#917 Mereological Nihilism to the Rescue?
December 08, 2024Hello Dr. Craig. I had a question about your first interaction with Alex O’Connor where you discussed mereological nihilism. I believe you were saying that things like chairs and buildings begin to exist because at some point in the past they did not exist. Alex seemed to suggest that since the material that makes these objects up already existed then there is no beginning of a chair’s existence for example. He said basically it’s an arrangement of particles that existed before but now in a different arrangement that we arbitrarily call a chair. My question is this. For those that struggle with this type of thinking would it be fair to say that any new arrangement of particles is the beginning of its existence since it was not in that arrangement before? One question asked is “when does a building become a building?” Well I suppose we could call it a building at any point of its construction. But I don’t think that is the point. The point is that as you keep constructing the building it is changing into something new. Something that did not exist before. So if you were to, let’s say, build it one atom at a time, each atom you stack on top would make it a different thing than it was before. Which means something new began to exist. Correct me if I am misunderstanding this line of reasoning. Perhaps this might help the mereological nihilist accept the first premise of the Kalaam Cosmological argument. Thank you for your time. Your work has truly changed my life for the better.
Jesse
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
There are a number of different issues that are getting run together here, Jesse.
First, the premiss that is under dispute here is not the first premiss of the KCA that “Whatever begins to exist has a cause.” Something begins to exist, roughly, just in case it exists at a time t and t is the first time at which it exists. So understood, this premiss is not under attack by the critic you imagine.
Rather the premiss that is under attack here is the second premiss that “The universe began to exist.” The critic alleges that things, like the universe, that have material causes do not really begin to exist. So, for example, a chair that a carpenter builds out of wood doesn’t really begin to exist because the pieces of wood already existed. Now that claim seems crazy. Are we to think that the chair existed before the wood was assembled? Then why couldn’t you sit on it? Has the chair always existed? Then where was it? The critic seems committed to the principle, “Whatever begins to exist has no material cause.” Why adopt such a radical principle so contrary to experience? Don’t most of the things we are familiar with that begin to exist have material causes?
The only way to rescue the critic’s position is, as you intimate, to adopt mereological nihilism, the view that there are no composite objects. The reason the chair never began to exist is because chairs do not exist! There are just fundamental particles arranged in different ways. This is not a very attractive option, however, since it requires the critic to say that no people exist. The critic can perhaps be saved the embarrassment of maintaining that he does not exist by saying that only inanimate composite objects do not exist; perhaps living things have a principle of unity that inanimate things do not. But why think that non-living things have no unifying principle of their own?
Now your example of the building raises a different but related issue, namely, mereological essentialism, the view that all a thing’s parts are essential to it, so that if even one atom of it is changed, then a new object begins to exist. This equally radical view is almost the exact opposite of mereological nihilism. In this case, new objects are constantly coming into being as their fundamental parts change. So things that have material causes constantly begin to exist! In this case a new universe begins to exist every split-second! So you’re right that mereological essentialism won’t help the critic escape the beginning of the universe.
In any case, as I point out in my published work, all this is academic anyway. For we can accommodate the mereological nihilist’s qualms by simply rephrasing the second premiss, “The fundamental particles arranged universe-wise began to exist,” and the very same philosophical and scientific arguments can be offered in support as before.
- William Lane Craig