The Neoneoplatonic Argument For God

The Neoplatonic argument is old news

The failed Neoplatonic argument

Ed Feser has a Neoplatonic argument for God. The more condensed version—before Feser tries desperately to squeeze all the traditional divine attributes from absolute simplicity—is as follows (for the record, composite means composed of parts):

1. The things of our experience are composite.

2. A composite exists at any moment only insofar as its parts are combined at that moment.

3. This composition of parts requires a concurrent cause.

4. So, any composite has a cause of its existence at any moment at which it exists.

5. So, each of the things of our experience has a cause at any moment at which it exists.

6. If the cause of a composite thing’s existence at any moment is itself composite, then it will in turn require a cause of its own existence at that moment.

7. The regress of causes this entails is hierarchical in nature, and such a regress must have a first member.

8. Only something absolutely simple or noncomposite could be the first member of such a series.

9. So, the existence of each of the things of our experience presupposes an absolutely simple or noncomposite cause.

The argument has many problems nicely pointed out by Joe Schmid in this paper (expounded on in his book which you all should immediately buy). 3 is extremely undermotivated—as Joe shows, Feser’s arguments for it fail completely. Furthermore, Feser’s argument goes wrong somewhere according to every view of composition.

There are three views of composition. One view is called mereological nihilism. It says that composite objects like tables, chairs, and penguins don’t really exist. The only things that really exist are the basic physical things—quarks maybe—arranged a certain way. We just refer to certain arrangements of quarks as tables and chairs for convenience. On this view, 1 would be false.

The second view is called mereological restrictivism. On this view the basic physical components—the things that are most fundamental, that don’t break down any further (let’s call them atoms)—sometimes combine to form new composite objects. So, for example, the atoms in my brown wooden desk form a composite object—that is to say, they form my brown wooden desk—but the atoms on my desk + the atoms in a random turkey don’t form a composite object. Only some combinations of atoms are composite objects.

On this view, 3 is false. It doesn’t require a concurrent cause for composition to occur—there just have to be things arranged in the right way.

The last view is mereological universalism. This view’s a free for all—it says every combination of atoms forms it’s own composite object. There is a composite object composed of me, your mom, 5 random atoms on Jupiter, and the statue of liberty. Of course, it’s not a very useful composite, but it’s a composite nonetheless. On this view, 3 is false—all you need for composition is for stuff to exist.

So Feser’s neoplatonic argument fails. But there’s an argument slightly in the vicinity that might work.

The not-failed Neoneoplatonic argument

I'm coming to terms with a broken heart
I guess that sometimes good things fall apart

—John Bellion.

The things of the world hang together in an important way. They interact. This could easily have been otherwise in a bunch of ways (I’ll point out roughly how strong of evidence I think these things are each, in Bayesian terms, so if I write 5 then it favors theism over naturalism by a factor of 5):

1. As pointed out by Saad and Cutter (and me, after repeating what Saad and Cutter said), the laws of nature could just not apply to anything. Or, if you think laws are just descriptions of what stuff does, the stuff could have causal properties that don’t interact with anything—for example, you might have As that interact with Bs but not have any Bs. 25

2. Even if things are broadly in the business of interacting with each other, there are certain conditions that have to apply. But most ways reality could be, they wouldn’t apply. Things only interact under certain conditions, but that means there are an infinite number of conditions under which they don’t apply. For example, you could have all the physical stuff really far apart so that it doesn’t interact. And that doesn’t seem much less intrinsically probable—it doesn’t compromise simplicity. Similarly, you could have there be other stuff that interferes with the interactions—potentially an infinite number of things could do that. 20

3. Even if the stuff that exists is broadly in the business of interacting, it has to be in the same spacetime region. That’s not guaranteed—you could have things occur in their own isolated spacetimes—distinct from each other the way David Lewis’s worlds are distinct. Them being in the same world is no simpler and so it’s pretty unlikely. 2

4. For stuff to interact in any way which brings about anything interesting there has to be time. Otherwise, everything would be static. Furthermore, things have to have interactions that play out across time. 2

5. The stuff has to be all of a similar kind to interact. You might have, for instance, disembodied minds, weird mathematical laws that do stuff, and then also have physical composites. One of the worries of the many worlds interpretation is that something as abstruse and mathematical as a wave function can’t explain the real physical stuff of our experience—you could have a world like that where there are abstruse mathematical laws but they don’t build up to anything concrete. 2

6. The stuff all has to be capable of interacting with other things. But surely it’s simpler for it to just follow its own plan—for instance, particles that move around in a circle whatever the other particles do. 10

7. Then, even when the stuff interacts, it has to be able to bind together in stable ways. If particles just bounced off each other but didn’t form more complicated composites, nothing interesting would happen. 20

8. For the stuff to interact, there also has to be space. Now, space might be necessary, but if not, it’s another thing needed for reality to hang together. 2

If the numbers are right then this is 1,600,000:1 odds in favor of theism

The basic point is that reality hangs together to a truly surprising extent. A lot has to go right for that. And naturalism doesn’t have a good story of why it does that. Theism does—God would only create things that hang together, for otherwise they’d be wasteful, useless, and redundant. Seeing the sheer number of ways reality could catastrophically fail to hang together, I think this is a decently strong argument for God—a slightly more generalized version of the nomological harmony argument.

Appundix

Here I shall make roughly two paragraphs worth of bad puns about arguments for God.

Ed Feser claims that God is simple and necessitated by what turns into potential—but I think that’s pure act. I think his Aristotelian proof of God has potential actually, and his argument from composition is at least part of a good argument. No, nevermind, the Aristotelian proof doesn’t have potential—it is actual lies. He takes the pro position on the neoplatonic proof, I take the conposition, in whole or in part.

I think more people are convinced of the anthropic argument now than before I wrote about it.

The Kalam? God, where to begin? It’s a kalamitously bad argument, almost as if it’s kalamculated to be maximally unpersuasive. The ontological argument—people think it’s good, L! It truly has no positive properties.