An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part III

Here I respond to Keith Parsons’ third post.  Jeff Lowder’s index of existing and forthcoming installments in my exchange with Prof. Parsons can be found here.

I’d like to respond now, Keith, to your comments about Bertrand Russell’s objection to First Cause arguments.  Let me first make some general remarks about the objection and then I’ll get to your comments.  Russell wrote, in Why I Am Not a Christian:

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.  If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.  (pp. 6-7)

The context makes it clear that Russell is presenting this as a knock-down refutation of the First Cause argument.  For example, he immediately goes on to say that that argument “is exactly of the same nature as” and “really no better than” the view that the world rests on an elephant which rests on a tortoise, where the question what the tortoise rests on is left unanswered. 

Now, this might be a knock-down refutation of a First Cause argument if such an argument either rested on the premise that absolutely everything without exception has a cause, or made a sudden, unexplained exception to this general rule in the case of God.  For in the first case the argument would be guilty of contradicting itself, while in the second case it would be guilty of special pleading.

The trouble is that none of the major proponents of First Cause arguments (Avicenna, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Leibniz, Clarke, et al.) actually ever gave an argument like the one Russell appears to be attacking.  For none of them maintain in the first place that absolutely everything has a cause; what they say instead is that the actualization of a potential requires a cause, or that what comes into existence requires a cause, or that contingent things require a cause, or the like.  Nor do they fail to offer principled reasons for saying that God does not require a cause even though other things do.  For they say, for example, that the reason other things require a cause is that they have potentials that need actualization, whereas God, being pure actuality, has no potentials that could be actualized; or that the reason other things require a cause is that they are composite and thus require some principle to account for why their parts are conjoined, whereas God, being absolutely simple or non-composite, has no metaphysical parts that need conjoining; or that while a contingent thing requires a cause insofar as it has an essence distinct from its act of existence (and thus has to acquire its existence from something other than its own nature), a necessary being, which just is existence or being itself, need not acquire its existence from anything else; and so forth.

So, in the actual arguments of proponents of the idea of God as First Cause, there just is no self-contradiction or special pleading of the sort Russell’s objection requires.  The arguments may or may not be open to other objections, but Russell’s objection seems either aimed at a straw man or simply to miss the point.

Now you suggest reading Russell’s objection as directed at the sort of argument in which “cause” means something like “explanation” (where the notion of an explanation is broader than the notion of an efficient cause, which is what is usually meant by “cause” these days).  Thus read, Russell’s objection becomes:

If everything must have [an explanation], then God must have [an explanation].  If there can be anything without [an explanation], it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. 

But the trouble with this is that it does not save Russell from the charge that he was either attacking a straw man or missing the point.  At best it just makes him guilty of attacking a different straw man or of missing a different point.  For this reconstructed objection would be a good one only if proponents of First Cause arguments either insisted that everything has an explanation but then suddenly made an exception in the case of God, or if they denied that everything has an explanation but nevertheless arbitrarily insisted that the universe must have one while God need not.  For in the first case they would be contradicting themselves while in the second case they would be engaged in special pleading.

But in fact defenders of First Cause arguments like the thinkers I named are doing no such thing.  In fact they would agree that everything has an explanation, and they would not make any exception in the case of God.  In their view, neither God’s existence nor the world’s existence is a “brute fact.”  But the explanation of God’s existence, they would say, lies in his own nature, whereas the explanation of the existence of other things lies in their having an efficient cause.  Nor is there any arbitrariness in their saying that God’s existence is explained by his own nature whereas the existence of other things requires an explanation in terms of some efficient cause distinct from them.  For they would say, for example, that the reason other things require such a cause is that they are mixtures of actuality and potentiality, and thus need something to actualize their potentials, whereas God, being pure actuality, has no potentials needing actualization, and exists precisely because he just is actuality itself; or they would say that since other things have an essence distinct from their acts of existence, they need something outside their essence to impart existence to them, whereas God, whose essence just is existence, need not derive existence from anything else but exists precisely because being itself is what he is; and so forth. 

Now, other objections might be raised against these sorts of arguments and the metaphysics that underlies them.  But they are simply not guilty either of contradicting themselves, or of making an arbitrary exception in God’s case to a general demand that things must have explanations, or of failing to give a reason for saying that God has a kind of explanation that other things do not.  So, they are simply not at all subject to Russell’s objection even as you suggest we read it.

So, I continue to maintain that Russell is attacking a straw man, at least if his remarks are intended as a response to an argument some philosopher has actually given, as opposed to some popular version of the argument.  (And they surely are so intended, for what would be the point of a philosopher like Russell attacking only some unsophisticated version of the First Cause argument while ignoring the versions philosophers have actually given?)  And perhaps you would agree with that much, since you don’t cite any examples of theistic philosophers who have given arguments like the one Russell attacks.