‘portion’ of that plurality exists necessarily and so can’t have a cause.”[4]

In other words, God is this “portion” of the totality of reality, and since he is the uncaused and eternal necessary being that brought us into existence, it’s impossible for him to have a cause for his existence. He’s uncaused!

The Best Explanation is God

Inference to the best explanation allows us to rule out other explanations that cannot adequately explain all the facts that we’ve covered. We can infer that this necessary thing is God.

But what if someone objects and asks, “how do we know this necessary thing is God and not something else that is necessary, say, an abstract object?”[5] 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. Namely, because even if abstract objects did exist, they would not stand in causal relations, and therefore cannot cause anything to happen.[6]

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.

The idea of an abstract thing interacting with a concrete thing, such as rocks, bananas, cats, humans, angels, and so on, 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) using my brain (concrete) to go drink a caramel macchiato (concrete).

Whatever created time, space, and matter would have to be outside of time, space, and matter to be the source of it. Therefore, the source would have to be timeless, spaceless, and immaterial.

This source would also have to be extremely powerful in order to create such a universe, and personal in making a decision to bring about something from nothing.

The only thing to fit such a description and category would either be a mind or an abstract object. Since abstract objects can’t cause anything to happen, inference to the best explanation tells us that a personal intellect chose to create us.

And because God is a divine unembodied mind, he has the libertarian freedom and ability to create the material universe.

God is an uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, powerful, personal mind upon which everything else depends on for their existence. Therefore, He is the Ultimate Foundation of reality. Thanks for reading!

Blessings,

Andrew Drinkard

[1] See Joshua Rasmussen and Felipe Leon, Is God the Best Explanation of Things?: A Dialogue (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 7-8.

[2] See J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 479.

[3] Rasmussen and Leon, Is God the Best Explanation of Things?, 10.

[4] Alexander R. Pruss and Joshua L. Rasmussen, Necessary Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 55.

[5] Abstract objects are a strange concept in philosophy, so I’m going to do my best to simplify and briefly explain them. For a better understanding, see J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 169. 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.

[6] 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).