Leslie, J - The World's Necessary Existence

The World's Necessary ExistenceAuthor(s): John LeslieSource: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 11, No. 4 (1980), pp. 207-224Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40012544 .

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THE WORLD'S NECESSARY EXISTENCE

JOHN LESLIE

Articles

University of Guelph

When God created the world, then how, and what made God a reality? Perhaps these things should not be asked. The world may exist reasonlessly or God may - if he exists at all. Creative power may be similarly inexplicable. Many view Nature's basic laws as reasonless, events do conform to them and that, they say, is all there is to it, so might we not say the same about a law that a deity's every creative wish is satisfied? Gamblers hope to influence dice by will-power. Possibly divine will just happens to be more successful. And yet it is strange to find in God a solution as to why the world exists, or as to why its elements have such and such causal powers, if God's own reality and power are treated as needing no explanation. It can seem an altogether simpler theory that it is worldly things and their powers which need none. However, I find such a theory difficult to accept. Elaborating on themes introduced in a recent book and other writings,1 this paper will therefore consider an answer to the questions with which it opened. It may be the only answer available. If it fails, then the questions should probably be suppressed and so perhaps should the entire God-hypothesis. If it succeeds, then perhaps it will be only through moving away from the sense of the word "God" which most have in mind when such questions are raised.

Certainly it is curious that some treat questions of this type so briefly, commenting only that "God's necessary existence" has not yet been proved to be nonsensical, or arguing that because God exists eternally his existence presents no problem, or claiming that in his case any explanations would be beyond human understanding. "You ask me, what is the cause of this cause? I know not; I care not; that concerns not me. I have found a Deity; and here I stop my enquiry,"2 often sums it up.

The Supposedly Necessary Existence of Whatever God Wishes to Exist

It may be wrong to picture God as a person able to wish or to command in some straightforward sense. Yet assume it for the moment and assume that

Int J Phil Rel 11:207-224 (1980) 0020-7047/80/0114-0207 $02. 70. © 1980 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers bv, The Hague. Printed in the Netherlands.



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God is in a creative relationship to other existent s. It would be a relationship of form Not (C without W) where C is the creator or his creative wishes and W the created world. Now, just why would the relationship hold?

It would be something red-blooded, in contrast to any triviality which holds automatically whenever C is absent, so that we lack even the first of the two feet on which a relationship could be expected to stand. By never uttering an Abracadabra a conjuror could guarantee that Not (Abracadabra without Rabbit) remained the case, but we have no such cheap guarantee in mind when supposing that any wishes of God's are necessarily effective. It would likewise not hold through the mere presence of the second foot. (If the rabbit is already peering out of the conjuror's hat it is trivial that Not (Abracadabra without Rabbit) would be true for any Abracadabra now uttered.) What is envisaged is instead a relationship having two firm feet, two actually existent "terms," yet in which the second foot owes its existence to the first. Can any such relationship be guaranteed by the natures of its terms?

Relationships can certainly be real necessarily. Imagine that a deity's creative wishes are fulfilled. Will not they and the world which fulfils them then be through their very natures alike in various structural respects, somewhat as a town plan is like the resulting town? More simply, suppose you take two grass blades from the town park and lay them parallel and in contact. Surely their natures will settle whether the one is longer than the other. The crux, though, is that in these cases we deal with existing things. We have two grass blades; relationships of identity or of difference in length thus have two feet on which to stand and the natures of the feet force a particular relationship to stand on them. But were there only the one blade, how could it "have some necessary relationship to the other' '? Creative necessitation may chase its own tail. For how could a relationship necessitating the presence of a world owe its own necessity partly to that world? Were the world already present, there would be no need to bring it into existence by a creative act, yet if it were not present then how could it and various creative desires or activities be in a relationship made necessary by their natures?

Impressed by this difficulty we may decide not to picture God's creative power as guaranteed "by the very natures of things." Fortified by the reflection that explanations cannot ramble on infinitely, we may say that nothing in the nature of God's wishes and of their effects in any way necessitates that God's wishes indeed do have effects. Rather it is a brute fact that God's wishes are fulfilled on every one of countless occasions. Yet even if we dress this up a little by speaking of Law (not of Nature but of Supernatural Action) we seem to be bidding farewell to satisfying explanation. Why is there a basilisk in Amsterdam? There is nothing



The World's Necessary Existence 209

helpful in the "explanation" which runs, "Because two basilisks are there," and to exchange "two" for "countless" hardly improves matters.3

God's Own Supposed Necessity of Existence

Worse awaits us when we ask about the allegedly necessary existence of God-as-a-person. We no longer have even a relationship's first foot, a creative wish, which struggles to guarantee the presence of the second. God must instead use his bare possibility to bring about his own existence. Instead of creatively requiring something else he must be creatively self- requiring.

