Thesis

When considering a body of associated phenomena, we should endorse only that theory
which adequately explains the given phenomena without inventing new phenomena that require
new explanations. When no such theory exists, we should refrain from offering an explanation and
simply admit there we do not yet understand the phenomena, either because there is not enough
evidence, or a sufficient theory has not yet been offered.

Classically speaking, the grandest phenomena is that of existence. Why does the universe
exist? Why does life exist? How come Earth is so well-equipped to support life? The theory given
most often as an explanation for this question is that there is a being (called God) capable of, at the
very minimum, initializing some chain of events that led to the construction of the universe as we
know it today. In some versions of the theory, God has more control over the details of the
universe, and in the most popular versions, God is primarily concerned only with the actions of
Homo Sapiens on the planet Earth, which is odd given what a small fraction of all activity in the
universe may reasonably be attributed to Homo Sapiens. Either way, these more popular versions
of the God theory have too many features to be given an adequate analysis in such a short paper, so
we will focus on the version presented by the philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas in the
13th century. We do this for two reasons: first, Aquinas’ version is the most abstract, and therefore
it is also the simplest. As such it comes very close to meeting the criterion presented in the thesis;
second, Aquinas was thoughtful enough to provide proofs of his theory, which gives it the ability
to be discussed rationally rather than emotionally.
Aquinas argues God’s existence as a necessary pre-requisite for motion. Noting that all
things which are in motion must have been put in motion by some previous thing which was in
motion, and then claiming that an infinite regress is absurd by default, he invents a substance
named God which has the capacity to initialize itself. This doctrine explains observable phenomena
in a qualitative manner (all motion is caused by prior motion, but this God fellow is kind enough to
kick-start the whole process, so we don’t have to allow for infinite regresses, which are tricky to
think about), but its main weakness is that it raises the larger question of the mechanics of God.
What are the inner workings of a self-causing substance? What are its properties? Can we obtain it
somewhere? Does its ability to cause itself necessarily preclude our ability to create it?
The de facto explanation offered to quell these new questions is that God is somehow
beyond the scope of human knowledge, or exists outside the universe (whatever the hell that
means). The contention I hold is that this is not a legitimate explanation, but rather a failure to
explain. To be cliché and quote Richard Dawkins, this tactic is “an abdication of reason”.
Here I advocate the policy that, rather than invent explanations and then set the question of
their validity outside the scope of Reason, we simply withhold judgement until such a time as we
can formulate an explanatory tool that conforms to the criterion presented in the thesis, which we
shall refer to henceforth as the “Simplicity Criterion”.
This criterion does not guarantee that our theories will be true, because new phenomena are
subject to be discovered at any time, but by taking this minimalist approach, we can be assured that
we will not be unreasonably far off. It ensures that we will not be found by posterity to have
invented explanatory fairies and stashed them at the bottom of the gardens of scientific mystery in
order to ease our task. It forces us to maintain our intellectual integrity, and admit that we simply do
not understand something if we cannot explain it without magic.
As an anecdotal example, we introduce “Russell’s Teapot”. Bertrand Russell challenged us to
deny that there is a small china teapot in orbit about the Earth. The teapot is too small and is moving
too fast and traveling in too strange a path for our telescopes (or other conceivable scientific
apparatus) to detect it. We may assume (because we’ve already ascribed many unrealistic properties
to this teapot, why not heap on a few more?) that this teapot contains within it the power to
initialize and sustain its own orbit; it thus qualifies as an Aquinian Unmoved Mover. If there is no
way to detect the teapot, there is no way to measure any of its properties. We could not, for
example say “Ah, but it isn’t small, it’s rather large”. Nor could we say “Ah, but this is a tin teapot,
not a china one”, and because we lack the capacity to scan all of the heavens at an arbitrarily fine
precision, we certainly cannot say “Ah, but there is absolutely, without doubt, no teapot!”.
Thus, we cannot deny the teapot its existence. Under no means can we produce
counterexamples to any of the qualities attributed to it, because the definition of such a teapot
includes the property of immeasurability.
Let’s embellish Russell’s challenge a bit and make it a stronger analogue of Aquinas’ model.
We’ve gone through all of the trouble to construct this teapot, and then to demonstrate that its
existence cannot be denied, so we should make use of it by attributing some previously ill-
understood phenomenon to its existence. In this way, the teapot becomes a very powerful
explanatory aide. We could suppose, for example, that at some time in the extremely distant past,
the teapot deflected the path of some asteroid which would have otherwise merely grazed past the
Earth. This asteroid was made of just such and such kind of chemicals, and because of the
interference of the teapot, had just such and such a trajectory, and upon impact, all the elementary
amino acids were created.
This theory has many conveniences. Chiefly among them, it settles many scientific problems
in chemistry, biology, and geology without undermining the legitimacy of current and widely
verified theories in those fields. Particularly, it settles the problem of abiogenesis (that is, where did
the amino acids come from? What got evolution going?) while leaving evolution and plate tectonics
completely intact. It is far simpler than the notion of an intelligent designer, because rather than
derive infinite intelligence out of nowhere, the teapot has only to derive finite motion out of
nowhere (although if the teapot is to remain undetected, this motion must become more and more
subtle as technology improves, and this raises questions about possible teapotian intelligence; but
this becomes impressively silly in short order, so I must digress).
But convenience carries a price. 19th century scientists assumed (quite arbitrarily, because it
made little difference in the mathematical models used at the time) that electromagnetic waves (such
as light, radio, x-ray, so forth) needed a substance to travel through in much the same way that
mechanical waves (such as sound and vibrations) did. No known substance had adequate
properties to be a carrier for electromagnetic waves, so they invented one: the Luminiferous Ether.
In 1895, Michelson & Morley did experiments on some of the properties of the Ether and
obtained a very strange result. Their experiment was to measure how the speed of light was
affected by the Earth’s position. Under Newton’s laws of motion, light traveling in the direction of
the Earth’s orbit should move faster than light traveling in a direction opposite the Earth’s orbit. A
more concrete analogy is this: a baseball thrown forward from a moving car will have the car’s
speed, plus the additional speed given it by the person doing the throwing. This can be described as
such:

