#958 A New Argument from Contingency
September 21, 2025Hello Dr. Craig! In their book "Dieu, la science, les preuves", two french engineers (Michel Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies) offer an argument for the contingency of matter in 5 pages that can be summed up like this:
1- Any matter can take a wide or infinite range of values regarding their mass and their space occupied.
2- If (1), then there are possible worlds for any matter in which it has a different size or weight.
3- If (2), then it is false that any matter with a certain size and weight is necessary.
What do you think Dr. Craig? Is the argument sound or weak? I'd love to hear your commentary on it!
And I am sure Bolloré and Bonnassies would love too! Since they reference your work in their book (which just arrived in English version).
Daurelle
Ivory Coast
Dr. craig’s response
A
It’s wonderful to know that we have readers in Ivory Coast, Daurelle! While I cannot respond to Bolloré and Bonnassies directly, since I haven’t read them, I can respond to your summary.
At face value, it seems to me that (3) does not follow from (2). All that follows is that the size and weight of matter is contingent, but not that the matter itself is contingent. From what we have been told, it seems that the matter could exist in every possible world with different sizes and weights. Perhaps they are assuming that a necessary being cannot have any contingent properties; but that does not seem to be true. God, for example, exists in every possible world, but with different states of knowledge in each world. So why couldn’t the same matter exist in every possible world in different sizes and weights?
What they would need to argue here, it seems, is that if matter differs in its size and weight, then it is not the same matter, but a different matter. For example, if the matter had a different electrical charge, it would not be the same matter. But are size and weight truly essential properties of matter? Maybe what they mean is that material particles could have had different values of their mass, in which case they would be different particles, not the same particle. That seems plausible.
- William Lane Craig