God Exists! Author(s): Robert K. Meyer Source: Nos, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1987), pp.

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God Exists!
ROBERT K. MEYER AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Everything has a cause. And the cause of everything has a cause. So metaphysics teaches. Project any of these causal sequences indefinitely back, without limit, and the mind boggles. Whence there is a First Cause. That all men call God. The reader, we trust, has heard this argument before. With its variants (for example, from motion), it is the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God. Aquinas devised it (with hints from Aristotle) and pronounced it valid. Later philosophers have not been so sure. In Kant, the argument finds an equal and opposite onethat things go back and back and back and back-and gets underfor mined in the resulting antilogism. Other philosophers-Hume, example-may be taken to have pronounced it simply invalid. And this, perhaps, is today the ruling opinion. But is this ruling opinion correct? Oddly, the Cosmological Argument these days gets a boost from Cosmology. Trace back the Actual History of the Universe-not what it could or might have been, but what it was-and its outset, on today's common opinion, came with a Big Bang. Physicists, not wishing to delve further into Theology than that, do not report Who, if Anybody, said "Let there be Light." But, if they are to be believed, all of a sudden Light there was, in a mighty rush. So it is at least ironic that, at a time when empirical scientists are putting some physical teeth back into this old argument, philosophers (by and large, and Thomists not counting) have given it up. There is nothing particularly unusual about this. Philosophy is rarely out of tune with the Science of the last century, and has

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been known on occasion to pronounce it Ineluctable. It does take a while to decide why things must be the way that Scientists have told us that they are, and it would be comforting if they would take a hundred years off (or at least fifty, given that a good many contemporary philosophers have by now caught up with Relativity and Quantum Theory) so that philosophers could catch up. But, if the Cosmological Argument is now pronounced invalid, what is wrong with it? Various things, according to various people.' Any argument that has been around that long has had more than sufficient time for minute examination by philosophical counsel for any one of several hundred positions on these questions (and, more relevantly, for two), and it is not surprising that, it is alleged, various loopholes have been found. The most persistent has to do with the character of the backwards causal sequences. Aquinas, living at a time when the natural numbers only went forward, the negative integers not yet having been invented, did not think of the infinite descending sequence, 0, - 1, -2, .... (And, presumptively, it did not occur to him to think of the positive integers as analogous to a descending causal sequence, with item n + 1 identified as the cause of item n, forever.) Was Aquinas that dumb? We leave that question to scholarly exhumation and examination of his old math homework. But there is no need or reason to think that the Cosmological Argument is itself that dumb (whence, granting Aquinas the benefit of the doubt, the present argument should be ascribed to him, not to us). For consider some homely causal sequence-the rolling of a ball across the floor by a child, for example. If we view this situation from the viewpoint of the most casual physics, the ball occupies a succession of points <xo,yo>, . . . , <xiyi>, . . . on an appropriate plane, where the xi and y, are real numbers. The ball's occupying any of these points is, presumptively, an item in a causal sequence. Yet the ordering is not of the 1, 2, 3 variety. To the contrary, since the real numbers are densely ordered, there is between and <xkyk> a third pair any two distinct pairs <xi,yi> So this causal sequence, at least on the most casual < xyj>. physics, is already deeply infinitistic in character. The picture is not of one item in the sequence causing the next (since there is no next), but of the causal relation just rolling along (so to speak) as the ball works its way through continuum many spots on the floor, some of them mighty close together. While the title of this paper has (somewhat rashly) asserted the truth of the conclusion of the Cosmological Argument, we are (naturally) concerned here only with its validity. So the premiss-