Let me confess to finding fewer stumbling-blocks here than do most, (i) God's creative self-requirement would not involve his existing before himself so as to be able to pull himself into being by his own bootstraps. A divine person would be a creator, Aquinas insisted, if a world necessarily accompanied his desire for it. Desire and world might always have existed: temporal priority did not enter into the concept of creation. Neither, then, does it enter into that of self-creation. Admitting that nothing could cause itself if a thing's "cause" meant something existing prior to and separately from it, Descartes still called God self-causing, intending only that God's nature necessitated his existence eternally, (ii) That emptiness cannot contradict itself dots not worry me since I cannot see why God's necessity of existence should be assumed to be a case of logical necessity, necessity imposed by avoidance of contradictions, (iii) Mainly necessities seem to me to concern possibilities. For instance: If only there were two boxes, one with internal measurements 20 x 30 x 40 cm. , the other measuring 2 x 3 x 4 cm. externally, then the smaller necessarily would fit inside the larger.

All the same it is hard to detect how necessities concerning possibilities could escape being thoroughly infected with "if-only-ness," purest hypotheticality. How could any such necessity bring about any actual thing? Impossible attributes, such as being simultaneously round and square, give to their putative possessors a guaranteed A2o«-existence, but by what magic could possible attributes guarantee existence? To declare that they simply could not, just because of a failure to detect how they could, would no doubt be rather question-begging. But I should beg the question blithely if no insight could be offered into the means whereby possibilities might act creatively.

A Treacherous Ambiguity in "What Could Possibly Be So"

Suppose someone insists on the question's not being begged. A self-



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necessitating Being, he tells us, cannot be ruled out. But if so, he continues, such a Being is at least possible. And if possible then he must be actual also, because the no more than possible existence of the necessarily existent is an absurdity!

Is his proof of God's existence a success? Far from it. To bring about something's existence a necessity must be "out there," "ontological," "in the nature of things." Our not being able to rule out a Necessary Being would in contrast concern goings on "in here," in minds. Plainly it could not make the Being really possible, "possible out there," in a way which then guaranteed his existence. Compare the following case. Trials have convinced most mathematicians that every even number is the sum of two primes, as 20 is of 7 and 13. If right, they are right necessarily: in all possible worlds every even number is this. Now, perhaps they are right. Possibly it is a necessity that every even number is the sum of two primes. But this is no Ontological Proof of any such necessity. It would be mad to reason here that a necessity which is possible must be more than merely possible. Nothing compels every possible necessity to escalate into a necessity whose presence is assured.

Still, nor need a necessity's possible absence escalate into its assured absence! Soon I shall be arguing that the entire universe, or a divine person in particular, might be required in a way which we could understand. The requiredness would issue from the nature itself of the universe or the divine person, not from any outside entity which might or might not chance to be present. Any creative effectiveness which it had would therefore not be haphazard. At the same time, requiredness of the sort I have in mind could perhaps be creatively ineffective. But is not this the claiming of a necessity in one breath ("its effectiveness would not be haphazard") and rejection of it in the next ("could be ineffective")? No it is not. The words "could be ineffective" must be read as the context demands, as an admission that nothing is known here. There could be an even number not the sum of two primes, for aught I know, but in another sense of "could," the "ontological" (rather than "epistemological") sense, it is I think untrue that there could. It could be that the requiredness which I have in mind is creatively ineffective so that nothing possesses necessary existence, yet perhaps a deity or the entire universe possesses it.

How God's or the World's Existence Might Be Explained

What could be meant by the above talk of something's having a requiredness to which its own nature gave rise? In his "Two 'Proofs' of God's Existence"4 A.C. Ewing speculates that God's existence is "necessary not because there would be any internal self-contradiction in




denying it but because it was supremely good that God should exist." Now, perhaps we ought not to protest that it is just so obvious that the

