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Why is There Something?

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Abstract

The tension that many early scientists experienced between a reliance on religious tradition as a source of truth and scientific methodology as a guide to truth eventually led to a clash between theists who claimed that the existence of the universe required a creator and non-theists, who insisted that recourse to a creator to explain why there is something perverts scientific methodology. The present paper defends the position that physics and its foreseeable cosmological extensions neither requires nor excludes either opposed contention. Each has the status of an inference to the best explanation. This is developed in three stages. The first uses historical analysis to support the claim that the advancement of physics and cosmology do not rely on an appeal to supernatural forces. The second explains inference to the best explanation. The third shows how this accommodates these conflicting claims. An appendix examines an influential argument that the intelligibility of the universe requires a creator.

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Notes

  1. The most influential and clearly developed exposition of this science-religion relation was given by Euler in Letters to a German Princess. (Euler, 1768). These two volumes of letters were translated and printed in twelve French, ten English, six German, four Russian, two Dutch, two Swedish, one Italian, one Danish, and one Spanish editions.

  2. I am using the translation of this expression given by H. Floris Cohen (2021).

  3. The classical summary of this conflict is White, Andrew D. (1897) An updated account illustrating the form this conflict takes in many different perspectives is Holt (2013).

  4. Summa Theologica, I, q. 2, a. 3. Henceforth this will be referred to as ST.

  5. ST, I, q. 2, a. 3, obj 2.

  6. A non-technical account is given in Greene (2020). A more detailed mathematical account is given in Weinberg, Cosmology (2008).

  7. An overall survey of the problem is given in Adams et al. (2005).

  8. Aamodt et al. (2011).

  9. For fairly non-technical accounts of the application of string and brane theory to the big bang era see Randall (2005), or Susskind (2006).

  10. This citation is from his Summa Contra Gentiles. 1, c 30, #4. The same principle is presented more diffusely after the proofs of God’s existence in his ST,1, Q. 3, Iand Summa Contra Gentiles 1, Chap. 14.

  11. We will cite the 2nd edition of Insight through page or chapter numbers.

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  1. Philosophy Department, California State University East Bay, Hayward, CA, USA

    Edward MacKinnon

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  1. Edward MacKinnon
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MacKinnon, E. Why is There Something?. Philosophia 51, 835–855 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00549-1

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