The Argument from Contingency

“It is self-evident that truth exist in general, but not self-evident to us that there exists a first Truth.” (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q2, art. 3)

The Argument from Contingency is the probably the most popular and, perhaps, the oldest cosmological argument for God’s existence. While the Bible does not attempt to prove God exists (it assumes it), the argument can be found in the Bible itself, as typified by Psalm 19:1 which reads “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork.” The cosmological argument says in an oversimplified nutshell, “hey, look at the universe—something must have created it!” The argument from contingency says “even the universe depends on something for its existence and that something is God.”

Key to understanding this argument is the notion of contingency. Contingency is used in this argument in two distinct ways. One, contingency is used to denote an unknown state in the logical necessity of a given claim. A contingent claim is one that may be true, but there is nothing that forces us to accept it as truth. To say that a thing’s existence is contingent is to acknowledge that it need not exist at all or that its existence is merely possible. For example, it appears that human beings are contingent (that is, there’s no reason why we could not exist). Some truths depend on something else. This sentence depends on each word; each word depends on many letters. (For all you other database nerds out there, think functional dependencies between attributes in related tables.) Others do not in the same way that a triangle with three sides depends on nothing else. In fact, it appears that the entire universe is contingent because each element or property of a whole is required before we can say a thing exists.

But why was there a universe at all? Under what circumstances could we conceive that it not exist? Why, as Leibniz asks, is there something rather than nothing at all? There is a universe; that much is obvious but how do we explain its existence? The answer given by those who subscribe to the cosmological argument is that, because it appears that everything we can experience could not exist (that is, they are contingent and dependent on their various relationships), a necessary cause (as opposed to contingent one) must act in such a way to hold the universe as an existent whole.

The second, and perhaps more important, way in which contingency is used is more closely related to the idea of dependence. Specifically, any change is contingent (dependent) upon another. Things don’t simply change on their own, rather they come about because of something else. If one thing (the universe) is the creation of another, it is dependent (contingent) for its existence on that other. Things do not owe their own existence to themselves. Even if some things are eternal (suppose, for example, the sun or the universe itself), they do not owe their existence to their own nature. Their existence depends on, and is caused by, something else. That something is what we call God.

While almost every major philosopher throughout history has attempted to tackle this problem, the most oft-sited formulation for this argument comes from St. Thomas Aquinas (and a lesser extent Leibniz). Aquinas builds on St. Paul’s claim that “the hidden things of God can be clearly understood from the things He has made” (Rom. 1:20). He therefore argues that, if that were so, “we must be able to demonstrate that God exists from the things he has made, for the first step in understanding a thing is to know that it exists” (Summa Theologiae, I, Q2, art. 3). Aquinas claimed that, in order to know that God exists, we should be able to find God by tracing a linage effect to cause, infinitely backtracking. Each event, object or state is caused by something previous and each effect implies something about it’s cause. As we trace these implications backward, we see that, eventually, we must encounter some sort of uncaused cause. If not, we would not exist at all.

If we trace all of these effects back through time, carefully noting each cause in turn, we will, according to this line of reasoning come upon a moment when there was no universe at all and we will encounter God. Unlike Aquinas’ argument, the so-called Kalam arguments assume an actual beginning of time. But this isn’t a required element of the contingency argument. Aquinas simply states that God (the Uncaused Cause) is non-contingent to the universe; whether He created (in the conventional sense of the word) the universe is indeterminate. The universe simply depends upon God the way that the moonlight depends upon the sun. For most people today, we can, with some confidence, argue that the universe did have an actual beginning: the so-called Big Bang some 15 billion years ago. But this does not necessarily torpedo the argument. Not even God can bring Himself into being. Self-caused or uncaused, in this case, simply means that God exists independent of any cause whatsoever. He is necessary, though not the “first” cause in time, but the ultimate, primary cause of the universe. (The claim is that the Big Bang wasn’t the first moment IN time but rather the first moment OF time.) The universe depends on God to exist, perhaps, to hold it in place, to give it shape and meaning.

Whether or not there was a specific beginning of the universe in time and space seems to me irrelevant to the question. Rather, the point of the entire argument is that there seems to be a particular relationship between things in the universe. Whether we can trace these dependencies back in time (one cause/effect at a time) or in some kind of relational (the earth depends on atoms which depend on smaller particles), there is, according to Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz and Taylor, a direct pathway back to God.

I am not convinced that this is a completely sound argument in general and some problems seem to pop out at me immediately, but that is a task for another day.