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that everything has a cause-is assumed, since we are not here querying what Metaphysics teaches. (Quantum or other Indeterminism might, of course, but this is not our present concern.) But we are entitled to ask what the premiss means. For our homely example, though it surely dealt with causally relateditems, hardly enabled us to speak of the cause of a particular <xi,yi> item in the sequence. The Mechanistic Ideal, at least, has been that, given a particular item in the sequence, and sufficient information pertaining thereto, the subsequent items are thereupon determined.This suggests that what "Everything has a cause" ought perhaps to mean is that, for every item J, there is some causal sequence C and some item I such that, in the sequence C, I is causally anterior to J. And it is not hard to see that, if that is what "Everything has a cause" means, we are back in the old soup. Beginning with J, we can go causally back and back and back and back, forever. Well, so perhaps we can. But what happens after "forever"? Consider again the infinite sequence <x,,y,> of ball-rolling items. Beginning anywhere in medias res, it does go back forever, in the sense that any item in the sequence has an infinite number of causal antecedents. But it is not just the case, in our homely example, that every element of the sequence of ball-rolling items has some causal antecedent, in this sequence. The child, remember, rolled the ball across the floor. That is, there was an item, in a largercausal sequence, causally anterior to every item in the ball-rolling subsequence: namely, the impetus that the child provided to the ball, that made it roll. This suggests that our first try at "Everything has a cause" (and, perhaps, the Mechanistic Ideal on which it rested) is a bit naive. It is not simply particular items in a causal sequence that require causal antecedents. If we are to make causal sense of even the most mundane and ordinary items of our experience (at least if we use the real numbers-or, these days, perhaps even Leibniz's, and Robinson's, infinitesimals), it is whole causal sequences that require such antecedents. This leads us to formulate the Causal Principle (henceforth, CP) in the following manner: (CP) For every causal sequence C, there is some item I which is causally anterior to every item J in C.

A few words are in order about CP. In the first place, it subsumes our earlier version of "Everything has a cause". For, where J is any item, we may form the one-element causal sequence consisting of J alone. By CP, there is some element I causally anterior to every member of this sequence: namely, in this case, to J. But first-order

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functional calculus fans will note immediately that, on a point of quantifier interchange, CP is strictly stronger than the subsumed principle. In prenex form, its quantifiers would read '(C)(HIJ)(J)'. The weaker principle, were we to state it analogously, would come out with prenex quantifiers '(C)(J)(HIJ)'. That is, roughly speaking, CP stands to its weak analogue as uniform continuity does to continuity. Some to whom we have communicated this argument have objected at this point that the question has been begged. Since CP does in fact suffice for the existence of God, it is at least begged in the sense that every valid argument begs the question: namely, if you believe its premisses, you cannot but believe its conclusion, since it is already contained in the premisses. In this case, the claim is simply that if everything has a cause, then God exists, which is the traditional content of the Cosmological Argument. Since some have found this claim startling, while others have found it false, the question is at least not begged in a psychological sense. But the idea behind the friendly objections seemed to be somewhat simpler. If every time we try to project a causal sequence backward without limit, we strike something causally anterior to every member of the sequence, does not this mean that every causal sequence has a First element? Whence every causal sequence that is long enough has a first element, namely God. While what follows the 'whence' is true enough, a delicate mathematical point is still involved. For it is not true, at any rate, that every causal sequence has a First element, even after CP is granted. Let us go back to the ball-rolling, with the former causally fixing items <xi,yi> and <xj,yj>, anterior, and let us consider now all the items in between. This is a causal sequence, but it does not have a first element. What it has, by CP, is an element of a larger sequence which is causally anterior to all members of the given sequence. (In this case, clearly the <xi,yi> item will do.) So, at least intuitively, it would seem that the path to a First Cause is still blocked. We take a causal sequence, and apply CP to find an item anterior to all members thereof. But this item is just part of a larger causal sequence, whence, again applying CP, we find an item anterior to all members of the larger sequence. This too, it would seem, is on its way to going on forever. And our task is to show that, this time, a sufficient number of iterations (perhaps infinitely many) will, no fooling, yield a First Cause. The way to do this, we shall see, is to make use of a renowned mathematical principle-the famous Axiom of Choice. We shall first apply this axiom informally, to get the ideas down. And then we

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shall set out the requisites for a formal proof. The idea, in fact, is the one that we have just been through. Pick any item I. If I is not already a First Cause (that is, if we did not pick God to start with), there will be some II causally anterior to I, by CP. Pick an II with this property, and find by CP a causal anterior I2 to both of IlI. Pick an I2. If we continue in this way, we may get a causal sequence (. . . Ii+1 J0 . . . Jo=I), where each natural number i appears among the indices. Let us not be discouraged by this, as those who faint-heartedly pronounce the Cosmological Argument invalid are prone to do. For there is, by CP, a causal antecedent I. to all these Ii, where X is (as usual) the first transfinite ordinal. Picking I,,, we are off again. But we have by now made an infinite number of arbitrary choices (we had already, in fact), which is what the Axiom of Choice licenses. And we simply continue the process until we have either exhausted Absolutely Everything-in which case we have found a First Cause, since there is nothing left to choose-or can quit because we have already found a First Cause. In any event, there is a First Cause. That all call God. In this informal version, the argument may be no more convincing than previous versions of the Cosmological Argument. For one thing, there are still various gaps in the argument. (The famous question, "Who made God?" is one of them.) For another, as we have described the "picking" process, there is still something mindboggling about it. To fill these gaps, and to unboggle the mind, it is necessary to be a little more careful. Let us begin by returning to CP. In stating it, we made use of the notion of a causal sequence, and of a relation, "is causally anterior to". But, aside from trading on the reader's intuitions, we didn't really say what these things were; or, more important for our immediate purposes, what formal properties they were supposed to have. Let us begin with, "is causally anterior to", which we shall henceforth abbreviate simply by 'A'. A is evidently a binary relation. And, since we don't want to presuppose what the Universe is made up of (events, atoms, souls, or whatever) we have been using the relatively colourless word "item" to describe what it is that A relates. Items, intuitively, are what is real in the Universe. Balls and falls, shirts and dirt, lights and fights, sinkings and drinkings and thinkings we presume either to be items, or to be constituted from items in ways not here to be explained. We make no such presupposition about what is more evidently conceptual or abstract. For example, sets and numbers, whatever their ontological status, do not obviously stand in causal relations to each other (esoteric efforts at shuffling the furniture of the Universe aside).

