Epistle to Ansgar: Letter 09 God and Being
15 December AD 2024,
Gaudete Sunday
Dear Godson,
On Gaudete Sunday, we light the rose candle of rejoicing, and give thanks in the midst of our season of penitential waiting. The coming joy of the birth of Our Lord awaits us.
In lesser matters, we can also take joy, in that the Lord made knowledge of Him open not just to the spirit of faith, but also to the eyes of reason. He could have arranges the world otherwise, but, in His mercy, the Lord saw fit to give mortal man just enough power of reason for philosophy to reach the pearly gate of heaven, but not enough to enter the throneroom. Reason can tell us that the Lord is real, and worthy of glory and worship, but more than that, must be revealed by a grace, or remain hidden.
But to know God exists is no more impossible than to know reality is real. Indeed, from the fact that reality it real, that being has being, is one way to know God exists.
The Church teaches, and reason confirms, that the Supreme Being is and must be the ground of being: and this all men know to be God.
The necessary being is a being that necessarily must exist, without whom no existence would exist, and for this reason, the argument is often called the ontological argument. It could more simply be called the argument from the nature of being.
We know that God is real because reality is real. This is not a matter one need take on faith, but a conclusion to which anyone who has faith in his power of reasoning will come.
This is one of those truths that is so simple and so obvious that it is ironically hard to prove because it is hard to articulate. Like trying to prove that existence exists, the argument is so obvious that it sounds like nonsense to say it: All beings have a source, therefore being itself must have a first source.
This first source itself is not a being, but the Being, that is to say, the Supreme Being, rightly named I AM WHO AM.
It may sound a little less awkward if we take the backward way, and show why any other conclusion is absurd. We know all things have a source because a world of uncaused events or unsupported conclusions is absurd.
The law of sufficient reason says every event must have a cause sufficient to bring it about, and every conclusion must stand on first principles or postulates sufficient to support it. This does not mean we necessarily know the cause or reason; it merely means we know there is one.
For assume it were not so. Assume that an effect can arise without a cause sufficient to bring it about. If so, then any event following another becomes mere coincidence. Or assume a conclusions can rest on no prior postulate, that is, cite no reason to support it. If so, every assertion is an arbitrary assertion.
If nothing has a reason, nothing has meaning and nothing has an explanation. Nothing is true in such a world, not even the statement “nothing is true.” The world of unreason, all events arise without cause, and conclusions are asserted without reasons, and so every idea is meaningless.
No idea more completely refutes itself than the idea that all ideas are meaningless.
So if we assume any events arise without cause, then we enter a world of mere coincidence, mere chaos. Or if we assume a conclusion without assuming any postulate, definition, or common notion needed to necessitate that conclusion, then we assume arbitrarily. We enter a world where things happen for no reason and nothing has an explanation. Reason stops.
To reenter the world of reason, reason requires we affirm the law of sufficient reason: that every effect has a cause sufficient to bring it about, and every conclusion rests on ground sufficient to support it.
Now, it might be objected that while physical objects, such as chickens, have a beginning hence have a cause, such as being hatched from an egg, non-physical objects, such as the Pythagorean Theorem, do not necessarily have a beginning. Pythagoras did not hatch his theorem from his skull the way a chicken hatches from an egg: the theorem is innate in the nature of right triangles. The theorem exists in nature, in this case, in the nature of Euclidean geometry.
But this does not mean geometrical theorems, or other non-physical reality, exist without cause, or rest on no foundation. It means that non-physical reality has a non-physical source.
Geometric theorems and other abstractions, such as matters of morality and logic, are timeless, for they neither begin nor end, neither age nor die. Timeless things have sources that are timeless. In this example, the Pythagorean Theorem is contingent upon the postulates of Euclidean geometry. If Playfair’s axiom, the parallel postulate, is not granted (as it is not in non-Euclidean geometry) then the Pythagorean Theorem does not necessarily follow. Playfair’s axiom is the source of the Pythagorean Theorem in the sense that the theorem depends on the axiom. The timeless conclusion rests on a timeless source.
But geometry does not depend on itself for its own proof, nor conclusions of philosophy, such as logic, ethics, or metaphysics.
Some things are true, but could be imagined as not being so. In this world, man is mortal, but would involve no logical self contradiction were it otherwise in some other world or some other time. But there is no world where twice two is not four; at no time, not in any world, can this be the case. To be otherwise would necessarily involve a logical self contradiction.
