Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: The Argument from Contingency Explained

In this video I explain and defend one of the most popular arguments for the existence of God, the Argument from Contingency.

0:00 Intro
0:35 The Starting Question
2:20 The Principle of Sufficient Reason
4:45 Necessity vs. Contingency
6:36 Matter as Contingent
8:00 Contingent Collections
9:00 From Contingency to God

Link to my video on Aquinas' Third Way:

This video is part of a larger series on the arguments for the existence of God. Click the subscribe button to stay informed about when future videos come out on this channel!

[murn]

Is there an Olympic medal for mental gymnastics?

[yordaddy]

I was struggling to find arguments in favor of my theory, that the universe has been created by the 3 necessary magic turtles and this video finally proves my point. Thanks dude!

[mr_underscore]

I don’t believe I even agree with the first argument presented in this video, that things cannot exist without a reason. This, in my mind, becomes abundantly clear when studying quantum mechanics. You don’t even need to go into the deeply philosophical parts of the subject. Quantum mechanics is built upon the observation that matter (and everything else) behaves as a sort of wave. This, in turn, (as a fundamental mathematical property of waves) leads to the outcome that we cannot know certain things with absolute certainty. But knowing, say, that nothing exists in a region of space would contradict this, so there must exist something where there exists nothing. And this is precisely what is observed, a phenomenon called quantum foam. This quantum foam, like many things in quantum mechanics, seem to be truly random in where and in what magnitude it is formed in. Most notably, even if there was some sort of existential reason (apart from purely mathematical constraints) for the existence of quantum foam, there is truly no reason for why it is observed the way that it is in one place in space and time as opposed to some other way. Hence something has provably existed without any reason.

Now, this obviously doesn’t prove that God can’t exist, but it does prove that it is silly to imply that the existence of something must result in a reason for its existence. Basically (as we all know by now) we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God or any other supernatural deity/phenomenon.

Have a great day!

[generichuman_]

Reaching the end of this video, I think this is only a conclusion you can come to if you've planned getting here the entire time, and have painstakingly engineered each step in the process. You started with "God exists" and asked "ok, how do we get there". One obvious thing to point out is that God is clearly a mind. To be all knowing you have to be a mind. The problem is, every mind we have ever encountered is like your Perry Como CD, it's contingent on the material world. If your brain did not exist by you not being born, your mind would not exist. When your brain ceases to exist in the future, your mind will no longer exist. You're taking this contingent thing that requires a complex material object for it's functioning, and pasting it into a changeless immaterial world. This is a bit like ripping all the components out of your computer and still expecting Microsoft word to run.

Think about the justification for God being a mind. How do we come to this idea? It's only from reflection on our subjective experience. Being a mind is simple, it's effortless. I don't need to expend any energy being a mind, I just am. I also feel different than my material body. I feel like a passenger and that my mind could exist without the body. I have intelligence and can create things, so I can imagine a God that is intelligent and can create things. The problem is, like with most of our arm chair intuitions, they don't map to reality. Cognition is horrendously complicated and like I said dependent on the brain. Take a second and appreciate that using our intuition, we can't even know that the brain is involved in our cognition, let alone what neurons are doing. What ever magic you want to attribute to consciousness, which is usually the way that this disembodied mind is justified, you don't get the properties God needs to have to be God from consciousness alone. Knowledge, ability to create, intelligence, are not properties of consciousness, they are properties of not just a brain, but a complex primate brain with a large neocortex. We know this because when we have brain damage, we cease to have knowledge, we lose the ability to create, we cease to be intelligent. Every aspect of mind that you could ever care about, things that are absolutely essential to a God, can be perturbed by perturbing the brain. I understand that once you grant that such a mind could in principle exist, it solves all your problems, but that's simply because magical solutions explain everything. It's why God was used as an explanation for every gap in scientific knowledge throughout history with equal confidence, and with zero modifications to his underlying nature. My response is that you just don't get to do that.