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This enables us to assume that the collection V of all items is in fact a set, in the mathematical sense, and that A is a binary relation on that set. This enables us to invoke the ordinary apparatus of set theory. (If this is displeasing, either because the assumptions are already felt to be too restrictive or because the reader prefers to do his or her mathematics on some other basis than, say, ZF set theory, we note that these assumptions are readily transferable to related contexts; e.g., in set theories that admit them, V could be a proper class, provided that other assumptions are adjusted to suit.) What else do we expect of "is causally anterior to"? Since we have given up (here, anyway) on the thought that A is a next-tonext relation, relating a cause to an immediate effect, it makes sense to think of A as transitive. If I is causally anterior to J, and J bears the same relation to K, then I is causally anterior to K as well. If, nonetheless, we wish to have some primitive idea of a causal relation C that relates causes to their unique, immediate effects, a relation that would not sensibly be transitive, then we may simply identify A as the ancestral of C; that is, in this case, A bears the same relation to C that "ancestor" bears to "parent"; or, near enough, that a bears to successor as a relation on natural numbers., This observation, perhaps, relates our work here to some more traditional metaphysical analyses of causality; whence, given CP, it will apply to these analyses also. But, for reasons in part adduced above, our concern here is with A, not C, and we do not think of A as "cooked up" from any other relation. Let us now turn to the question, "Who made God?" The only reasonable answer, after all, is "God", if we want to speak that way. If not, the First Cause is itself to be viewed as uncaused. So far as the formal properties of A are concerned, this leaves us two choices that seem plausible. Either we can make A irreflexive, allowing nothing to be its own cause; or we can make it reflexive, counting any item I (by courtesy, so to speak) among its own causes. The former, perhaps, is closer to the usual intuitions about these things. The idea then would be that a First Cause (and only a First Cause) would be itself uncaused. But, so far as formal analysis is concerned, it doesn't make much difference. (Roughly speaking, we can think of "is causally anterior to" either as an analogue of arithmetical <, or of arithmetical S. Either of the latter is recoverable from the other in an obvious way, using properties of identity; i a j if and only if i < j or i = j, while i < j if and only if both i s j and i * j. Whether A is characterized as reflexive or irreflexive, there will be a kindred notion definable therefrom by the same rubric.)

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It will be convenient, accordingly, to take A as reflexive, extending to every item I the above courtesy of being counted among its own causal antecedents. A corresponding relation PA, meaning "I is properlycausally anterior to J, " may then be defined as just suggested by (I A J) & (I * J). PA, of course, is also taken to be transitive, whence, since it is evidently irreflexive, it follows immediately that it is also asymmetric:if I PA J then not J PA I. The corresponding property to be imposed on A is that of anti-symmetry: if I A J and J A I, then I = J. This corresponds, in either case, to the thought that the causal relation has a direction,without loops. One does not start from an item I, proceed through a change of effects II, I2, etc., and get back to I. (More sharply, one does not, some years hence, run into one's younger self on the street.) These assumptions, though they certainly are traditional, rule out some esoteric possibilities that physicists, science fiction writers, and other partisans of the imagination have wished to entertain. Since our purpose here is to be traditional in all things, we shall, in the present context, rule them out as well. with some familiar We can sum up our assumptions mathematical terminology. Any transitive, reflexive, antisymmetric relation R is called a partial order. Given such a relation R defined on a set S, S is called a partially ordered set, under the relation R. So our assumptions on the "causal anterior" relation A amount to the following. (PO) The set V of all items is partially ordered under A. We need now merely to spell out what we mean by a causal sequence. But, in the light of the assumptions that we have made on A, all that is required for some set S of items to be a causal sequence is that, when confined to S, the relation A be total; i.e., a subset S of V is a causal sequenceprovided that, for all I, J in S, we have either I A J or J A I. Such a subset of a partially ordered set X is called a chain in X. And so the causal sequences are just the chains in V, under the partial order A. We introduce some further familiar terminology (at least it will be familiar to those who are familiar with it) to restate our Causal Principle CP. Let X be a partially ordered set, under a relation R. A member J of X is minimal provided that, if I R J then I = J. (Less formally, thinking of R as a < and defining the corresponding < as suggested above, J is minimal if there is no I < J.) Nothing prevents a partially ordered set, though, from having many minimal elements; or, for that matter, from having no minimal elements (e.g., in the latter case, the negative integers again, under the usual a). But, if a partially ordered set X has exactly one minimal

