Must Everything Have a Creator?
I saw a meme shared by Cameron Bertuzzi upon logging onto Facebook. (I don’t usually engage with meme culture, but in this case, I think it can be instructive.)
Many of my readers will immediately recognize the problem: The meme is an obvious caricature of cosmological reasoning.
Anyone familiar with the history of cosmological argumentation understands that nobody in the tradition ever committed to the claim that everything has a cause — or a creator, as the meme suggests.
In fact, quite the opposite is true: Philosophers such as Plato, Plotinus, Aquinas, Leibniz, Clarke, and others have long realized that not everything can have a cause, to avoid paradoxical results. Thus, at least one thing must be uncaused.
Cosmological arguments contend, rather simply, that only things of a certain sort have a cause (i.e., changing things, composite things, contingent things, etc.), and that there must be some uncaused cause that ultimately accounts for all the caused causes. The question then becomes what sort of thing an uncaused cause could be. This leads to “Stage 2” of cosmological reasoning, which involves conceptually moving from an uncaused cause to divinity.
If the meme wanted to be stronger, as one commentor suggested, it should focus on explanation rather than causation or creation. While theists do not claim everything has a cause, they often (but not always) claim that everything has an explanation. This is where things get a little trickier, depending on how one understands the nature of explanation. As I argue in The Best Argument for God, it is correct to maintain that everything has an explanation, but one must also understand that certain explanations can be internal, ultimately arising from the inherent intelligibility of something. I claim that if fundamental reality is going to be self-explanatory (an autonomous rather than brute fact), it must be qualitatively unrestricted or unbounded. That is, it must contain within itself adequate information to answer all coherent questions about itself, particularly why it exists and has the attributes it has. This, I believe, is where divine simplicity is absolutely essential, since only an entity of simple, unbounded existence could be a suitable candidate as the self-explained explainer of everything else. Anything else would have arbitrary limits and complexity that crucially require some further explanation for their attaining, but to which no adequate answer could possibly be given since we’re talking about something fundamental.
"as one commentator suggested, it should focus on explanation rather than causation or creation"
Both sides of the atheism/theism argument commit the same logical error. They both assume that something is true and go from there. This is called begging the question. However, there is then a big difference. One, the atheist, assumes that there is either an infinite regress or that something has appeared out of nothing. This leads to absurdities and chaos.
The other side assumes that the regress is finite and begins with a cause that has no cause. (the other begging the question) It is self-existent. This leads to an ordered universe and existence. Everything flows without incident from that assumption.
Both sides use IBE or inference to best explanation to justify their position. One side's best explanation leads to absurdities and incredibly improbable events while the other side best explanation leads to simplicity and an existence of order and likely events.
So we have two explanations with one side leading to the orderly world we see and the other would only lead to this world with incredibly improbable events happening and one filled with absurdities.
The concept of simplicity as Patrick lays it out has two completely different theories with the same name. One is simple because the initial cause must be simple, no parts, nothing changing, nothing contingent. The theist theory is also simple because it has a simple explanation for existence while the atheist explanation leads to incredibly complex and convoluted worlds just to explain the one we live in.
In other words, a creator explains everything simply. An existence without a creator leads to an extremely complex and convoluted existence of absurdities.