ethical need or requirement expressed by "it was supremely good that God should exist" could not possibly be responsible for God's existence; for what form would the obviousness take? (i) Could Pure Intellects tell from the mere sense of the phrase "ethical requirement" that ethical requirements were never directly responsible for any actual existence, not even an existence as much required as Ewing believes God's to be? Some ways of giving sense to the phrase - for example the way of prescriptivists for whom calling a thing ethically required is an egging on of somebody to produce it - would make Ewing wrong. But Ewing is no prescriptivist. To prescriptivism a good is something marked out for existence by someone's appropriate demand (where to call a demand appropriate is to make the demand oneself)- In contrast the account of God's existence which Ewing is suggesting seems to me to involve that a good can be required, marked out for existence, by its own nature, regardless of whether anyone demands it.5 It might still be that all ultimate goods were ones of happy consciousness, which would be much in demand once there existed people to demand it. It is simply that people would not have to demand it first for it to be good that people should exist to have it. (ii) Yet did not the very concept of ethically required existence evolve because ethical requirements ARE NOT creatively effective, so that the world contains room for moral effort? Well, NOT ALL ethical requirements would be considered creatively effective by Ewing or by anyone in his right mind. But standard defences against the Problem of Evil start from the conviction that such requirements can conflict: a possible reason why some of them are unfulfilled is therefore that they have been overruled by others of them. If, however, God is the most perfect being that there could be, his existence may be the object of an ethical requirement so strong that no other could overrule it. (iii) Suppose we define "purely ethical force" as follows: In the absence of a good the purely ethical force of the requirement for that good's existence is exhausted in making its absence tragic or unfortunate, thereby supplying moral grounds for efforts to produce it. Even an ethical requirement which itself produced the existence of something would then not be exerting purely ethical force. Ethical purity being defined as specified, creative power becomes an impurity. Now, I challenge nobody's right to march to this linguistic tune. It sounds natural to say that a requirement acting creatively, even if it were "a requirement ethical in kind," would exert an authority which was "not purely" (or "not just," or even "not strictly" when this means not just rather than not genuinely) ethical "because it was creative as well." But these points do not narrow the field of requirements able to act creatively, excluding the ethical ones.



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That ethical requirements ARE NEVER creatively effective may thus be very speculative metaphysics. Conceptual analysis may fail to reveal the Necessary Creative Ineffectiveness of all such requirements and eyes may give no firm knowledge of their actual ineffectiveness. Discussions of the Problem of Evil and of alleged signs of ethically guided Design suggest that in this area the evidence is ambiguous.6

We might now have our answer not only to why God exists but also to how he creates other things. Any creative wishes of a supremely good person would be good; there would be an ethical need for them to be satisfied; so if God's existence can result from the ethical need for it then that of the things for which God wished might result from the need for them, a need which his wishes recognized and (because a good person's wish for something increases the need for it) reinforced. Yet perhaps God's wishes and their reinforcing effects are pointless complications. We might instead say simply that a scheme of things of which God forms part exists thanks to its ethical requiredness. For if God's existence can be held, not blasphemously but as a compliment, to be the product of an ethical requirement, why think it any more blasphemous to treat all existence similarly? No deity would be the less good through not bringing about goods which came about quite as readily without any creative desires of his. Besides, there would remain an important sense in which God could be creatively active. In a universe existing in response to an ethical requirement each thing would owe its existence to how it fitted into a good system. A divine being, if part of this cosmic system, could well be the centre around which all was organized. He would then be a main factor helping to make every other being creatively required because the natures of the other beings - how many and which other beings would exist -

would be determined largely by how they could best interact with him. Still, they would also have to be such as could interact suitably with one another. Hence it would be the nature of the universe as a whole which set up the requirement for the existence of its individual elements. The divine person, even if perhaps carrying far more creative weight than any other of these elements, would not be the only one of them to carry it. Expressed more simply: the universe would be its own creative ground. By virtue of its own nature it would be ethically and creatively self-requiring.

Our initial problem was of how existence could be generated from possibilities. We have an actual conjuror, a possible rabbit; how can the rabbit be made actual too? Or we have a possible deity; how can his possibility render his existence inevitable? Once a thing exists, most people today think its continued existence no mystery. Far from introducing a Creator to "conserve" it, they ask why it should disappear when no Annihilator is at work. We might risk saying that they see things as re- creating themselves from instant to instant. In contrast a thing's "creating




itself from nothing" - its maneuvering so to speak with its possibility in order to bring about its existence - strikes them as absurd. When nothing existed would not all facts about possibilities be too trivially hypothetical to engage in creative action? Well, hypothetical they would be, but not trivial. Even in an emptiness it would be of importance that a good world might have been there instead. Such a world's absence would be tragic although there would exist nobody to experience it as tragic, just as an evil world's absence could be a blessing though no one would be there to be blessed. Ethics is wh§re possibilities can be unconditionally significant. Accepting a need for a good world to continue in existence, how extravagant to deny one for such a world to come into existence! Ethical requirements need not wait for a divine person (existing reasonlessly?) to conjure them into reality (just by thinking about them?) before commencing any creative activity of which they are capable. That a world of a certain sort is possible can be quite enough to make them real.

A picture of an "empty" situation, empty of anything more concrete than an ethical need, which is followed by a divine person or an entire universe created by that need, is of course defective. Were the need truly able to act creatively then there never would have been any such situation; as commented earlier, creation does not imply a temporal beginning of existence. Still, a requirement responsible for all existence must at least have a reality which is not itself dependent on any fact of existence. Though its status as a creatively effective requirement would certainly depend on the existence of something created by it, the requirement evidently could not stem from the previously given existence of that something if it were to act as its creative ground. It would have to be "ontologically prior" to what it created, even if not prior temporally. Ethical requirements have reality of the unconditional kind needed to fit this bill.