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element G, under R, such that G bears R to everymember of X, we shall call G first in X. What the Cosmological Argument, viewed as an Existence Proof for God, establishes is that the set V of items, partially ordered by the causal relation A, has a minimal element G. Monotheism requires also a Uniqueness Proof, whose conclusion is that there is only one minimal element G in V, which is first in V under the ordering A. We note that Aquinas' Cosmological Argument is an Existence Proof, and that further argument for Uniqueness is required. (In fact Aristotle, whose argument to Prime Movers formed the rubric for the analogous argument of Aquinas, ended up with 47 or so of these. So, as Aquinas knew, uniqueness does require further argument.) Let again X be a partially ordered set, under a relation R. And let S be any chain in X; i.e., by definition, S is a totally ordered subset of X. An element I of X is a (lower) bound for S provided that, for every element J of S, I bears R to J. Note that a bound I for a chain S in X may belong to S, but it need not do so; all that is required is that I belong to X. Another way of saying that I is a bound for S is to say that I is first in S U {I}, considering the latter as a partially ordered set on its own. Finally, the partially ordered set X has the boundpropertyprovided that everychain S in X has a (lower) bound. It is now evident, checking definitions, that CP may be restated as follows. (CP) (Second version) The set V of items, under the (causal) partial order A, has the bound property.

We have now almost proved the existence of God. What is required is an appropriate version of the Axiom of Choice, which we used in our informal proof. The one appropriate in this context is Zorn's Lemma, which we state as follows: (ZL) Let X be a partially ordered set, under a relation R. Suppose that X has the bound property. Then X has a minimal element G.

(Note: Zorn's Lemma is usually stated in a dual form, where the bound property is characterized using upper bounds, and the conclusion is that X has a maximal element.) Our Main Theorem now follows. Theorem. God exists! Proof. By PO, the Universe V of items is partially ordered under the causal relation A. By the causal principle CP, V has the bound property. By Zorn's Lemma ZL, V has a minimal element G. That all call God. Q.E.D.

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It will be readily observed, by those familiar with our familiar terminology, that we have in fact done very little work at all, outside of our remarks motivating CP and our observation that, on a straightforward understanding of "is causally anterior to", it is indeed a partial order. The rest is humdrum, and almost trivial. If it fails to be completely trivial, it is because the Axiom of Choiceand, accordingly, its equivalent ZL-has had itself a somewhat controversial history. It has been the sort of principle that most mathematicians have used, not knowing how to dispense with it, but that many of them have wished that they didn't have to. Some of the equivalents of this principle seem crashingly obvious. For example, though 2 * 0, 2 x2 * 0, 2 x2 x2 * 0, and so forth, one requires the Axiom of Choice to show that, if one multiplies 2 by itself an infinite number of times, the result is still non-zero. But other equivalents have seemed decidedly miraculous: e. g., Zermelo's famous proof that every set can be well-ordered. Rosser, in his book Logicfor Mathematicians,puts in the mouth of a character who objects to the Axiom of Choice, "You're doing theology, not mathematics." It is now clear, by our Main Theorem, that this is exactly correct. We also note the unfortunate decision in some universities, a number of years ago, on which mathematicians were no longer required to take Holy Orders. Save, perhaps, in Holland, this would seem to have been a mistake. But the question will naturally arise (in fact, it has been raised by J. M. Dunn) whether there is a constructive proof for the existence of God-i.e., one that does not make use of the Axiom of Choice. Faith, which is no doubt the usual (and, on most accounts, the most satisfactory) route to the assertion that God exists, presumptively doesn't count here since we take it that Dunn had in mind a proof by the Light of Natural Reason, and that he would count appeal to Special Revelation as cheating in this context. (But next, we fear, he will be asking for a proof of the existence of God which is relevantistically valid.) But, assuming that the God whose existence has been established by the Main Theorem has His Familiar Properties-Omniscience, Omnipotence, and All That Stuff-we can confidently assert that no such shallow and trivial proof will be forthcoming. For Corollary. The Axiom of Choice is true. Proof. By the theorem, God exists. But the axiom of choice has as its content that an infinite number of choices can be made. God can do anything. Accordingly, He can make all those choices. Q.E.D. Our theorem and corollary state the truth of the matter. But the invincibly ignorant might be reduced to the claim (given cer-

