Derek Parfit’s article “The Puzzle of Reality: Why Does the Universe Exist?” has been reprinted several times since it first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1992, and for good reason. It’s an admirably clear and comprehensive survey of the various answers that have been given to that question, and of the problems facing some of them. (Unsurprisingly, I think Parfit’s treatment of theism, though not unfair, is nevertheless superficial. But to be fair to Parfit, the article is only meant to be a survey.)
Parfit appears to sympathize with the “Brute Fact View” according to which the universe simply exists without explanation, and that’s that. The claim here is not that there isan explanation but that we don’t and even can’t know what it is. It is rather that there is no explanation at all, no intelligibility, rhyme or reason to why this universe exists rather than another or rather than nothing at all. This is, of course, implicitly to deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), according to which everything does have an explanation, whether or not we can always discover what that explanation is. I’ve defended PSR and criticized the Brute Fact View in several places, such as in Scholastic Metaphysics. (Also in several earlier blog posts, to which you’ll find links below.)
Parfit describes and defends the Brute Fact View in the following passage:
[On] the Brute Fact View… we should not expect reality to have very special features, such as being maximal, or best, or having very simple laws, or including God. In much the largest range of the global possibilities, there would exist an arbitrary set of messily complicated worlds. That is what, with a random selection, we should expect. It is unclear whether ours is one such world.
The Brute Fact View may seem hard to understand. It may seem baffling how reality could be even randomly selected. What kind of process could select whether time had no beginning, or whether anything ever exists? But this is not a real problem. It is logically necessary that one global possibility obtains. There is no conceivable alternative. Since it is necessary that one possibility obtains, it is necessary that it be settled which obtains. Even without any kind of process, logic ensures that a selection is made. There is no need for hidden machinery.
If reality were randomly selected, it would not be mysterious how the selection is made. It would be in one sense inexplicable why the Universe is as it is. But this would be no more puzzling than the random movement of a particle. If a particle can simply happen to move as it does, it could simply happen that reality is as it is. Randomness may even be less puzzling at the level of the whole Universe, since we know that facts at this level could not have been caused.
End quote. Parfit’s argument here seems to me highly implausible and problematic. For one thing, he seems to allow at least for the sake of argument that there might be a kind of “process” which “selects” whether anything exists etc. but in a “random” way that is not ultimately explicable. This is a very odd suggestion for a couple of reasons. First, why bother with it? If you’re going to commit yourself anyway to the idea that the universe is just an unintelligible Brute Fact, why not simply say that the universe just exists and that’s all that can be said and leave it at that? Why posit, between the universe on the one hand and sheer Bruteness on the other, some intermediate “process” of “selection” which in some sense accounts for the existence of the universe but itself operates in an unintelligible way? What’s the point of positing such a “process” in the first place if one doesn’t think that it or anything else can do any real explanatory work where the sheer existence of the universe is concerned?
Second, why call something a “process” which functions to “select” the universe if one thinks it is not something whose operation is ultimately intelligible? Other things we call “processes” are not like that, including processes that involve an element of chance. For example, the way a population is molded by natural selection is a kind of process, and chance plays a role, but that does not make any of its results unintelligible. Given such-and-such a variation within a certain population (larger beaks in certain birds within a group of birds, say) under such-and-such environmental circumstances (hard seeds being the main local food source), it is perfectly intelligible why there would be a change in the population (the larger sort of beak would be much more common in later generations of birds).
(As Aquinas argues, chance always presupposes the convergence of lines of causation which are not the result of chance. To take a stock example, when a farmer finds buried loot while he is out plowing his field, that is a chance occurrence. But that a robber decided to bury his loot there and that the farmer decided to plow the field that day were not chance occurrences. All chance occurrences are like that in that they resolve themselves, at some level, into a convergence of non-chance occurrences.)
So, what we ordinarily describe as “processes” of “selection” are intelligible even when they involve an element of chance. So why call what Parfit is describing -- something which is chance all the way down, as it were, and the operation of which is notintelligible -- a “selection process,” or indeed a “process” of any kind?
So, the stuff about “how reality… [is] randomly selected” is one problematic aspect of Parfit’s view. Then there is the suggestion in the second half of the second paragraph quoted, to the effect that logic itself essentially solves any apparent problem with the Brute Fact View. Again, Parfit says: “Since it is necessary that one possibility obtains, it is necessary that it be settled which obtains. Even without any kind of process, logic ensures that a selection is made. There is no need for hidden machinery.”
To see what is wrong with this, suppose police come across a dead body and start batting around possible explanations -- murder, suicide, accident, heart attack, etc. Suppose one of the policemen who has heretofore been silent interrupts and says: “I don’t know why you guys are wasting time considering these different explanations. I say it’s just an unintelligible, inexplicable brute fact that this corpse turned up here and now. Case closed, we can go home now. Don’t raise your eyebrows! After all, it’s necessary that some possibility had to obtain here and now, so it’s necessary that it be settledwhich one obtains. Even without a murder, or suicide, accident, heart attack, etc., logic ensures that a selection is made. There is no need for ‘hidden machinery’ such as murder, accident, etc.”
No one would accept this for a moment, of course. That “logic ensures” that somepossibility or other will obtain simply does not make it the least bit plausible to say that we needn’t bother asking how exactly this particular possibility -- a corpse, and this corpse, here and now -- got to be the one which obtains. Now, Parfit gives us no reason at all to believe that this sort of move is any more plausible when we are asking “Why does the universe exist?” than it is when we are asking “How did this corpse get here?” So, his attempt to appeal to logic in order to make the Brute Fact View believable fails.
