Hi
It is so difficult to juggle between a demanding day job and a philosophical pursuit after work. I was up t 5am doing my research believe it or not
:) and then off to work few hours later
:( :(
Going to back to your comments:
I do apologise I wasn’t initially clear about what you meant by ‘self-explanatory’ but I think I now understand what you mean. And I also agree with you that there is often a conflation between something existing necessarily and some necessary existent.
It is like saying ‘if every house has a foundation, and this is a house, then there exist a foundation necessarily’ which doesn’t mean ‘there is a necessary foundation that cannot fail but to exist’. So far I agree.
I confess I haven’t had much time to properly reflect on this topic as my research is about something else (fortunately all philosophy is in some related) but if we carry a line of enquiry, independent of what Avicenna had said, we may perhaps be able to reach the below. Before I start let me say I don’t claim to have conclusive answers and my hope is to outline some possible options and possible lines of enquiry in favour of yesterday’s argument.
Here we go:
The first premise is the key premise which we often take as uncontested and elf-evident. And that premise states ‘every event has a cause’ or that ‘every event is dependent on some other event to bring it about’ including the event of an object coming into being and the position/state of that object, the how it is and what it is.
This premise maybe contested and requires an enquiry of its own. But I take it that most of us are willing to accept as a truism and I take it to be so here for the sake of our argument.
But as a side note I would say that we associate the ‘coming into being of anything’ with some force or energy. If something, an event or an object, was to come into being it would need some force to bring it about, which also applies to force itself which means force itself (energy) cannot just come into being without some force to initiate it (whatever that could mean). In explaining the Big Bang it is suggested (as a part of one of physics unknowns) that energy seem to enter the universe accelerating its expansion. But that doesn’t mean energy is created from nothing as it also could mean that the energy is coming from an unknown system into a known system, from outside of our universe into our universe, it doesn’t mean it was created from nothing. Unless of course we circumvent all this and say energy is neither created nor destroyed which then gives us a candidate for some uncaused being, namely force or energy. As I said this is a much bigger discussion that needs a more in-depth enquiry and research and I might be conflating force with energy here.
So for the sake of argument let us start with the premise, calls it P1, that ‘every event has at least one cause’ and see which conclusions this gives us. I have added ‘at least one cause’ to open the possibility of multiple necessary existents.
Now, although we have accepted that every event has at least one cause, we haven’t however conceded that every cause is an event. This option is still on the table, and it wouldn’t contradict P1 if we were to establish the existence of some non-events which were uncaused. It wouldn’t contradict P1 because all that P1 implied was about events, not non-events.
Also what we so far have from yesterday’s comments, is that if every event has at least one cause then we will have an infinite causal chain.
We then took the chain to be a set of all things caused and called it the contingent set.
Following our own enquiry we can then ask if the set itself is contingent (dependent on one cause or more) or not.
Now, if we take the set of all things contingent as one event, for simplicity, we can then refer to P1 and deduce that it must have a cause. But if its cause is an event than it is itself contingent (dependent on a cause) and belongs to the set.
For the cause of the set not to be contingent we can say it could be a non-event sitting outside of the set which itself wasn’t caused (since it is not an event) which caused and brought about the set.
This we called the necessary existent by which we meant something non-contingent.
So far is the summary of what we said before.
The valid point you made earlier is that just because the existence of something is necessary it doesn’t mean it is some necessary existence.
What this means is that ‘even if the house demands the existence of some foundation it doesn’t some foundation exists such that it cannot fail to exist’. This means we can easily imagine a world without the house and hence without the foundation.
This much is true. But as a reply I think we can say the following:
Given that there is a house in this world we can then conclude that there necessary exists a foundation in this world.
Meaning; given there is a world of events, we can conclude that in this world there necessary exists some non-contingent being. In other words given there is a world of events it is necessary that such an entity exists.
This should not be confused with the statement that ‘this non-contingent being is in fact contingent on there being a world of events’. This would be some strange backward causation meaning the non-contingent being is caused by the events which itself caused. No, what we mean by “given there is a world of events” is that we have reason to conclude “it is necessary that such an entity exists” given the original premise P1.
Sure, in a world where there are no events such a non-contingent being can easily not exist, but all that this statement says is that where there is nothing then nothing brought it about, which is the same as saying in a no-world there are no necessary being/s. I say no-world because an eventless world could be argued to be an empty world and as such no world at all. For how else could we descriptively discern a world that doesn’t exist from a world that has nothing inside it including the very notion of ‘inside’. This means the notion of necessary being/s applies to worlds that exist and not to worlds that do not exist. And I think this is a somewhat acceptable point for an argument in favour of the existence of the necessary being.
Sure in maths we can have empty sets but some mathematical talks are just abstract and not applicable to the real world.
(Remember as I said earlier I don’t claim to have conclusive answers but I think what we have so far is some path for a possible argument in favour of an Avicenna type argument)
OK, so from what we have so far we need to move onto why this non-contingent being needs to be unique and one in number.
Yesterday we also agreed this this thing must be simple and non-composite, so at least one in nature if not yet agreed to be one in number. That was agreed so because if it had parts it would be contingent on its parts. We then arrived at a simple definition.
You then commented then whatever explains this thing, meaning however we explain it in itself (its definition), then we can explain another in the same way. In summary whatever definition we give to the non-contingent being it can have multiple instances where each is explained in the same way. (This is what I think you meant but I might have misunderstood you)
If my understanding is correct then what we can say as a possible response is the following:
If the descriptions of some beings are exactly the same and are completely indiscernible then they could be argued to be the same thing, same as in one in number. So an argument can be made that if multiple objects are ‘qualitatively and descriptively’ truly identical then they are numerically identical too. For there would be no way to discern one from the other, implying all we have is just one thing after all. If we don’t agree to this then what we are saying is that single and multiple are descriptively and qualitatively the same which is a contradiction, unless we are going to radically change the concepts of ‘single’ and ‘multiple’.
In quantum mechanics some elementary particles are believed to be identical such that they may even occupy the same space. But in these cases is not true that they are completely indiscernible, because these particles have different trajectories and come together from different positions and, more importantly, have some combined effect different than each separately (such as wave interference even though they are not interacting) all of which offer us some justification as to why we say we have multiple photons while they are co-occupying the same space. All this means they are not truly and completely indiscernible. Granted the phrase ‘occupying the same space’ doesn’t really apply to photons but I use it for a lack of a better notion. All that matters is that photons pass through one another ‘not interacting’ and during that moment they are indiscernible and all we have is some combined effect.
In the case of the non-contingent beings it could be argued that unlike photons they are outside of time and space which too belong to the set, and as such the non-contingent beings are truly and completely indiscernible which would mean they are just one and the same thing; numerically one.
Most of the above needs tidying up but hopefully it gives food for thought.