Speed of Ball = Speed at which ball was thrown + Speed of Car at time of throw

Likewise, the speed of a baseball being thrown backwards from the car will go much slower,
because the initial speed of the car is working against it. Remember this time we measure the speed
of the ball in the opposite direction of the car, so it makes sense to think about the car having
negative speed in that direction. (I.E. Going forward at 50mph is equivalent to going backwards at
-50mph). We can express this motion with the following equation:

Speed of Ball = Speed at which ball was thrown - Speed of Car at time of throw

The speed of light traveling through the Ether was found not to be affected by the direction the light
shines in relation to the Earth’s orbit. This is like saying that the baseball, when thrown forward
from a moving car will necessarily travel as fast as a baseball thrown backwards from a moving
car. This result put the whole of theoretical physics on high alert: there was clearly a big problem,
but where? Fortunately, Albert Einstein resolved the problem when he published his Special
Theory of Relativity in 1905. Relativity removed the Luminiferous Ether from the scene altogether,
and with it the need for electromagnetic waves to have so many of the same properties as
mechanical waves. Namely, electromagnetic waves were now without need of a medium: they
could travel through empty space. More importantly, they travelled through empty space at a fixed
speed, which is entirely counterintuitive. This is something that commonly happens when we
substitute unnecessarily convoluted explanations for simpler ones: we learn that the universe does
not have to conform to our intuition. It is often this desire to bend the universe to our intuition
which is responsible for the creation of explanatory unicorns such as the Ether.

Likewise, regarding the teapot, while it may be impossible to give an irrefutable proof or
denial of its existence, this criterion of simplicity compels us to be inclined towards doubting the
teapot’s existence, because it is simpler that we do not yet understand what formed the first amino
acids than it is to suppose them the work of some agent which, by definition, exhibits qualities
found nowhere else in the universe, and is also undetectable and hence conveniently non-
investigable. Here, our criterion encourages us to reserve judgement until new evidence is
discovered, new explanations are offered, or at worst to leave the problem unanswered so that
future generations of scientists will not think us fools. Even doubting the teapot’s role in the
origins of life, why postulate the existence of something which has no measurable effect on the real
universe?
But, enough about teapots. Let’s look at Aquinas’ argument in detail. If we’re going to make
the claim that Aquinas’ argument violates the Simplicity Criterion, we need to do two things:
demonstrate where it makes unreasonable, arbitrary, or unsupported claims, and show what a
simpler explanation might look like.
Aquinas’ model is very strongly analogous to Russell’s construction of the number system.
Let us give Aquinas the benefit of the doubt (for we know now that non-moving things like
magnetic fields can cause motion in previously immobile metallic objects) and abstract his meaning
of the word “motion” to something more along the lines of “action” or “event”. We will now
reformulate his claim in more favorable terms: “All events are caused by some previous event.
Obviously this can not go back infinitely into the past, so there must have been some initial event
G, which is also capable of causing itself.”
In this way, we can think of Aquinas’ model of the universe as a sequence of dominoes, each
of which is positioned such that upon being knocked down by its predecessor, it will knock down
its successor. Under Russell’s definition, numbers have a similar property. Every number has a
successor, and we can think of “knocking down” the successor as adding one to the number. So
Aquinas’ model could be expressed in terms of Russellian numbers by thinking of the initial event
G as being equivalent to the number 0, and the current state of the universe as some positive
number n, and the chain of events between Creation and the current state of the universe as the
numbers 1 through (n - 1). In these terms, what Aquinas is claiming is that the number 0 has the
feature that it is its own predecessor. That is, 0 is inherently different from other numbers in that it
is not susceptible to the laws which govern those numbers, namely that every number has a
predecessor. The analogy breaks down here, because Russell’s 0 clearly has a predecessor, namely
the number -1. That being said, what Aquinas’ proposed is that there are two distinct classes of
events: those which are caused by other events, and those which can cause themselves. Both of
these classes events have the ability to cause other events, so there is some kinship among them.
Now to make a judgement like Aquinas’, that there exists some element G in this sequence
such that G is its own predecessor, decency would require that we had the capacity to observe the
sequence of events in its entirety. But in fact, we are only privy to a finite subsection of the
sequence. What is important, is that for this subsection, both theories are equivalent. That is,
whether there exist two types of events (those which cause themselves and those which must be
caused) or there exists only one type of event (those which must be caused), the results we observe
will be the same. Neither raise contradictions with the observable universe.
The advantage of the simpler explanation is that once we understand the mechanics of event
causation, we can, in principle, understand the entire future and the entire history of events (though
in practice our accuracy will be limited by available technology). With Aquinas’ model, there is a
hard limit on what we can know. No matter how much we understand about event causation, there
is that one pesky event G which is forever un-investigable.

