The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review

The Thomist 62 (1998): 291-302 WHATEVER COMES TO BE HAS A CAUSE OF ITS COMING TO BE: ATHOMIST DEFENSE OF THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON MARKR. NOWACKI National University ofSingapore Republic ofSingapore ABOUT 1,500 YEARS AGO, John Philoponus,1 a Christian Neoplatonist, proposed the following simple argument to prove the existence of God: (1) Whatever comes to be has a cause of its coming to be. (2) The universe came to be. :. The universe has a cause of its coming to be. Revived interest in this argument, especially in the Kalam version championed by William Lane Craig,2 has met with a surprising reception. Inclined to grant the truth of premise (2) on the grounds of the empirical evidence of Big Bang cosmology, Quentin Smith3 has attempted to avoid the argument's theistic conclusion by denying premise (1). In other words, he flatly denies the age-old dictum that ex nihilo nihil fit. 1 For the battery of arguments Philoponus advances for the finitude of the past, see Philoponus: Against Aristotle, on the Eternity of the World, trans. Christian Wildbcrg (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1987). In this paper I do not defend premise (2) of Philoponus's argument; for my contribution to that debate, see "The Finite Past," forthcoming. 2 William Lane Craig, The Kalam CosmologicalArgument (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979); also see Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3 See for example essay 6 in Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. Also sec Smith's "Can Everything Come to Be Without a Cause?", Dialogue 33:2 (Spring 1994). It should be noted that Smith is committed to rather more than the bare possibility of something coming to be from nothing, for he believes that the universe itself came to be ex nihilo yet was uncaused. 291 292 MARK R. NOWACKI Thomas Sullivan notes in a recent article that it is difficult to construct an argument in favor of the principle of sufficient reason (of which premise [1] is one expression) by appealing to a principle more obvious than the principle of sufficient reason itself.4 Sullivan is surely right about this. However, it is often the case that those who would dispute the truth of a fundamental axiom themselves hold more complex and tentative propositions to be true. A good example of this would be a person who, while agreeing with Smith, embraces (perhaps for good independent reasons)5 a metaphysics of substances. It is to just such a person that my reply is directed. My response is rooted in the traditional Scholastic understanding of the principle of sufficient reason. To avoid some of the confusion that has grown up about this principle since the time of Leibniz, I will call the (weak) principle I defend simply "the reason of being."6 The full formula for this ontological principle is as follows: Every being has the reason of being of that which belongs to it in itself or in some other: in itself, if that which belongs to it is a constituent of itself; in another, if that which belongs to it does so without being a constituent of itself.7 4 Thomas D. Sullivan, "On the Alleged Causeless Beginning of the Universe: A Reply to Quentin Smith," Dialogue 33:2 (Spring 1994): 328. 5 For example, the ability of such a metaphysics to resolve the problem of change, to explain continuity of identity over time, and to provide a metaphysical ground for the natural necessities that science investigates. 6 Jn what follows it might be thought that I run together two things contemporary philosophy keeps distinct: "explanations" and "causes." I plead nolo contendere. Contrary to the fashionable idiom, the Latin word causa, like its Greek counterpartaitia, preserves the important conceptual point that a "cause is always explanation-affording and aitia qua explanation is always cause-specifying" (Alasdair Macintyre, First Principles, FinalEnds andContemporary Phi/osophicallssues The Aquinas Lecture, 1990 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995), 4). When we consider the beginning of the universe, and ask for an explanation of how it came to be, the natural way of understanding this is as a search...