"Pointing in the Right Direction"

Many elements in the position now reached can be developed in much detail. Let us, however, concentrate on the query, "Just how could an ethical requirement operate creatively?" The answer is simply that some such requirement may require with creative success.

An ethical requirement for a world or for a deity must after all be a requirement for such a world or deity to exist. It must be at least analogous to a causal or creative requirement to this extent, that it makes sense to say that it has actually been fulfilled by the presence of what is required. Causally required situations are typically conceived as ones marked out for existence by other earlier situations: the powder trail is lighted and the



214 John Leslie

barrel becomes fated to explode. Good situations can be marked out for existence through their own natures. No external fuse is essential to their being required. Now their marked-out-ness is of course ethical: the coming into being of a good satisfies an ethical requirement but it in no way follows that it was produced by that requirement. The word "requirement" tells us nothing about whether ethical requirements are ever practically powerful. No analogy between them and causal requirements can assure us that they yield practical effects or that they tend to yield them or that it is "a priori probable" that they do. But they are requirements for the existence of things so that it is not entirely baffling to suggest that some of them might yield them, requiring existence with success. This is not quite the same as supposing that the moon or being spherical or the volume of the average bucket could be successful - which could only provoke the puzzled inquiry, "Successful in doing what?" Ethical requirements "point in some direction." (Compare the case of inductive reasoning. A man's expecting the next apple to be nutritious is at any rate not bewildering. To think in contrast that the next would be poisonous, just because previous ones were not, seems absurd. Now, it would be every bit as absurd to imagine that a divine person or a world existed because his or its absence was ethically required. If an ethical requirement is to play any role here, then it is clear how it will have to "point." It will have to be a requirement for the world's or a divine person's presence.)

In search of a factor able to explain all existence you are looking not for a new fertilizer or a monstrous hand, or a mathematical formula which might apply to events if there were any, but for an unconditionally real requirement for the presence of the world or of a creator. An ethical requirement presents itself - and you dismiss it as not the kind of thing wanted! Well, do you hope to hit upon some other variety of requirement which, could some Being bring it under control, might allow him actually to create what would otherwise be marked out for existence only ethically? You would still have to suppose that this other variety of requirement marked things out for existence with creative success instead of "only" marking them out for existence. Yet if it could act creatively then why could not an ethical requirement?

If we leave aside the extremely serious Problem of Evil - the often hideously clear fact that not every ethical requirement is practically powerful, so that for instance the need for a man not to kill another never removes his freedom to kill - then the main difficulties which people find here are two. One lies in an assumption that ethical requirements are all of them really only requirements that people should act thus and so, and even that there is nothing good or evil or fortunate or unfortunate outside of what people's actions could influence. But this assumption's second half is plainly wrong: the absence of a world (an evil one) could be fortunate, that




of some other (a world containing people whose lives were on the whole worth living) unfortunate, even if there actually existed no people, let alone people able to influence whether a world existed. Whether the assumption's first half is wrong is less plain, yet it can seem strange to call a world's absence "unfortunate" while simultaneously denying that such a world is ethically marked out for existence or required. Though if you wish to say that in an absence of all people who might be ethically obliged to create it a world would be marked out "not truly ethically but only quasi- ethically or as what is essential from the standpoint of goodness," then please yourself, so long as you see that its goodness really would be a matter of its being marked out for existence. Goodness is no mere quality on a level with yellowness.

The second main difficulty - it worries people most - is this. Suppose that some ethical requirement was indeed creatively effective for a time but that then a baneful Annihilatory Factor counteracted it. Would not the requirement remain as real as ever? Or suppose it was only thought to have creative success while in fact it had none; would it not be as real either way? It was the ability of ethical requirements to be real whether or not they were fulfilled that formed my excuse for calling them requirements of a kind which, issuing from sheer possibilities, might plausibly explain why anything actually exists. And yet if an ethical requirement could be real even when not fulfilled then it could the more plainly be real even when not bringing about its own fulfilment. So how can it be held that some such requirement is itself creatively powerful? Is it not now clear that the reality of ethical requirements in themselves has nothing to do with power?

How to Balance "Could Be Powerless" against "Could Themselves Have Power Necessarily"

I do want there to be a sense in which some ethical requirements "could themselves be creatively effective," even "effective necessarily," instead of needing to be put into effect by some outside agency. Yet words can take many senses.