That twice two is four is necessarily the case; that man is mortal is a contingent truth.
Now, even those things that are necessarily the case are themselves contingent on their existence.
Even a self evident truth, as saying twice two is four, depends on something deeper than for its source. In this case, if there were no such thing as numbers, no such thing as two and four, then it would not be the case that twice two is four. When we say twice two “is” four we are assuming as an unspoken axiom that “is” is “is.” Existence exists. Reality is real.
Everything, even abstractions like numbers, have to have beingness, that is, they have to exist, in order to have properties. Four is not twice two if “four” does not exist. No “even number” exists if “number” itself does not exist.
Every proposition is implicitly a statement about the being of something. A thing is what it is and is not what it is not. A is A and A is not non-A.
We say S “is” P, twice two “is” four, or man “is” mortal. So all these statements, and, indeed, any statement, presupposes the existence of the subject matter. Here I am speaking of existence in the broad sense of the term, meaning both literal existence and figurative existence. Here we must be a little careful, because, in English, the words “exist” and “is” and “being” can have more than one meaning.
The narrow meaning of the word is literal. Men exist and unicorns do not. The broad meaning of the word includes anything that has a definition. This includes figurative and hypothetical meanings, or things that exist only by consensus. A unicorn is a one-horned quadruped and not a goat-headed biped.
By existence in the broad sense, we only mean that the predicate can be predicated of the subject. Consider the statement that a unicorn is a one-horned quadruped. The unicorn does not exist in this world, not literally, but it does exist as an animal from fable and story, and, as a figure in fable and story, some things can be truly said of it, and others falsely. A story where is a goat-headed biped is called a unicorn but not called a faun defies common meaning of these words. In that sense, it would be a false story, or, at least, against common meaning.
This is because a thing can exist as a fable, or exist literally. As long as meaningful statements, true or false, can be made about something, in that sense, it exists. If it has properties that can meaningfully be stated of it, in that sense, it exists. If it is what it is and is not what it is not, it exists. A unicorn is not a faun.
So, to recap: we believe the principle of sufficient reason because otherwise the world is nonsense. The principle of sufficient reason says every event is based on a cause, every conclusion is based on a principle, sufficient to explain it. Contingencies depend on necessities, and every necessity depends ultimately on that fact that it exists. In order to be, a thing must be what it is, and not be what it is not.
The conclusions of geometry depend on the axioms of geometry. The truths of mathematics depend on the nature of numbers. Both depend on the laws of logic. Logic depends on truth, that is, on the nature of reality itself. Beauty and truth and virtue depend on reality itself. And the thing that makes reality real is that it exists: it is what it is.
And what makes existence exist? The source of all being is and must be the being whose nature brings forth all other beings, without whom no bring is possible nor imaginable: a necessary being. The ultimate source of being cannot be contingent, because then it would be dependent on something else, hence not ultimate: therefore it must be a necessary being, a being who by definition must exist, whose nonexistence is a self contradiction.
The only being whose non-existence would be a self-contradiction is one which must exist and must form the basis of all other existence.
Keep in mind we are here talking about existence in the broad sense of the term, not just the material existence of the material universe. We are talking about the existence of all things, both eternal and temporal. We are talking of a necessarily being without whom truth is not true, reason is not reasonable, virtue is not virtuous, beauty is not beautiful, existence itself is not in existence. We are not talking about some Big Bang or primal explosion of matter and energy, but about the source of cause and effect itself. We are not talking about an abstract metaphysical principles or law of non-contradiction, but about the thing that makes logic be logic. Nor can this being bring forth being by an operation or action, since it is the source of all action, indeed, the source of the nature of action itself. This is rightly called the Supreme Being.
There cannot be two such beings, because then the existence, the being, of the Supreme Being would depend on whatever properties they had in common. The cannot be two supremacies any more than there can be two numbers one at the origin of the number line. Nor can there be a succession of Supreme Beings, one after another, since by definition the Supreme Being, as the source of being, cannot come into existence out of non-existence nor pass from existence into non-existence to make way for the next Supreme Being. There can only be one. For the same reason, that one must be perfect and unchanging, albeit must be the source of all change, since it is the source of all things.
Thus from the fact that anything exists we can and must deduce that existence has a necessary source, and that this necessary being by definition must exist, and be the source of all that is good, true, and beautiful, the source of the universe, the source of man. This Supreme Being is what all men know to be God.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
