Calhoun wrote:

Also, What sort of argument can be presented against necessitarianism? Complete loss of any kind of free will seems  a compelling enough reason to reject it for me but what else can be said ?

 
I can think of some arguments.

1- free will, as mentioned

2- it is easy to imagine the universe being different, having a different collection of particles, not having me in it, having no trees, etc. Almost all philosophers accept there are many different possible worlds available, and scientists also seem to presuppose it and come up with different cosmological models. We generally trust our modal intuitions and and necessitarianism would be extremely counter-intuitive,

3- From experience we do know there are at least some contingent beings. This to me is very clear. There are beings that come to be and also cease to exist; they undergo corruption, etc. A necessary being can't fail to exist at any point or time. One could, perhaps, argue that these things that pass away are just different "modes" of the same necessary substance, but then it is still hard to avoid the fact that these modes would therefore be contingent and subject to change, destruction, passing away. We know at least some beings are contingent, and so necessitarianism is false.

4-  the Kalam cosmological argument also gives us good reason to accept that the universe began to exist, therefore it's not necessary. The scientific evidence for a beggining of the universe would come into play, too.

5- Indeterministic QM?

UGADawg wrote:

Calhoun wrote:

Also, What sort of argument can be presented against necessitarianism? Complete loss of any kind of free will seems  a compelling enough reason to reject it for me but what else can be said ?

It doesn't entail a complete loss of free will any more than run-of-the-mill determinism does. The kind of necessity entailed by PSR is only of the hypothetical or consequent sort, i.e. given the causal antecedents of X, X necessarily is. And we can surely distinguish between that kind of necessity and another kind, usually referred to as absolute or intrinsic or per se necessity, which is just something that must be given the kind of thing that it is. Leibniz himself hashed this out in terms of differences in a thing's essence, which should be sort of familiar to fans of St Thomas, though he obviously had some significant differences there.

On this reading, there would be a kind of necessitarianism in the possible worlds sense, but it's not exactly clear why that's objectionable. The usual argument is that it makes our counterfactual claims nonsensical, e.g. "I could have had juice instead of coffee this morning." because there is no possible world in which I had juice rather than coffee in any robust or thick sense.

But it's not clear this is a problem, for two reasons (a) counterfactual claims need not be interpreted in terms of possible worlds, but could rather just mean something like that one is the kind of thing that had the metaphysical potential to bring about the counterfactual state of affairs; and (b) even if such counterfactual claims do require possible worlds, there's still a very thin sense in which they would at least exist in the mind of God. So as far as I can tell the alleged problem is just a non-issue.

I do wonder what Feser thinks about all this, since, as Daniel has pointed out on Ontological Investigations in his largely negative reviews and as DB Hart pointed out in his largely positive reviews, he's been virtually silent on the issues of free will and PSR, which is a bit surprising. Interestingly, I remember in Scholastic Metaphysics, and I believe in Five Proofs as well, he has cited Lloyd Gerson's article Two Criticisms of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, wherein Gerson's primary objection to modal collapse is in terms of the absolute / hypothetical distinction in necessity, rather than appealing to libertarian free will.

I find this attractive, since I wouldn't want classical theism to be dependent upon such a controversial thesis as libertarian free will, which seems to run into significant problems whenever one attempts to give a sufficiently plausible account of it consistent with PSR.

 
I think he meant free will as in libertarian free will, which I think is required by PSR.

I am not sure if the analysis in (a) would make sense of our modal intuitions and what we talk about when we say stuff such as "I could have had juice instead of coffee", since what we talk about isn't just that there is a metaphysical potential to bring about the counterfactual state of affairs (which would be a ground for alethic modality), but that such a counterfactual state of affairs actually could have been the case, in a stronger sense than that of a conceivable, coherent effect from a metaphysical object. After all, there would be a sense in which, if necessitarianism is true, then there *really* would be no object with the metaphysical potential to bring about something different than what has been created.

For that reason (b) would also not be a sufficient solution. Such possible worlds would not be "possible" in the relevant sense, they would only ground alethic modality in a very weak sense since they wouldn't really be possible worlds after all; in actuality nothing could bring them about, and since there is only potentiality for actuality, there wouldn't be any potential for them to exist either. Necessitarianism even of this kind seems to me deeply problematic.

If given God, it's actually the case that there must be a universe just like ours, then there can really be no possible world in which there is God but no universe like ours; given God in every possible world, our universe would exist in all possible worlds. Otherwise there would be no sufficient reason (per the fatalist psr) for why this universe exists. But then there would also remain the mystery of why the world -- with corruptible beings that could have failed to exist, composite, and wth essence distinct from existence -- could exist in every possible world. Not even the will of God could explain this, since if a thing's essence is distinct from existence then it CANNOT exist in every possible world, as it would be actually possible for its essence to not be instantiated.

Last edited by Miguel (3/07/2018 12:20 pm)

Calhoun wrote:

Actually I wan't focusing on PSR and modal collapse issue, I was thinking about what If the critic simply deny that there are contingent facts at all in response to cosmological argument, or maybe block world view can be challenged if it leads to necessitarianism. That being said, to me it seems libertarianism is more promising way to deal with modal collapse problem. 

 
Points 2, 3 and 4 solve such an issue. Also, 3 not only shows there are contingent things (starting a cosmological argument), it also leads to other cosmological arguments independently of modal collapse anyway (neoplatonic argument, esse essence, act potency etc)

UGADawg wrote:

Miguel wrote:

...but that such a counterfactual state of affairs actually could have been the case, in a stronger sense than that of a conceivable, coherent effect from a metaphysical object.