(A) Remember for a start the ambiguities threatening "what could be so," "possible," "necessary." In an epistemological sense of the words "could be" there could be an even number not the sum of two primes; it can still be that, in their ontological sense, there could be no such number. It is perhaps an ontological fact that the strongest ethical requirement (or set of compatible requirements) must necessarily be creatively powerful even though anyone believing this "could be wrong" (meaning that he is, as an epistemological fact, not demonstrably right), this yielding a sense in which it could be powerless. The creative effectiveness of any supreme



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ethical requirement would not be haphazard, any more than is the fact that exactly such and such (though I cannot be sure what) is what is supremely required. The requirement's practical power or else its lack of it (for I cannot know which) is eternally fixed; the ontological fact simply does lie in the one way or the other, always Oust as when an experience is intrinsically good then others like it are intrinsically good in all possible worlds even if nobody can demonstrate their intrinsic goodness), for such power would not be derived from some outside agency, some magic spell or whatever, which might be present today yet absent tomorrow, nor need we take seriously the idea of an Annihilatory Factor which could at any moment interfere. So if such a requirement really is creatively powerful there is a sense, the ontological one, in which it * 'could not have failed to be so." Yet even if ordained ontologically the power cannot be proved by examining concepts. We can well conceive what it would be like for the requirement not to be fulfilled; we can see that a good possibility would then be very importantly unactualized and that the possibility's own nature and not any outside agency would be what made this important; all which shows how bare possibilities can carry weight, as they must if any explanation of all existence is to get off the ground.

(B) Now, why is every ethical requirement's powerlessness an epistemological possibility so that even existence which is infinitely required, a divine person's perhaps, is not at all evidently guaranteed? The reply is that a creatively effective ethical requirement would be a reality having two aspects separable in our thoughts about it. As well as the creative aspect, there would be the ethical one mentioned above, the fact that the requirement's non-fulfilment would be important, unfortunate, tragic. Recognizing this fact is not an admission that the non-fulfilment is or was or will be ontologically possible. The creative power must be there necessarily and eternally if it is there at all. But its presence or absence is irrelevant to the truth that the requirement's non-fulfilment would be unfortunate or tragic. Armchair contemplation of this ethical truth therefore gives no clue to whether such power is there or not.

Shall we then say that any creative side to the affair would be "essentially non-ethical" and that an ethical requirement "in itself" and "as such" cannot have power? Curiously enough this turns out to be a matter of verbal choice. We are dealing with what is envisaged as a unity. It is not as though an ethical requirement and a quite separate creative one just happened to be set up by the nature of one and the same possibility. Rather, some possibility's nature supposedly marks out that possibility for existence (which it would do as an ethical matter even if nothing creative came of this) with practical success (which is the creative aspect of the business). The requirement's being ethical, on the one hand, and its creative force on the other (which not all ethical requirements possess), are




only abstractions from this unified reality. But abstractions can be malleable. Particularly when it is an abstract term, a term may cover much or little according to your taste, as I shall next illustrate, (i) Watching a play, you concentrate on an actor. Is he "as such" red in the face? Some features belong to actors as such in the way that having husbands belongs to wives as such. By "an actor as such" we could mean an abstraction possessed of those features alone. "Actors as such," we could declare, "don't have red faces." Yet we should mean not that no actor can have one but that an actor can lack one. I am willing to say that no ethical requirement "as such" can be creatively effective but please interpret this correctly. There is a sense in which some actors as such are red-faced, meaning that they are not white-faced ones under red greasepaint. There can seem to be a sense in which some ethical requirements as such might act creatively.

(ii) Is "the actor himself" red- faced? This appears to have a firm answer until you ask whether an actor must end where greasepaint begins. The actor exits; returns raging and red; is he himself red? Well, are you asking whether his artistry extends to blood pressure control, or could "himself red" be satisfied with the help of make-up but not with that of a red spotlight? Must "an ethical requirement itself" end where creative power begins, so that such requirements never in themselves have this power? The question can look similarly ambiguous.

(iii) When it changes to a purple, has a red taken on a blue element, or must red be red and blue blue and never the twain meet in any talk of the one "taking on" the other? In the latter spirit we might say that the ethical requiredness of a divine person could not itself take on responsibility for his existence.

(iv) Will a man's being a mammal move around when he does or is it "too abstract to have a position"? In the latter spirit we might say that an ethical requirement is too abstract, "too straightforwardly ethical by its very definition," to have creative power.

(v) A philosopher claims that minds are immaterial. Does he then think his body controlled by a separate, immaterial, non-spatial entity? Not necessarily. He may be as much a materialist as any Mind-Brain Identity man. But in contrast to those who define the mind as what controls the body's intelligent movements, then identifying this with the brain in its material entirety, he may mean by "mind" something more abstract: for instance the sum of what is knowable by introspection. Now, introspection gives no knowledge of the brain in its material entirety (nor could it be expected to even if brains are what introspect). Hence the philosopher, believing that brains carry on all our mental processes, may still call minds immaterial and non-spatial. This is a simple, if confusing, consequence of his use of "mind" to stand for a pale abstraction. It may still be that minds



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defined thus palely exist only as aspects of brains. Somewhat similarly, creative power may exist only as an aspect of various requirements which have ethical characteristics, it then becoming arbitrary whether you declare "that ethical requirements themselves and as such sometimes act creatively" or whether you limit yourself to saying "that creative requirements have an ethical aspect which is essential to them."