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tain subsidiary theorems that we have not proved here) that what we have shown is that the Existence of God and the Axiom of Choice are in fact equivalent. The former should thereupon find its place among the long list of mathematical equivalents of the latter. And indeed, since it is sound mathematical practice to name a principle after its discoverer, the usual ascription of the Axiom of Choice to Zermelo should in fairness, we think, be replaced by its ascription to Aquinas. But is it possible nonetheless to prove the existence of God without appeal to the Axiom of Choice? Certainly not. For Cohen, in a famous paper, showed the Axiom of Choice independent of just about everything else (the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis and other even more theological hypotheses not counting). By the argument of our Corollary, it is not independent of the Existence of God. So, conversely, any argument for the Existence of God must use the Axiom of Choice, or something that implies it. Or face the wrath of Cohen. While not everything in the last few paragraphs need be taken as totally serious (though some of it should be taken as at least partially serious), there is a definite moral to all this. (In addition to the moral that we might draw from Gddel's equally famous work on this topic: namely, the Existence of God is consistentwith the rest of mathematics.) Even philosophers must sometimes confront the World in wonder. It is, surely out of this sense of wonder that the traditional arguments for the existence of God, and on the other Great Questions of philosophy, came to be. Nor is such wonder any enemy of the impulse to be rational. To the contrary, the development of a narrow logic-chopping style, as a preferred instrument for philosophical discourse, has little to commend it. In this style, it has sometimes been held that the Great Questions (or some of them) have been solved-usually, we fear, in the negative. The traditional arguments for the existence of God have had particularly hard going (not always undeservedly). But that they have done so has, to say the least, depended on a less than sympathetic reading of these arguments. If you think that the causal order of the World, projected back, is like the negative integers, of course you aren't going to end up with a First Cause. But, if that sort of mathematical sophistication is allowed the opponent of the Cosmological Argument, it is equally (and perhaps more) permissible to its defender. Adopt weak premisses about what the Causal Order of the World is like, and of course one won't do much Theology. But, as we have seen, one won't be able to do even humdrum Physics either. We return to what has to count as a most significant omissionnamely that, although the argument given above does establish

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(granted its premiss) that there are First Causes, in the sense that there are items which themselves have no extrinsic cause, it leaves some further possibilities open. One can be quickly disposed of. Consider a particular item J. Let G be an ultimatecauseof J provided that G is causally anterior to J, and G is itself a minimal element in the causal order. Our theorem, fairly read, establishes that some items have ultimate causes. It does not yet establish that J in itself does. But this is quickly repaired. Theorem. Everything has an ultimate cause. Proof. Like the previous theorem, but beginning with the set VJ of items causally anterior to J. This is a subset of V, and it is partially ordered by the causal relation (since any subset of a set is partially ordered by the same relation). Moreover, since VJ contains J, VJ is non-empty. We need to show that any chain in VJ has a bound, whence VJ will have the bound property. But any chain in VJ is a chain in V, whence by CP such a chain has a bound in V. Let I be such a bound, and let K be an arbitrary element of the given chain. Since K is in VJ, by definition K bears A to J; and, since I is a lower bound for a set that contains K, we have I A K as well. By transitivity of A, I A J. This suffices that I should be in V and shows that VJ has the bound property. Now applying ZL, there will be a minimal element G in VJ. G is also minimal in V; for, if not, there would be a G' distinct from G such that G' A G, whence since G A J, we would have again G' A J, whence G' is in VJ and G is not minimal therein after all. So any arbitrary item J has an ultimate cause. I.e., everything does. Q.E.D. But, although everything has an ultimate cause, it does not yet follow that all things have the same ultimate cause. In fact, what we have showed so far is consistent so far with everything being its own cause, and nothing being causally related to anything else. (This is reminiscent, perhaps, of the "windowless monads" of Leibniz.) But this last possibility would not seem to be in the spirit of the Causal Principle. The idea behind this principle, one presumes, is that we find ourselves, and the happenings within our purview, involved in real causal relations, which lead from one to another. We have made some assumptions about these relations, since we have ruled out the possibility that, where I and J are distinct, each can be causally anterior to the other. And we certainly don't wish to assume that the causal order is a total one. What is going on on ae Centauri at this instant is, presumptively, neither causing nor being caused by what is going on here now. But there are, certainly, causal relations between what goes on on ae Centauri and what