Objections

Several important objection arises here, and I will address each of them promptly.

Surely some events cause multiple subsequent events? A pool ball may knock into the 9 ball and
then later knock into the 11 ball, but these are not the same event.
We address this concern by treating the successor of a domino as the class of all events
caused by that domino. That is, the domino (say) D10 is how we represent all events caused by any
event contained in domino D9. Likewise, every event contained in D10 will go on to cause other
events, and these we will represent as D11. This is analogous to the notion that the number 10
precedes the number 11 and succeeds the number 9. Indeed, it borrows heavily from the Russellian
definition of number, which is the class of all objects having the same relation to another object.
For example, a collection of brothers all have the same relation to their father, that of son to
father, so we would group them together in a single class. In the sequence of numbers we say that
a number n precedes a number (n + 1) if and only if n and (n + 1) represent classes, and every
member of the class n bears the relation R to some member of the class (n + 1) . Likewise, we say
a number (n + 1) succeeds a number n if for every element in (n + 1) there exists an element in n
which bears the relation R to it.
Some experience with mathematics will help one overcome the dizzying effect of this style of
thinking, but so too will a a familiar example. Let us think of parents as causing children. Now let
n represent some group of people (any group will do). The class (n - 1) will represent the parents
of these people, because each member of the class (n - 1) will be a person with the relation of
‘parent to child’ to some person in the class n. Likewise, the children of the people in the class n
can be grouped into the class (n + 1) because for each of them, there is someone in the class n who
bears this relation to them. This example is merely an illustration, and should not be taken with too
much zeal, for it completely breaks down in pre-organismic biology where there is not necessarily
a well defined notion of ‘parent’ or ‘child’.

What about the Big Bang? Didn’t the COBE experiments pretty much verify that the universe
began at a definite time in the past?
We address this concern by noting that the model presented here is independent of time, and
a good thing too, because another result from the COBE experiment was to show that ‘time’ is a
feature of our universe resulting from the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Our model is not a
temporal chain of events, but rather a logical chain of events, and it tells us that the inner workings
of the Big Bang are in principle something we can study, even though we may be severely limited
in practice. In particular, it tells us that time is a logical successor to the Big Bang, even though our
Simplicity Criterion forces us to admit that we don’t know anything about the logical predecessor of
the Big Bang. Not that we may never know, but simply that we don’t know anything yet.

Isn’t it fundamentally weird to suppose that there are infinitely many events previous to the present
(whether logically or temporally)? How do you get off saying that’s “simpler” than having an
initial starting point?
Yes, it is extraordinarily weird, but that’s precisely the point. The real universe often
surprises us by how weird it really is. Wasn’t it fundamentally weird for the Earth to be round
before the 15th century? The point is that the universe operates how it operates regardless of what
we think is weird.
When we say our model is simpler than Aquinas’ we mean that Aquinas proposed a second
class of events because of its implications, whereas we endorse a single class despite its
implications. Aquinas’ event G is a way of bundling all of our unknowns up into a single body,
and sealing them off from explanation. Our model is an attempt at providing explanation.