(vi) Is any ethical requirement which acts creatively "a requirement more than merely ethical"? Even this has its ambiguity. An object can be gray as well as being a hard stone without our having to deny that it is through and through and even "merely and purely" a hard stone. There might be nothing self-contradictory in saying that God's existence has a requiredness which "is merely and purely ethical and is creative," instead of that this requiredness, "rather than being merely and purely ethical requiredness, is creative also." The first way of speaking would reflect a decision so to use words that "merely and purely ethical" authority could extend to the creative authority exerted by any ethical requirement which brought about its own fulfilment, creative authority would be being treated as a kind of ethical authority (widely defined). This would risk giving the impression that the ideas of ethical and of creative importance were indistinguishable so that no ethical aspect would be left to the requirement if creative success were absent; hence, I cannot recommend it, but it is a possible way of speaking.

Whatever you say here must be said with one of two possible interpretations in mind and your audience will often saddle it with the other, so making it asinine and inconsistent with things said earlier. Let me therefore insist that there evidently are senses in which ethical requirements themselves and as such, requirements purely or strictly ethical, could not possibly create anything. The position is just that there are other senses in which this is not evident.

The Simplicity of This Account of Creation

I. Whether a requirement's creative effectiveness might itself be an ethical matter may depend, I have argued, on where we choose to draw the boundaries of ethical matters, and this can raise a dust of misunderstandings. The underlying situation can however appear simple enough. Once having supposed that requirements stemming from mere possibilities can call for the existence of things, there may seem nothing very daring in speculating that some of these requirements create something, and this despite their ability to retain some reality -

"indisputably ethical" reality - even if they created nothing. Whether the requirements when acting creatively would be "engaging in ethical action"




may involve nothing more complex than an arbitrary decision on how to use "ethical" in an unusual context. Correspondingly, hesitations about saying "that some ethical requirements require with creative success" could combine with a conviction that requirements requiring with creative success had an ethical aspect which was essential to them, an aspect explaining why they did not depend for their reality on previously existing things. Their creative success would be separable in thought from this other side of them which might alone be called ethical and which would then include all that they could do as ethical requirements. (A judge can blow his nose but it is trying and sentencing which he does as a judge.) The linguistic decision which made being ethical end where the creative power began would not be positively wrong. The case is of course not quite like that of a stone which, hard through and through, still has grayness which goes beyond its hardness, but there is no definite error of linguistic tactics in treating these cases similarly, stipulating that creative ability goes beyond what "ethical" is to cover.

The outcome can admittedly look strange. A requirement both ethical and creatively successful will still be denied to be "an ethical requirement which requires with creative success" or "an ethical requirement which is itself creative." The grounds for this oddity will be that the requirement's ethical aspect, since some at least of it would survive in the absence of creative success, is able to be defined as ending, all of it, before creative success begins, and has, as a matter of linguistic tactics, in fact been defined as ending there (whereas phrases like "an ethical requirement which is itself creative" would give a contrary impression). But if these tactics strike you as needlessly confusing, remember that anything said here will tend to confuse because the context is so unusual. Explaining God's or the universe's existence is not an everyday affair and it is unsure that even Ewing7 (or Plato, Plotinus, Dionysius, Aquinas, Leibniz, Tillich) has attempted quite the explanation I have sketched; there are therefore excuses for holding that I give to "ethical" a somewhat novel and extended sense when, adopting different linguistic tactics, I suggest "that some ethical requirements themselves require creatively." And extended senses risk causing confusion.

It is not always easy to decide whether a sense is being stretched. (Will "mind" be used in an extended sense when computers of the year 5000 are said to have minds?) But my stretching of a sense, if that is what it is, can scarcely be very bold when it is difficult to judge whether it has occurred at all. That the context is unusual - that everyday handling of "ethical" is against the background of "How ought we to act?" rather than of "Why does God or the world exist?" - cuts both ways. Nobody is suggesting that all ethical requirements are effective; if some of them bring about a universe, ensuring that physical laws favour life's evolution, this may be



220 John Leslie

the full extent of their creative action, and it need not be claimed that they meddle constantly with everyday life, for instance by removing each would-be criminal's freedom of action or ensuring that men of good will can walk on water in an emergency, since such meddling might satisfy one set of ethical needs only at the cost of overruling a stronger set, and hence ordinary decision-making may well be unaffected by the proposed "ethical explanation of existence." To maintain, then, that ethical requirements are never themselves effective in producing anything, this being proved by ordinary usage of "ethical," can seem to foist on the language of ordinary ethical judgements a firm opposition to speculations which perhaps never enter ordinary heads and are in any case not opposed to those judgements. So anyone making "ethical" function in such a way that ethical requirements are by definition creatively powerless may himself introduce a new sense of "ethical," a restricted sense. This supplies a first reason for claiming that my position is fairly straightforward.

