#861 Is God’s Existence a “Brute Fact”?
November 12, 2023This question is about the concept of a necessary being. I'm not sure how a concrete being can be self-explanatory. How is it any different from a brute fact? You can posit that an eternal God explains all of reality, but the question still arises: "why does this specific eternal being exist in the first place?". If your response is that the being is self-explanatory, then to me you're just saying "God is a brute fact".
Maybe I can explain it more clearly with an example. Let's say that the atheist posits an eternal, immaterial, timeless, automatic, multiverse generator as the explanation of all reality. You then ask "but why does this specific generator exist, and why does it have this specific nature to automatically generate a multiverse?". The atheist then responds "it's self-explanatory". Would you be satisfied? This atheistic position seems to explain the origins of the universe just as well as your God hypothesis.
Greg
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
Why think that concreteness is incompatible with existing necessarily, Greg? If you think that abstract objects like numbers and other mathematical entities can exist necessarily, why can’t a concrete entity?
In any case, it seems to me that there is a difference between saying that God’s existence is a brute fact and saying that God exists by a necessity of His own nature. In the latter case, we are explaining God’s existence because existence belongs to the very essence of God. Therefore He doesn’t just happen to exist.
Contrast the view of Richard Swinburne, who does think that God’s existence is just a brute fact. Swinburne thinks that God exists contingently and therefore does not exist by a necessity of His own nature. God just happens to exist. Such brute factuality seems very different from the view that it belongs to the very nature of God to exist.
So if the atheist postulates “an eternal, immaterial, timeless, automatic, multiverse generator as the explanation of all reality,” my response is that such a physical universe does not exist by necessity of its own nature, due to its dependency upon metaphysically contingent parts, such as quarks. Therefore, his assertion that it is to be explained by a necessity of its own nature is implausible. So there is not simply a standoff here, as you seem to imagine, Greg; rather, the atheist postulate is a less plausible candidate for a metaphysically necessary being that exists by necessity of its own nature.
Now if you don’t want to regard existing by a necessity of one’s own nature as an explanation, that’s fine. In that case, you could simply argue that every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence. Then you could argue, as I have, that the atheist’s postulate seems to be contingent and therefore requires an explanation.
- William Lane Craig