Questions on Brute Facts, Nihilism, and the Elegance of Math

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question:

This question is about the concept of a necessary being. I'm not sure how a concrete being can be self-explanatory. How is it any different from a brute fact? You can posit that an eternal God explains all of reality, but the question still arises: "why does this specific eternal being exist in the first place?". If your response is that the being is self-explanatory, then to me you're just saying "God is a brute fact".

Maybe I can explain it more clearly with an example. Let's say that the atheist posits an eternal, immaterial, timeless, automatic, multiverse generator as the explanation of all reality. You then ask "but why does this specific generator exist, and why does it have this specific nature to automatically generate a multiverse?". The atheist then responds "it's self-explanatory". Would you be satisfied? This atheistic position seems to explain the origins of the universe just as well as your God hypothesis. Greg, United States

DR. CRAIG: I would say that God's existence is not just a brute fact, Greg; that is to say, a fact that has no explanation. Rather, I think that God exists by a necessity of his own nature and that in virtue of that he is a metaphysically necessary being, a being whose non-existence is impossible. It belongs to his very nature to exist, and that's different from saying that something just exists brutely without an explanation. To see this point, the philosopher Richard Swinburne believes that God's existence is a brute fact. Swinburne thinks it's possible that God not exist. There are worlds in which there is no God. So God's existence is contingent, but it's just an inexplicable brute fact. And Swinburne would say that God's existence is simpler than the universe and so it's a better candidate for the ultimate explanation of everything even though it's a brute fact. Clearly that's very different than the view that I'm suggesting – that God exists by a necessity of his own nature and therefore his existence is not a brute fact. Now, with regard to his alternative of the multiverse, the way I would respond to that is different than what he suggested. What I would say is that the multiverse does not exist by a necessity of its own nature. When you look at the things of which the universe is comprised (like its fundamental particles, like quarks and electrons), these do not exist by a necessity of their own nature. They are contingent. Therefore the universe comprised of these is contingent and could have failed to exist. Indeed, there are different models of fundamental physics such as String Theory, which is different than fundamental particle physics, and that's possible. That's metaphysically possible. It's a scientific question whether or not String Theory is true. It's not a metaphysical question to be decided by philosophers. So the universe, it seems to me, is different from God in that it is contingent. It doesn't exist by a necessity of its own nature. Therefore, if there is no explanation for the universe it would be a brute fact, and that is different than postulating God as a metaphysically necessary being who explains the existence of all contingent beings including the universe.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question,

Dr Craig, I am an agnostic although very often I slip into materialist atheism, and it causes great despair and depression. I have felt the lure of religion for a while so I'm quite keen to unburden myself of philosophical pain and so far scientific intervention hasn't solved the root problem which is nihilism. In a particularly low point, I decided to write down a list of qualities that I wanted to live by, and it ended up being remarkably similar to those that Jesus taught which got me thinking. Is the story of Jesus alone, without any empirical evidence, enough of a foundation to build faith upon? Grant, UK

DR. CRAIG: Well, Grant, thank you for such a transparent and honest question. I think that a lot of people in the UK are feeling the same way. They have had it up to here with the New Atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and others and are looking again at Jesus and finding him tremendously attractive as a person to build their lives on. Now, is the story of Jesus alone sufficient to build faith on without any empirical evidence? I think that belief in Jesus apart from empirical evidence is certainly rational, entirely rational. But I wouldn't call it believing on the basis of the story alone. Rather, what I think as a Christian is that the Holy Spirit of God bears witness to the truth of that story when you read it. When you read the New Testament and the story of Jesus’ life, teachings, death and resurrection, the Spirit of God quickens your heart. He convicts you of sin and tells you that this story is true. To respond to that objective witness of the Holy Spirit is a perfectly rational basis for believing in Christ and trusting in him. So this is not fideism, which would just be believing the story by a blind leap of faith in the dark. Rather, this would be believing the story as it is grounded in the witness of God's own Spirit to the truth of that story.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question:

Hello, Dr Craig,

I lost my muslim faith since a little more than a decade ago when I was 20 - now I'm 31 - because of historical and especially philosophical reasons: basically I concluded that claiming to be a messenger of God is an extraordinary claim in intself and that one who claims such a thing for himself the probability is significantly higher that that person is either deluded, insane or a fraud, and that there are no sufficient good reasons to believe Islam has divine origins. However, during the last years I have increasingly found my unbelief to by dry and nihilistic in terms of being able to offer a meaning of life: as british journalist Peter Hitchens likes to remark when he often asks atheists why would they want to believe that the Universe is a purposless caos in which there is no justice, et cetera?