II. Yet is not the position very bold metaphysically? Perhaps not. It is not as though we open-minded empiricists had looked to see whether a divine person or a universe existed and had found neither. We cannot even say confidently that the Problem of Evil defies solution. So, granted the intelligibility of the idea that ethical requirements ("in an extended sense" if you insist) could have creative effects, there may be nothing very adventurous in speculating that they do have them. The alternative, that the universe exists reasonlessly, may be as risky and as metaphysical.

What would be excessive would be a complex apparatus "behind" the creative effectiveness of "requirements which would otherwise be merely ethical." But no apparatus is imagined. The requirements mark things out for existence and they do so with creative success; that is all there is to it. This is, I submit, no more desperately complex than their marking them out for existence unsuccesfully. Rather than ask for Creative Machinery to come to their aid in the first case, you might equally well postulate Annihilatory Magic which opposed them in the second. It is seriously question-begging to argue that the requirements would in the second case have the only success they themselves possibly could have, "success" lying in how they really did mark things out for existence ethically, and that therefore the creation of such things would involve a complicating element which went beyond the ethical. For by what exercise of Pure Reason could we know that ethical marking out of things for existence - unlike a marking out of them by a deity's desires, or a marking out for existence of events such as arrow flights by factors such as bowstrings under tension - must everywhere end before practical success begins? We could know it only through a decision so to use "ethical" that a marking out of something for existence could not be ethical with respect to any creative power which it had, power being a non-ethical aspect of any requirements




which possess it even when these have an ethical aspect essential to this power. Such a linguistic decision would be no more wrong than taking milk in your tea, and it would be no more right either. Nothing substantive could hinge on whether "ethical" took the narrow sense envisaged rather than the wider one which I favour.

III. Yet may not the position stem from too unconvincing an evaluation of the universe? Does it not involve looking out on a world of plagues and earthquakes, seeing that this is precisely such a world as ethical requirements could be expected to create, and concluding that they must have created it? Not at all. "Unconvincing" might be too polite for that. "Incredibly indifferent to the world's horrors" could be what it deserved. The order of ideas must instead be much the one followed in this paper, (a) We start from a reluctance to accept that the universe jumped into existence reasonlessly or always has existed reasonlessly. (b) It turns out however that neither the universe nor a divine creator is logically required; how then can we bridge the gap between merely possible and actual existence? Foundations for an answer are not common as pebbles. I can see one only: that even in an absence of any world whatever a requirement for a world to exist would still be real if it were ethical, (c) Unfortunately we cannot examine details of how ethical needs might act creatively, asking whether the mechanism is likely to work. Even metaphorical talk of a mechanism is bizarre in this area. Yet though the absence of a creative mechanism has the drawback that we cannot examine a creative mechanism to estimate its "a priori probability of effectiveness," it has an advantage also. The proposed theory of creation is simple. This can encourage us to cling to it in the face of what can seem strong counter- evidence, which is decidedly different from looking out on plagues and earthquakes and "seeing" that the world is so remarkably good that Goodness must be responsible for it. The idea that the world is good need not give rise to, but can instead be a consequence of, the theory that some ethical requirements act creatively. Certainly plagues and earthquakes can appear very hostile to the theory. But the idea of "looking around and seeing how the world must be evaluated" is an odd one and is not the idea from which my reasoning begins.

Whether God Would Be a Person

If a mere need could itself create something then what would it create? The question threatens to alter one's entire world-picture. Among competing models of reality many which are compatible with experience can still be considered highly implausible if all existence exists reasonlessly. They may suddenly become attractive or even forced on us when we think of it as



222 John Leslie

existing for ethical reasons. But I shall here concentrate on a single issue. Would creative ethical requirements bring about the existence of a divine person?

To answer Yes may undermine defences against the Problem of Evil. God-as-a-person is usually pictured as having immense or infinite knowledge, intelligence, artistic sense and so on, and as having in consequence a "life" (or at least a mode of consciousness) supremely desirable. But why then does not reality consist of countless divine people and nothing else? If the divine kind of consciousness is consciousness at its best then why would God as a creator, or ethical requirements which were themselves creative, ever allow consciousness to take another form? (i) Some reply that not even two Gods can be possible if God is infinite. But while there could not be two infinitely powerful and quarrelsome Devils since each would wish to use his power in restricting his fellow's, the notion that Gods would quarrel is paradoxical. Again, if "infinite" means being everything that exists then there could not be two infinite Gods but nor could there be even one and a separately existing man; if God exists all of us would have to be parts of God, and then God would be "a person" only in a flabbergasting sense, (ii) Identity of Indiscernibles, if valid, prevents two divine persons who are precisely alike. However, it allows for any number of divine people so long as even the most trivial differences distinguish them, (iii) If God's existence is so desirable that there is no ethical need for the existence even of other people similar to him, he himself fulfilling every need, then one wonders how to account for the existence of mere human people and what could be evil in killing them. (I have not managed to grasp how the good, however immense, of one existent could make it any less desirable that there should be others also.)