(Indeed, it is strange that Parfit would take this suggested defense of the Brute Fact View seriously given what else he says in the article. In particular, at the beginning of the article he is critical of attempts to dismiss the need to explain the initial conditions of the universe that allowed for stars, planets, and life, on the grounds that there had to be some initial conditions or other. The fact that there had to be some initial conditions or other doesn’t remove the need for an explanation, Parfit argues, because the specific initial conditions that happened to have obtained are so improbable. Now, if saying “There had to be some initial conditions or other” is by Parfit’s own admission not a plausible way to dismiss the request for an explanation of why we have a universe capable of supporting life, etc., then why is saying “Logic ensures that some selection has to be made” a plausible way to dismiss the request for an explanation of why anything exists at all rather than nothing?)
A third issue raised by Parfit’s remarks is the stuff about the random behavior of particles, and what Parfit has in mind here are, of course, claims to the effect that quantum mechanics has shown that events can occur without a cause. I’ve discussed this issue at length elsewhere (e.g. in this post) and won’t repeat here everything I’ve said before. Suffice it for present purposes to note that when Parfit says that “if a particle can simply happen to move as it does, it could simply happen that reality is as it is,” he is overlooking a crucial disanalogy between quantum theory and the Brute Fact View, and one that should be obvious. No one claims that the motion of the particles in question is simply unintelligible. They don’t say “they just move and that’s that and nothing more can be said.” Rather, they say that (what they call) the random motion of particles is something which it makes sense to think of as occurring given quantum mechanics. The theory provides an explanatory context that makes the behavior of the particles intelligible even if their motion is said to be in some sense “uncaused.” (Hence the motion isn’t “random” full stop, without qualification. If you’re giving a theoretical description of some “random” phenomenon which gives it a kind of intelligibility, then you are ipso facto using “random” in a qualified sense.)
By contrast, the Brute Fact View denies precisely that there is any larger explanatory context within which the “random” “selection” of the existence of the universe can be made intelligible. It says that the universe just exists and that’s that and nothing more can be said. There is no larger background theory in the context of which such a “random” occurrence makes sense. So there just isn’t any parallel here with quantum mechanics. Hence, whatever it is Parfit and others think quantum mechanics has established, it simply lends no plausibility to the Brute Fact View.
Finally, there is Parfit’s remark that “randomness may even be less puzzling at the level of the whole Universe, since we know that facts at this level could not have been caused.” Those who haven’t read Parfit’s entire article might wonder whether he is blatantly begging the question when he says that “facts at this level could not have been caused.” For isn’t the claim that such facts are caused precisely what theism says? But Parfit is not ruling out theism a priori here. Rather, his remark here must be understood in light of what he says at the very beginning of the article, where he says:
[T]hings might have been, in countless ways, different. So why is the Universe as it is?
These facts cannot be causally explained. No law of nature could explain why there are any laws of nature, or why these laws are as they are. And, if God created the world, there cannot be a causal explanation of why God exists.
So, Parfit is not ruling out arbitrarily the claim that God is the cause of the universe. Rather, he is saying that even if God is the cause, God’s own existence would not have a causal explanation and thus would have to be explained in some other way. (The traditional answer is that it is God’s nature as that which is purely actual, subsistent existence itself, absolutely simple or non-composite, etc. that explains his existence in a non-causal way.)
So, Parfit’s point is that causal explanations, specifically, cannot be the ultimatesort of explanation, so that if there is to be an explanation of an ultimate sort it will have to be an explanation in something other than causal terms. And he is right about that. So, when he says at the end of his essay that “facts at [the level of the whole Universe] could not have been caused,” he is just alluding to the point made at the beginning of the essay that ultimate explanations cannot be of a causal nature specifically.
So far so good, then. The problem is with what Parfit seems, at the end of the essay, to think follows from this point. Again, he says that “randomness may even be less puzzling at the level of the whole Universe, since we know that facts at this level could not have been caused.” That is to say, from the (true) premise that ultimate explanations cannot be of the causal type, Parfit appears to derive the conclusion that it is plausible that the fundamental facts about the universe might be “random.” Well, that conclusion simply doesn’t follow from the premise. In particular, from the premise that “X does not have a causal explanation” it simply doesn’t follow that “X is random,” or even that “X is plausibly random.” That would follow only if the only plausible alternative to causal explanation is an appeal to randomness. And that isn’t so. Something that lacks a causal explanation could have an explanation instead in terms of its own nature, say, or by virtue of being a necessary truth. The fact that 2 + 2 = 4 does not have a causal explanation but it is hardly “random” that 2 + 2 = 4. When Thomists argue that God’s existence follows from his being pure actuality, subsistent being itself, absolutely simple or non-composite, etc., they are not saying that his existence is “random.” On the contrary, they are saying that his existence follows necessarily from his nature so understood. And so on.
Of course, an atheist would criticize the concepts of pure actuality, subsistent being itself, etc.; someone who denies the objectivity of mathematical truth might challenge the claim that it is in any interesting sense a necessary truth that 2 + 2 = 4; and so forth. But none of that is to the present point. The point is rather that the claim that ultimate explanations are not causal explanations simply does not by itself lend any plausibility at all to the Brute Fact View, contrary to what Parfit implies.
Anyway, even apart from the problems with Parfit’s account of it, we can know the Brute Fact View is false, because we can know that PSR is true. Again, see Scholastic Metaphysics, and the first several of the posts listed below.
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