That feeling made me be more open to considering faith in God and Christianity. I am saying Christianity because if there is one system of faith for me that is true, that can only be Christianity, because of the caracter of Jesus of Nazareth and the arguments put forward for the resurrection. As Antony Flew remarked in a conversation with Gary Habermas when he said that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is better and different in quality and quantity compared to miracles in other religions. And my question is related to this:

As I have mentioned above, for me claiming to be e prophet of God or God incarnated himself is a big claim that requires evidence at least closely proportional to that claim. My question is, what makes Jesus special compared to self proclaimed prophets of his time like Jesus son of Ananias, the so called the Egyptian, or later centuries claimaints like Baal Shem Tov who even had direct eyewitnesses who claimed that he performed miracles? I am ready to accept to accept that our Jesus was more special compared to other claimants in the sense that he was more carismatic and his teachings deeper, just like a person can be more carismatic than another. But what makes him radically different, what sets him radically apart that the most parsimonial explanation would be that he really was the Son of God? Kastriot, Kosovo

DR. CRAIG: Thank you, Kastriot, for this question. I think that we're running together here two separate questions that need to be teased apart. The first question is fairly easy to answer; namely, what makes Jesus radically different from these other self-proclaimed prophets that he mentioned? And the answer to that would be, first of all, Jesus’ radical personal claims whereby he put himself in the very place of God himself. It was these claims that led to his conviction by the Jewish high court on charges of blasphemy and led to his being delivered to the Romans to be crucified. But in addition to that, there is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus sets Jesus completely apart from any other self-proclaimed prophet or holy man. So clearly Jesus is radically different from these other figures that Kastriot mentions. The second question, I think, though is the more difficult question, and that is: What makes the evidence for Jesus special or different than the evidence for these other persons? That's a quite different question. Here I would simply invite him to look at the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth and particularly for his resurrection from the dead and compare it to the evidence for the miracles done by these other would-be prophets. I would suggest that he take a look, for example, at the chapters on the resurrection of Jesus in my book Reasonable Faith where I lay out that evidence which is extremely impressive. In fact, the facts that undergird the inference to Jesus’ resurrection are recognized by the wide majority of New Testament historians today and therefore are not in serious dispute. So I think it's radically different than the evidence that can be adduced for these other figures. Now, just to put a finger on one difference. The miracles that are typically associated with these other self-proclaimed prophets were allegedly performed within an atmosphere of anticipation of such miracles. They expected to see the holy man do these sorts of miracles. By contrast with that, what sets the resurrection of Jesus apart is that it was completely unexpected. Indeed, it was contrary to first century Jewish beliefs. Jews had no concept of a dying, much less rising, Messiah and no concept of a resurrection that occurred within history. The resurrection was always the resurrection of all the dead at the end of the world on the Judgment Day. So the resurrection of Jesus was not something that was due to an atmosphere of anticipation and expectation. On the contrary, the expectation in Judaism was that if your favorite Messianic candidate got himself crucified, you either went home or got yourself a new Messiah. But right across the first century before Jesus and first century after Jesus we find no other Messianic group claiming that their crucified Messiah was risen from the dead and was the Messiah after all. So this again makes the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection startlingly different from the alleged miracles attributed by followers of other self-proclaimed prophets.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question says,

Dear Dr. Craig, I came across a response to the ontological argument a year ago, and I still haven't come up with a good response. It seems to actually undermine the concept of a maximally great being. This would be the contradictions between God's mercy and justice. I am aware that you wrote on a closely related topic in the past but there's something that I don't believe you addressed in your response. You showed the atonement to be a resolution between God's actions of mercy and justice, but the very attributes themselves seem to contradict. Being perfectly just precludes mercy. Justice is to get what you deserve, and mercy is to get pardoned. To have both of these pushed to maximal degree seems to be a logical contradiction; that is to say, it isn't God forgiving. That's my problem. It's the very values themselves. How can a being be both maximally merciful and maximally just. Is there something I'm missing in a maximally great being? I consider that a maximally great being would have no logical contradictions and therefore cannot have attributes logically contradict, but this seems to make the being incompletely just or merciful which makes the entire concept seem incoherent. Logan, US