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goes on here. (Indeed, it is not at all unusual for photons that have been emitted from that spot while a paper was being written to strike the earth before it reaches its readers. But we hope, in this case, that the same cannot be said of the Magellanic Clouds.) What is a reasonable assumption in this situation, to account for causal interdependence of a familiar sort? It would seem to be that, given any two items J and K, there is some item I which is causally anterior to each of them. Note that this is far from identifying such an I as "the cause" of J and K. For given items will presumptively have lots of causal anteriors, most of which will not be shared between them. What seems not unreasonable is that, if one goes far enough back, one will find somecommon causal antecedent that J and K share. While the Big Bang might be taken to suggest that this is cosmologically true, the present assumption is considerably more modest; what it is in our minds to postulate, in addition to the CP, is not that all things have the same cause, but merely that any pair of things has at least one causal antecedent in common to each member of the pair. We shall trot out some further jargon to state this assumption, taking it as already informally clear. Let S be a partially ordered set, under a relation R. S is directed(down) if, for any two elements J and K in S, there exists some item I which is a (lower) bound for bothJ and K; i.e., both of I RJ, I R K hold. (It is not assumed that this I is in any sense unique; for given J,K, there may be many lower bounds. Moreover, as we have been at some pains to point out, it is certainly not asserted that any I which bears R to one of J,K will bear it also to the other.) We assume now a directedness property DP on the causal order. (DP) V is a directed set under the relation A.

We now observe that any directed set with the bound property has a (unique) first element. (FE) Let D be a directed set, under a partial order R, such that D has the bound property. Then D has a first element F.

Proof. By ZL, there is some minimal element F of D. To show that F is first in D, we must show, that F R J for every element J of D. So let J be an arbitrary element of D. Applying, essentially, the proof the technical argument of the last theorem, there is at any rate some minimal element G of D such that G R J. But, since D is directed, there is some H in D such that both H R F and H R G. By definition of minimality, H = F and H = G; whence

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F = G; whence since G R J, F R J as well. The reasoning is quite general, so F is first in D. So, given the DP, we have monotheism also. Theorem. There is exactly one God! Proof. If the theorem is thought to overstate the case, what we shall show is solutely CP the relation Whence there is one First Cause, which is causally anterior to abeverything. (That all call God.) But, as before, by PO and Universe V of items is partially ordered under the causal A, and it has the bound property. By DP, V is directed. by FE, V has a first element G. Q.E.D.

Again, the question arises whether an assumption weaker than the DP will do. In a psychological sense, this may no doubt be true; though, in a strictly mathematical sense, the DP, being strictly finitistic, is already considerably weaker than the CP. But note again that, given the theorem, the DP will hold most certainly. For, given a First Cause G, G will of course be a lower bound for any pair IJ of items. Still, unlike the CP, it does not seem fair to consider the DP part of the contentof "Everything has a cause". It is another assumption. While it does not seem an implausible one-it is far weaker than some principles like "action at a distance", which used to be taken with the utmost seriousness-making it underscores what was traditionally clear but which has become somewhat muddled in more recent times; namely, showing that God exists and showing that the God that exists is One are different problems. But, however plausible our assumptions in clarifying what may be taken to be the traditional content of the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God-brought up to date to eliminate some gratuitous holes that philosophers found (and other philosophers sometimes themselves inserted) in the argument-may they not be themselves out-of-date anyway? We spoke at the outset of bringing the Cosmological Argument up to date, given recent cosmology. But the argument here has been metaphysical, not physical; it does not depend on any cosmology, save that, to be sound, its assumptions must be true of the World. (They need not, however, be true of all possible worlds, since no claim is entered here that God is a logically necessary being-as though it were somehow below the divine dignity that He should fail to exist in non-existent worlds. For, while that question may divert philosophers, it seems somehow of less moment.) But has not modern physics passed such causal assumptions by? Everybody recalls Russell's famous quip-that causality, like the monarchy, persists because it is erroneously thought to do no harm.

