#789 Is the World a Brute Contingent?

Dr. craig’s response

It is fun, Samiullah!

In response to your question, let me ask you a question: Suppose you walk into the kitchen and find that all the spoons, knives, forks, and other utensils have been sorted and neatly arranged in separate stacks on the table. Curious, you ask your wife for an explanation. She says, “I chose to arrange them that way.” Now would you say that if she acted freely rather than deterministically, no better explanation of the arrangement of the utensils has been given than if it were just a brute contingency? Surely not! Her libertarian free choice, though ultimately inexplicable in terms other than her own personal agency, is clearly a better explanation than just brute contingency and is far more apt to be true.

In the same way, positing a Personal Creator who freely chooses to create the universe, to endow it with a certain mathematical structure, to fine-tune it for the existence of embodied, conscious agents, and to give those agents the ability to make moral choices is a vastly superior explanation to saying, “That’s just the way it is.” The fact that God’s choices are free in a libertarian sense does nothing to obviate the great advance in explanatory depth in the theist’s account of these phenomena over the atheist who asserts that things are just brute contingencies without any explanation (or the atheist who boldly asserts, despite every appearance to the contrary, that the arrangement of the utensils, so to speak, is broadly logically necessary!). All explanation has to stop somewhere; but what you need to understand is that a theory with greater explanatory depth is vastly preferable to a theory which offers no explanation at all.

“Can the atheist not accept Moral realism in virtue of it being necessary?” Sure (leaving aside the problems with atheistic moral Platonism); but as I explain in my responses to Huemer and Morriston in my debate with Erik Wielenberg,[1] the theist’s account of moral values and duties has greater explanatory depth than the atheist’s brute necessity. “Can the atheist not accept . . . the beginning of the universe as being necessary?” I don’t see how, since the beginning of the universe reveals that it does not exist necessarily and so is contingent. To the contrary, I should say that it is metaphysically impossible for something to come into being from nothing. “Can the atheist not accept . . . the initial state of the universe as an eternal vacuum that, perhaps, enters into time at the first moment of causation (through in-deterministic causation) and is timeless sans the rest of the universe?” In my published work on the kalām cosmological argument, I have shown that such models are not viable.[2] In any case, this question has nothing to do with brute necessities and is therefore a red herring.

The bottom line is that the theist does not wish to avoid but is eager to affirm that the best explanation of all these phenomena is a transcendent, Personal Creator endowed with freedom of the will, who is therefore not determined to do as He chooses. Such an explanation is immeasurably better than no explanation at all.