Yeah, I just don't see why. You just seem to be relying intuitions, here, rather than any kind of principled objection. Have you read the accounts from Leibniz, Martin Lin, and others that actually deal with the intuitive aspect of it, or are you just going off my one sentence summary?

Miguel wrote:

After all, there would be a sense in which, if necessitarianism is true, then there *really* would be no object with the metaphysical potential to bring about something different than what has been created.

But surely you know this is just wrong even from a Thomist perspective. As Feser has argued, I believe in SM, potentialities are not coextensive with possibilities, and are indeed grounded in the actualities of the substance in question, such that those potentialities are real even if they never could be actualized in principle.

Miguel wrote:

Such possible worlds would not be "possible" in the relevant sense...

But this is just straightforwardly question-begging, for you're assuming the only relevant sense of possible is that of possible worlds semantics. But, of course, there are alternative understandings of God's considering possibilities in his mind that doesn't appeal to the modern conception, so you'd need to actually engage those arguments (Lin usefully covers this as well).

 
I read Leibniz a long time ago on the subject of divine freedom and possible worlds, and it didn't seem coherent to me. Haven't read Martin Lin. So yeah, I'm going by your summary.

As I granted, but this doesn't solve the issue that there is a stronger sense of possibility which must be fulfilled. Is it really unproblematic to say X has a potential for Y if Y cannot ever be actualized? If you don't find that wrong, well and good, but I do. There is a sense in which if something can never, ever happen, then there is no potency for it. Potentiality stands in relation to actuality; it ispotency for something. If there can't ever really be something actual for which that potency would correspond to (under necessitarianism), can there thus be a potency for it? What will it be a potency for? Are these potencies in relation to God's power and that's it?

My point was that there is a sense in which pw semantics stays with us even if you seek to ground potentiality in powers. The issue is that if {if given God then our universe must exist}, then our universe exists in all possible worlds (per pw semantics), but it is impossible for a being whose essence is distinct from existence to exist in all possible worlds. You say this begs the question by assuming that "the only relevant sense of possible is that of possible worlds semantics", but no, I am merely stating that the sense of possible in pw semantics is ONE relevant sense of "possible" which we both can grasp, and this is important. It is a distinct concept from that of dependence, which is why we can discuss this. Because of this, it would be no good to reduce possibility to dependence even if it turned out to be the case that you can't have possibility without dependence; just as it would be no good to reduce trilaterality to triangularity even if one can't exist without the other. They are still different concepts.

To try to make it clearer: the problem I see is that there is a primitive sense of possibility (known by the very fact we seek to explain it, even if by appealing to causal powers for instance; the concepts remain different) which guides our attempts to ground and explain it; this primitive sense however would require us to say it really is possible for dependent things to not-exist as a counterfactual if you may, which isn't adequately fulfilled by merely saying something remains possible just because it is grounded in some metaphysical power, even if that thing could never actualize it.

This last point is important because necessitarianism would require the "could", not merely a "will never, or doesn't ever, actualize it", since the latter would be open to counterfactuals and the notion that reality could be other than what it is. But then necessitarianism here would seem prey to circularity and a different primitive modality included in "could" (surely it wouldn't make sense to say 'X remains possible because there is a metaphysical object Y with the power to bring about X, even if Y does not have the power to bring about X").

Last edited by Miguel (3/08/2018 1:04 pm)

DanielCC wrote:

Two general points: 

It seems clear that no one (least of all myself) in this thread is that interested in the problem of evil. This though is popularly considered one of the major justifications of atheism, even if - as I suspect - it’s post hoc.

The Logical Problem is not considered such a major issue any more (though Smith and others have presented important new variations) so the debate centred on the Probabilistic version and whether Sceptical Theism is an adequate solution. I’d be interested in people’s thoughts on this.

The other thing is that though the atheist ought to be seeking alternative explanations in non-theistic necessarily beings I suspect a significant number of them will attempt to well poison, by trying to keep up sceptical dirt and the loss of metaphysics or philosophy as an explanatory venture in general.

 
My take on the problem of evil is that it can at least be defused if one considers a more complete case about the existence of God.

That is to say, we already have reasons to believe God exists (whether deductively or inductively) from cosmological arguments, teleological, the soul, and whatever else one might add (augustinian argument, religious experience, perhaps morality and axiology, etc). And we have to take this into consideration when approaching the problem of evil. For that reason we can mount a defense against PoE, like skeptical theism, in that God may have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil in the world. This can be strengthened if we consider that different theodicies have been presented (like Swinburne's, Stewart Goetz's, Stump's, Robin Collins's, etc), so it is reasonable that at least some of these theodicies can turn out to be correct, or that there is a theodicy out there that is correct.

With that in mind, we have good reasons to accept a skeptical theist defense, and it is also more plausible that God exists (from argument X of natural theology) than that God could have no morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil and suffering.

Since I think atheism faces enormous problems (as mentioned in the thread), I don't think anything like PoE or divine hidenness can save it. To me the best defense against PoE is a positive case for the existence of God, so I think the latter takes precedence, and the problem of evil has become so popular nowadays because knowledge about classical arguments of natural theology has declined. If there are no strong reasons to believe God exists, then why would one be inclined to accept skeptical theism or a theodicy?

Last edited by Miguel (3/08/2018 1:29 pm)