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And Russell himself suggested that what used to be understood as causal is best understood in terms of relations of functional it was claimed, is the Modern Way. Similardependence-which, ly, everyone recalls Einstein's uphill fight against the purported acausality of quantum mechanics; he is not often judged to have won it; to the contrary, quantum mechanics has often served as a beacon for those who would defend human values (including religious values) against their remorseless undermining by relentless scientific Law. But, on the former point, it is far from clear what "functional dependence" means, unless it means that some things are dependent upon other things in a way that it still makes sense to call causal, while other pairs of things are not so related. Of functions in the sheerly mathematical sense, the problem is certainly that there are too many of them. And it has been a pleasant exercise, in which many thinkers have engaged, to determine on which of these functions the Universe is Lawful, and on which it is Unlawful (though not necessarily Illegal). The most definite of no partial differential equations allowed these speculations-e.g., not particularly commended of order greater than two-have themselves. And, otherwise, the speculations seem to bog down into something very much like, "Pleasant functions are those that reflect the fact that the Universe is causally ordered," which does not improve the conceptual situation a great deal. (This used to put a premium on properties like continuity and differentiability; but, these days, it probably only means that Cray can build something that will crunch the resulting numbers.) At any rate, not even Russell, by Human Knowledge, had done with causal relations. So, like the monarchy, the sense that their days were numbered may have been a bit premature. Acausality, despite its rapid dismissal above, is of course a more serious problem for the Cosmological Argument. But it would be at least ironic were this argument to fail not because we live in a Mechanistic Universe of Iron Law, but because we live in one that, on the description of one naval historian, is reminiscent of Japanese battle plans in World War II- with fleets and armies popping up in unexpected places at unexpected times". This was, no doubt, inconvenient for those at the time on the other side; and, failing their absorption in some wider system of regularities (which does seem to be the case in practice, if only because taking a Gallup poll of elementary particles appears to get even more decimal places right than did the old assumptions that each of them was just following orders), it would seem even more inconvenient for science if the basic items of the Universe are similarly inclined toward providing surprises.

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However, none of this has anything to do with the validity of the Cosmological Argument. Like any argument, its premisses must be granted if its conclusion is to follow. There is even a counterargument, as Smart notes in his paper on this subject.2 If it is false that there are first causes, then the CP must be false. (Or perhaps ZL is false.) And, if our first argument was correct, but there is no unique First Cause, then the DP must be false. But it is not the purpose of this paper, at least, to defend any of these anti-metaphysical positions. For such positions would have to have as their premiss that God does not exist, and knock-down, drag-out arguments to this effect have, deservedly, fared even worse than the traditional arguments that God exists. For, having now done enough logic-chopping of our own, let us return to the intuitions which one takes to have been the ultimate source of the traditional proofs. While the Cosmological Argument has come in many variants-we have stuck here to its causal one, but evidently similar remarks may be made if the Universe be ordered by a relation of contingent dependence, and so forth-but one takes each of them to result from our sense, whether built in in an a prior way or just a fact of life, that what there is grows out of what there was. (We speak temporally, since English is well-equipped to do so; but the root notion seems to be "depends upon", not "comes later".) There is nothing nonsensical in this holding in a transfinite sense as well as a finite one; to the contrary, if we take seriously the infinite collections admitted to our physics, through our mathematics, something on the order of CP seems necessary to do justice to this sense of dependence. This is not, to be sure, ineluctable; we might find grounds on which to assume some instances of CP, but not all instances. But, far from this being the natural course, the exceptions would then demand justification. Nor does this "growing out of" have to mean "determines", in the sense of "makes inevitable". (To the contrary, it would be presumptively offensive to traditional theology if it did, since it holds that God is Creator without holding that human wickedness is rendered inevitable thereby.) Projected far enough back, our individual genealogies find points of intersection. (It is claimed that almost everybody with European blood is a direct descendant of Charlemagne. In that, Royal Cousin, the DP would seem to have some confirmation, at least in our small sphere.) If the galaxies do likewise, nihil obstat. So what is being claimed here, at least, is a sound argument to a true conclusion. It is only reasonable to add the usual disclaimers. All that the argument seeks to establish is that there is a First Cause. Readers will have to join the churches, mosques, temples, or cells of their choice to ascertain what other properties, if any, God might

