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Coming To Be Without a Cause

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

T. D. Sullivan
T. D. Sullivan
Affiliation:
College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota
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Extract

Quentin Smith contends that modern science provides enough evidence ‘to justify the belief that the universe began to exist without being caused to do so.’

There was a time when such a claim would have been dismissed because it conflicts with a principle absolutely fundamental to all human thought, including science itself. As Thomas Reid expressed the matter:

That neither existence, nor any mode of existence, can begin without an efficient cause is a principle that appears very early in the mind of man; and it is so universal, and so firmly rooted in human nature, that the most determined scepticism cannot eradicate it.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 65 , Issue 253 , July 1990 , pp. 261 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1990

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References

1 Smith, Quentin, ‘The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe’, Philosophy of Science 55 (1988), 39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar One can say this while remaining a sort of theist. P. W. Atkins says that an infinitely lazy creator could get a universe into existence with ‘absolutely zero creative involvement’. Atkins, P. W., The Creation: (Oxford and San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1981), 7.Google Scholar

2 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, Brody, Baruch (ed.) (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1969), Essay IV, Ch. II, 267.Google Scholar

3 Treatise of Human Nature, Nidditch, P. H. (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar Bk I, Pt. I, Sec. III, 79–80. Hume is not the original source of such reasoning, discussed at length by the Arabs, at least since Ghazali in the eleventh century. See Averroës', Tahafut Al-Tahafut, Vol. I, translated by Van Den Bergh, Simon, (Oxford University Press, 1954), 316 ff.Google Scholar

4 Treatise, Bk I, Pt. III, Sec. XIV, 166.

5 What exactly Hume held on the point is open to dispute. In the cited passage Hume seems plainly enough to deny the reality of causal connections; but he also sometimes speaks as if he denies only that we can know them by intuition or demonstration.

6 ‘Causality and Determination’, Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge University, 1971, reprinted in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 136.Google Scholar

7 For an excellent review of the subject see Miller, Richard W., Fact and Method, (Princeton University Press, 1987), especially 60–64.Google Scholar

8 ‘Causality and Determination’, 145.Google Scholar See also Sorabji, Richard, Necessity, Cause and Blame (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 38.Google Scholar

9 The argument may be stated more fully with the aid of the following abbreviations and a free-logic version of quantified modal logic. The variables are to be understood as ranging over distinct entities.

Cyxz =y causes x to begin to exist in circumstances z

Nyxz =y is a necessary condition of x's coming to be in circumstances z

Ayz =y exists in circumstances z

Bxz =x begins to exist in circumstances z

In line then with the lesson learned from the objections, we relativize necessary conditions to situations. We say that y is a necessary condition for the beginning of the existence of x in z if x cannot arise in z if y does not exist in z. Thus:

With this definition and the assumptions discussed above, we may now argue:

Premise (1) is the argued contention that causes arc necessary conditions in the settings in which they function as causes. Premise (2) is Hume's thesis that every contingent being could come to be without a cause. Premise (3) is the assumption that there is at least one cause of one effect.

Thus, if causes are necessary conditions and some things are caused, then not everything that can come to be can come to be without a cause.

10 ‘But allow me to tell you that I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that anything might arise without a cause I only maintain'd that, our Certainty of the Falshood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstrations; but from another Source.’ The Letters of DavidHume, Greig, J. Y. T. (ed. ) (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1932), Vol. I, 187.Google Scholar

11 Op. cit. note 1, 48.

12 Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1988), 50.Google Scholar

13 Op. cit. note 1, 48.

14 Ibid., 49.