One thought on God being changeless. How can God do anything at all if he doesn't change? In order to think, or to create things, something needs to change, otherwise all you can do is exist statically having no influence on anything. A changeless thing causing changes seems to be a massive contradiction. If the answer is that we don't have to deal with this because God is outside of time, space and material, then I would point out the obvious, that this mysterious realm, which seems to be nothing but the negation of known properties, is used as a get out of jail free card for having to explain anything about God, yet somehow God is able to retain all his parochial properties ( thinking, creating, judging, answering prayers, having a dislike of mixed fabrics and shrimp). It's extremely convenient.

In closing, I think God is an idea that works if you have nothing but arm chair logic and intuition to guide you. But in the modern world where we have biology, neurology, computer science, machine learning, etc., we understand that the complexity of cognition is not something that we can use as an axiom.

[FullPerspective]

Excellent video and argument. One of many which proves the existence of God, but you are one of the best at having explained the contingency argument.

[perrygershin]

So why is it that you want there to be a god so bad that you come up with these convoluted lines of reasoning to justify that belief?
Are you trying just as hard to find reasons why a god can't exist? If you actually care to know what is true then you would pursue both possibilities.

Just because there is something rather than nothing doesn't prove that a god is necessary, it just means that we don't know.
I can suppose that if there is just nothing then there are no physical laws that prevent something coming from nothing.
If it can happen once there is no reason to think that can't happen an infinite number of times, each universe completely
isolated from and undetectable from each other.
Obviously we find ourselves in a universe that we can exist in. Fine tuning arguments are no problem with this scenario.

Without any means to test a hypothesis it is useless in figuring out if it is true or not.
I see no way to test your ideas or the one I proposed above. Why can't you just accept that there are things we just don't know.

So I ask you again, why is it that you want there to be a god? I think this places a bias in your ability to reason on this question.
You probably don't even realize you have it.

Another thing, why do you refer to god as a 'him'. Why would this god have a gender?
Why is god not an 'it'?

Do you realize that history is full of gods that you probably don't believe in?
Ask yourself why. Could it be that people like to make up stories that explain things they don't understand?
I hope you don't think that lightning and thunder are evidence for angry gods.
You know that once there were many people that believed that, not because of any good evidence but supernatural
explanations were often answers given to things not understood.

Please please please, don't just assume there has to be a god just because you can't think of any better answer.
We all have our own model of reality in our heads and we base our actions and decisions on it.
Those actions produce consequences that not only affect your future but those around you.
We all need to strive to have our models match actual reality as much as possible.
Those models need to be based on things that can be tested and verified before we accept them as likely true.

Religions in my opinion, are a huge obstacle to the prosperity of humans on this planet. Religion has been the root
cause of many violent conflicts in the past and continues to this day. Each one thinks theirs is the correct one and
all other beliefs must be eliminated. Because they all lack sufficient evidence there will always be those that reject them.
Those beliefs are used to justify violence against any that have different beliefs than their own.

[Testimony_Of_JTF]

I've been really liking this series so far, congrats!

[cutbyoccam]

@9:00 This is an unfounded leap that you can't justify. You're making a composition fallacy like the classical example: trees are made of atoms, and atoms are not visible to the naked eye therefore trees are not visible to the naked eye. Or better yet, just because all of the students in the classroom are male doesn't make the classroom male.

[BlueshiftedOne]

There is a fourth possibility with the origin of the cd. What if we found that cd in orbit around a foreign planet, where no human had visited before. The origin of the cd would then be unknown. There could be several possible explanations for it's existence and we could begin an investigation. But at that moment, with no more data, the answer would be "we don't really know how that particular cd exists". This is the situation with our universe. It might look constructed to You (and there are arguments for and against this claim) and we might have some ideas as to how it can exist. We can investigate further, but for now, we can't say anything for certain. Now. Here is where the analogy runs out, as all analogies do, when diving deep. The cd in orbit has a very high probability of being made by an intelligent being. The probability of the universe being made by an intelligent being is, however not as obviously assessable and You're doing yourself and your audience a disfavor, when suggesting it must be a god. There is in fact sufficient reason to say, that we really don't know the origin of the universe yet and we have less than sufficient data, to guess on god or any other offset.
In short. The principle of sufficient reason is a not applicable when we don't have sufficient data. There is, as You say, always a reason for something to exist, but it is arrogant, dishonnest and deceiving to suggest that we know enough about the universe to give any answers.

