God is the Best Explanation for Why Something Exists Rather than Nothing

This is a heady argument, but a good one. It shows that God is the best explanation for why anything exists at all. It trades on the concepts of "contingency" and "necessity". Something is "contingent" if it depends on something else. So if "A" is contingent on "B", then you need "B" in order to get "A". Sunlight is contingent on the sun, so if you haven"t got the sun then you can"t have sunlight. The sun is also contingent, because if you didn"t have the swirling mass of space dust (or whatever) that coalesced into the sun then you wouldn"t have a sun. The space dust is contingent because if you didn"t have " and on and on we could go but only to a point. We can"t have an infinite regress of contingent objects because there would be nothing to start the chain going. You need a fixed point to start the first contingency going. Think of a chandelier attached to a chain. Let"s say that each link in the chain has a number, starting at the bottom with number 1. Let"s say link 1 is hanging on link 2, link 2 is hanging on link 3, link 3 is hanging on link 4, and so on up the chain. If you don"t eventually get to a link that is hanging on the ceiling then none of the links can get upheld. The ceiling in this analogy would be the fixed point, itself not contingent on anything. In reality ceilings are contingent on construction companies, but for the purposes of our analogy imagine that the ceiling isn"t contingent on anything. This sort of existence is called "necessary" existence. It exists by the necessity of its own nature rather than existing contingent on some other set of conditions. The argument shows that not everything can be contingent, there must be some necessary reality to ground it. Notice that this has nothing to do with any sort of time duration. It isn"t that link 1 first relies on link 2 and then link 2 relies on 3. It is a matter of position, not of chronology. We could imagine that the chandelier had been there forever from eternity past and it would still be the case that the first link relies on the second, the second on the third, and so on. This is what makes this argument a little different from the Cosmological Argument. While the Cosmological argument relies on cause and effect, the argument from contingency relies on the relationships between things without respect to one causing the other. For this reason the argument from contingency works even if we assume the universe has existed forever. So let"s sketch out the argument: "Premise One: Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause. (i.e. it either exists by "necessity" or it exists "contingently") "Premise Two: If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. "Premise Three: The universe exists. "Premise Four: Therefore the universe has an explanation of its existence (from Premise One and Three). "Premise Five: Therefore the explanation of the universe is God (from Premise Two and Four). "Premise Six: Therefore, God exists. Several of these premises are not controversial at all. Premise One is a catch all, encompassing all possibilities. It basically says that things either exist contingently or non-contingently (that is, "of necessity"). This is the equivalent of saying that everything is either "A" or "not A", so it shouldn"t be controversial. Premise three is obvious, and premises four, five, and six are merely logical conclusions of the other premises. Since those are all straightforward, we"ll move on to the controversial premise. Premise Two: If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. Let"s point out exactly what this explanation is explaining. The explanation of the universe is the necessary grounds for the reality of all space, all energy, all matter, and of time itself. In other words, it has to be an abstract object1. There are really only two sorts of abstract objects, numbers and un-embodied minds. There just aren"t any other candidates out there. Since numbers don"t stand in causal relationships to anything (the number 3 never held up a chandelier, even though we"ve labeled one of the links "link 3") then the only remaining candidate is an un-embodied mind. What do you call an un-embodied mind that is the grounds for all space, time, matter, and energy? Christians call Him "God". 1Objects are either abstract or concrete. Abstract objects have no physical referent and concrete objects do. Since the explanation of the universe explains the existence of physical reality, it can"t have a physical referent itself.