DR. CRAIG: Well, Logan is raising a very good point here. Part of what it means to be the greatest conceivable being or a maximally great being is moral perfection, and I would argue that perfect justice and perfect love are constituents of moral perfection. For a being to exemplify moral perfection he must exemplify perfect justice and perfect love, and yet as Logan says these seem to be at loggerheads with each other. This leads to a dilemma in the law that is called The Dilemma of the Merciful Judge, and that is that if the judge shows mercy on someone brought before his bar then he isn't perfectly just. He doesn't give the criminal what he justly deserves.  On the other hand, if he gives the criminal what he justly deserves then the judge is not merciful. Therefore the very concept of a merciful judge is incoherent. I press this very strongly in my book Atonement and the Death of Christ because I think that it is the Christian doctrine of the atonement that reconciles these two attributes and shows how God can, in fact, be both perfectly loving and perfectly just. The answer is that these two attributes meet at the cross and find their full expression there. On the one hand, God is perfectly loving as he sends Christ. He enters into human history and, as Christ, he takes the punishment for our sins that we deserved so that we can be forgiven and pardoned – a tremendously loving self-sacrificing act. On the other hand, at the cross Christ bears the punishment that we deserve thereby fully satisfying the demands of God's justice. So the cross and the substitutionary atonement of Christ reconcile the perfect justice and the perfect love of God so that God can be both merciful in that he offers us a pardon for our sins and he can be perfectly just in that our sins do receive their just desert as they are imputed to Christ and he is punished substitutionally for us.

KEVIN HARRIS: This came in from the Philippines.

Dr. Craig argues for the existence of God through the unreasonable applicability of mathematics to the physical world. He often cites examples of scientists precisely discovering a certain thing through the use of complex mathematical calculations. However, it's still hard for me to fully grasp his explanation as to why mathematics is unreasonable to be applied to the physical world or why the absence of mathematics is possible in the physical world. Wouldn't it be better explained by considering mathematical laws as mere necessity to the universe, and therefore it's actually impossible for mathematical laws not to apply to the universe? Take this as an example. If you take one thing and another thing together, there will be two things, and it is just impossible for it to be three or four (which is similar to 1 + 1 = 2). I don't get why 1 + 1 equals 2 is unreasonable to apply to the real world because it seems to me that its applicability is perfectly reasonable and logically necessary. Can I get clarifications of this argument because it's really hard for me to grasp. Irwin, Philippines.

DR. CRAIG: Let me first clarify the use of the word “unreasonable.” Eugene Wigner in putting forward this argument spoke of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences.^[1] The reason that it appeared to Wigner to be unreasonable was because Wigner was a naturalist. He wasn't a theist. As a result he had no explanation for the applicability of mathematics to the physical phenomena. So it was as a naturalist that Wigner said that the applicability or effectiveness of mathematics is unreasonable. Now, as a theist, however, I think we do have a good explanation of the applicability of mathematics. Wigner in his article said that the effectiveness of mathematics is a miracle for which we have no good explanation. But he never considered whether God might not in fact be a good explanation for the applicability of mathematics. If God has designed the world to operate according to the mathematical laws that he had in mind then it is not unreasonable for mathematics to be applicable to the physical phenomena. So rather than the word “unreasonable,” I think it would be better to use the word “surprising.” It is surprising that mathematics would be so effective in describing the physical phenomena. Why is that? Well, it is because, first of all, mathematics is pursued for aesthetic reasons or a priori reasons. It is not pursued for its scientific utility but pursued quite apart from its scientific usefulness. Yet over and over again scientists have found that these mathematical concepts are applicable. Secondly, mathematical objects (even if they exist) are abstract objects and therefore causally effete. They have no causal powers and so have no ability whatsoever to influence the physical world. Therefore, given the a priori nature of mathematics and the causal inefficacy of mathematical objects, it is surprising that the laws of nature would be characterized by these elegant mathematical formulations. Now, Irwin is quite right that you could maintain that the truths of elementary arithmetic like 1 + 1 equals 2 or elementary truths of geometry are logically necessary. But when philosophers and physicists puzzle about the applicability of mathematics, they're not talking about elementary arithmetic or geometry. Wigner gives example after example of difficult elegant mathematics like complex numbers or infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces or the use of matrices in Heisenberg's quantum mechanics. These are not logically necessary. The laws of nature are not logically necessary, otherwise we could pursue physics a priori and mathematically rather than experimentally. So the universe could have been characterized by different laws of nature, or perhaps only by these sort of elementary arithmetic truths that Irwin mentions. But it is puzzling as to why the universe exhibits this complex mathematical describability that is not something at all that you would have expected. So that is the basic puzzle that has troubled not only Wigner but many physicists and philosophers since he first spoke.

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