[goodquestion]

"Why?" is a question that most easily shows the questioner's toddler level epistemology.
When a young and inexperienced mammalian nervous system faces the world, everything seems to have intentionality and teleology.

[generichuman_]

If this infinite being needs to be all knowing, all powerful, and all good, why does it not need to maximize other qualities as well? Does it need to be all charismatic or all funny? What about all evil? This one is interesting because a common rebuttal to this is that evil is just the absence of good. I don't think this works, because a rock has the absence of good, but a rock isn't evil. On the planet mars, there is a complete absence of good, but I don't think anyone would say that mars is an evil planet. Evil very clearly requires deliberate actions, and is a thing in it's own right. So why does an infinite being not have to maximize this trait as well?

[markwilson]

How did you sneak "all good " in there. Surely if it's all powerful it contains all powers and capabilities. Why would this entity not be capable of good and bad.

[generichuman_]

Why does the principle of sufficient reason not extend to God? By your own definition, saying that something just exists is not ever a good answer.

[legendsplayground]

Hey there, just wanna let you know you're doing a great job, keep it up👍💪

[huizhechen]

It might be a popular argument, but it's not convincing to me.

[rafaelgonzalez]

The answer is really simple. If there is something, then there is also nothing. Why because one cannot exist without the other. Something from nothing. Nothing is something.

[seppwurzel]

I'm not saying that you are wrong. But for sure our day by day understanding of the world is not very helpful in understanding the origins of universe.
And by the way: did you know that- according to the Einstein formulas - the overall balance of the energy of the universe is zero? Which means nada, niente, nothing!!! So the question how something came out of nothing might be of no use here.

[ronin]

this is what happens when someone not very smart tries to think too deeply

[veryeld]

Haha way to spend 12 minutes making a fool of yourself

[EitherSpark]

3:35 would we? i feel like this is similar to when Craig says if the Kalam's causal principle isn't true then bicycles, beethoven, and root beer would pop into existence from nothing.
maybe there exists some necessary governing laws which provide an explanation for why certain things can come into existence unexplained and why other things cannot. for example, maybe some necessary laws say that everything that isnt a contingent singularity must have an explanation for their existence, or something of that sort.

4:35 i dont think i share the same intuition as you, so maybe it is unfair to say the first option is off the table if your main argument for PSR is intuition.

7:07 you're probably correct by cant something change in its accidental features yet remain necessary. for existence maybe there is a necessarily existing red ball and then someone paints it blue. just because it has changed in its accidental features it doesnt seem the ball cannot necessarily exist.
we could apply the same logic to matter, although matter may change in its accidental features--such as where it is or what type of matter it is--maybe it is still fundamentally energy which could necessarily exist (this is a mere hypothetical and i probably wouldnt defend this view).

9:19 this is quite a good argument--similar to what josh rasmussen argues in one of his books--but i feel the analogy could be more apt. for example, could we not imagine a group of contingent things that exist in a 'symbiotic' relationship (so to speak) such that they form a self-sufficient whole? this might not seem intuitive to you but maybe it could work.

11:03 im not sure how you got to an unchangeable necessary thing but ill go with it.

11:06 why can you always gain that something? if there's a necessarily blue ball, it lacks redness, but it necessarily cannot have redness as it is necessarily blue.

11:22 does this infinite being not lack finite being?

11:24 why are these properties 'real being'? surely you would have to defend these properties as great-making features first?

11:50 why cant we differentiate things other ways, for example twin 1 may be exactly the same as twin 2, yet twin 1 threw a ball and twin 2 didnt. maybe there's two perfect beings, one who necessarily created and the other one who didnt. if you say that creation is necessary to be a perfect being, then this would have to be defended.