Arguments so brief will not persuade many. Still, they perhaps add interest to the fact that many religious believers deny that God is a being. By "God" they seem to mean a creative force with an ethical aspect, a Power of Being which the world displays. God may still be "personal" but only in acting as a benevolent person would to produce a universe whose value lies chiefly in the lives of its people - ordinary people of limited knowledge and ability, experiencing not phantasmagoric "dream lives" but life in a world whose causal laws bring it only partly under their control. For Tillich, "to argue that God exists is to deny him"; God is instead "a creative ground of existence," "the creative ground of everything at every moment," "the source of the beauty in the stars and mountains."8 Thomists, tending to interpret divine Being as activity in a way outlined in Austin Farrer's Finite and Infinite, sometimes appear to say much the same.

"The pantheistic element in the classical doctrine that God is ipsum esse, being itself, is necessary," Tillich declares, "for a Christian doctrine," but




"pantheism does not mean that everything is God"; "the concept of being as being, or being-itself, points to the power inherent in everything, the power of resisting non-being; therefore, instead of saying that God is first of all being-itself, it is possible to say that he is the power of being in everything," a power "manifest in the creative process."9 Yet it may be arbitrary whether you say with Tillich that God is the world's Power of Being, or instead that God is the world which has this Power. Either formulation can express the same idea that the world owes its existence to its ethical requiredness.

The second formulation may be all the more acceptable when it is held that the world has two characteristics often ascribed to God: a unity of existence which, as Spinoza thought, is compatible with complexity, and a kind of eternity such as Einstein had in mind when calling it "natural to think of physical reality as a four-dimensional existence instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three-dimensional existence."10 1 have argued elsewhere that these suggestions may be of help in dealings with the Problem of Evil and particularly with the limitations which must characterize even the happiest of lives lived in the shadow of inevitable death. But while there may be traditional elements in all this it could still turn out to be a far cry from the doctrines most characteristic of Christianity. Whether it is as much as compatible with such doctrines is controversial. It may have to stand or fall independently of any particular religion. Even the word "God" might best be used sparingly by its supporters.

NOTES

1. Value and Existence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979) and various articles: most relevant are "The theory that the world exists because it should," American Philosophical Quarterly 7, no. 4 (October 1970):286-98, and ''Efforts to explain all existence," Mind 87, no. 346 (April 1978): 181-93, but see also those mentioned in later notes.

2. Hume's Cleanthes is speaking. 3. Arguments in this vein are continued in "Does causal regularity defy chance?" Idealistic

Studies 3, no. 3 (September 1973):277-84. 4. Religious Studies 1, no. 1 (1966): 29-45. 5. This is an ethical position defensible quite apart from any theory that ethical

requirements are creatively active; see "Ethically required existence," American Philosophical Quarterly 9, no. 3 (July 1972):215-24.

6. The evidence is considered in four papers: "Morality in a world guaranteed best possible," Studia Leibnitiana 3, no. 3 (1971): 199-205; "The Value of Time," American Philosophical Quarterly 13, no. 2 (April 1976): 109-21; "The best world possible," appearing (with space-saving editorial changes) as pp. 43-72 of The Challenge of Religion Today, ed. J. King-Farlow (New York: Neale Watson, 1976); "God and scientific verifiability," Philosophy 53 (January 1978):71-79.

7. Later passages in Ewing's article tend to tie explanations in terms of value to Purpose,



224 John Leslie

then tying Purpose to a mind which has it. We may thus be left wondering just how convinced he is by his notion that something's ethical status could itself be responsible for its existence as distinct from having provided inspiration for some person's creative acts. It seems that he considers an ethical requirement perhaps adequate to account for God's existence; the world's, however, could come only from God's benevolent activity. This can look inconsistent.

8. Systematic Theology (Welwyn, Herts.: Nisbet, 1953), vol. 1, chs. 8 and 11; and The Shaking of the Foundations (New York; Scribner, 1948), ch. 6.

9. Systematic Theology, chs. 9-11. 10. Relativity, the Special and the General Theory, Appendix 5 to the 15th edition (London:

Methuen, 1962).



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Leslie, J - The World's Necessary Existence

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