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have. But let us return to wonder. Smart, the critic of the cosmological argument whom we have cited, finds the argument itself incredible, but what he takes to be the premiss, namely that something exists, rather wonderful. For he goes on to say, "That anything should exist at all does seem to me a matter for the deepest awe.' He also says, in the same place, that any argument along the lines of the cosmological argument can be pulled to pieces by a correct logic. Well, the present one can't. What Smart had in mind, one senses in reading his paper, is that it is a theorem of logic, standardly, that something exists. (This need not be the case from less standard viewpoints, such as the free logics of Lambert or the Meinongian ontology espoused, e.g., by Sylvan.) But it is scarcely a theorem of logic that God exists. Whence Smart was certainly correct in doubting that a result so remarkable could be derived from a premiss so minimal. But there is more to be in awe about, so far as the World is concerned, than simply that it is. Or that we are. It is, if anything, even more remarkable that, when we project our memories backwards, they run out. And, for that matter, if we project our expectations forward, they will run out also, in the same sense. Even tenure, that academic facsimile of immortality, pales beyond the real thing (though several people of our acquaintance would, just now, settle for the facsimile). Nothing in logic tells us that, although we are here today, we were not here yesterday; and shall be gone tomorrow. (While most people seem to view the former with more equanimity than the latter, the cases would seem to be symmetrical, with any repugnance that one has about ceasing to be matched by equal repugnance for not having been). So if there is anything more remarkable than the existence of of your friends, loved ones, house, rocks you, dear Reader-and in your vicinity (not to mention the starry skies above or the moral law within)-it is that you and all these things come embedded in a causal nexus. Let us forget the old easy arguments, to the effect that, since we all come from somewhere, the World as whole must have done so also. (These arguments have, nonetheless, some continuing plausibility.) And let us forget also the ease with which we have adjusted to the Mathematics of the Infinite. (Well, for one thing the arithmetic does tend to be simpler than in the finite case. This information must be kept from the Treasury, lest the Government becomes aware that, if it already owes continuum many dollars, it will be no worse off if it borrows as much again-a principle that actual Governments seem to apply anyway, though in what would seem to be an Arithmetic inappropriate for the purpose.)
'

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Let us ask simply about the character of the causal nexus in which we are embedded. In assessing whether this nexus leads anywhere, it certainly does not suffice that it is logicallypossible that it should not. Arguments from the logical modalities work both ways, and it is no more satisfying to assert that what might not be is not than to assert that there is anything which, on logical grounds alone, must be. (Certainly there is some deep aberration in the thought that the old theological sense that God is a necessary being should now be encompassed in the thought that LI(God exists) ought to be a theorem of S5. One detects a fallacy of equivocation here somewhere.) But, more seriously, our own lives are presented to us, in memory and expectation, as an open interval, not a closed one. The terminal points of this interval are not experienced, but inferred. And the greatest wonder of all is that this should be the case; that, while consciousness provides no bound on our individual histories, reason supplies one. That is, the Causal Principle, in what had been taken to be its prohibited, fallacious form, is one that we in fact apply to our own lives. It is nothing to conclude that what we are most immediately acquainted with, Out There, is enmeshed in the causal nexus. This is humdrum, from our first new toys, and old ones that wore out. It is everything to have become aware that among the things which have been new but which wear out are we ourselves. There is the Causal Principle, in the stuff of our own lives, with a bound anterior to an infinite summing up. A ball rolling across the floor, if one does not wish to be so dramatic, provides the same. It is customary to assert of God that He does not exist in Time. Of course. The Cosmological Argument (in this form and speaking loosely) locates the First Cause before forever, and the Final Cause, though we have not dwelt on it here, in the same sense, afterforever. So God exists! which was to be demonstrated.
NOTES 'Adolf Grunbaum once spent six weeks of a course on the philosophy of science examining the Cosmological Argument and what was wrong with it. 2J.J.C. Smart "The existence of God", in New essays in philosophical theology, A. Flew and A. Macintyre eds. (London; SCM Press 1955). 3Ibid., p. 46. 4My thanks are due to Professor Hilary Putnam, who suggested in conversation several years ago that stock objections to the Cosmological Argument (that, for example, Aquinas lacked the wit to conceive infinite descending chains) were a bit heavy-handed. The view that he expressed then, to the best of my recollection, was that one could meet these objections (at least formally) by suitable appeal to principles of transfinite induction. I am, of course, solely responsible for the form of the argument given here, and for the conclusions drawn.