Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by SRB :

I think I was dealing with a more sophisticated form of GP's argument than they in fact presented. It seems that a defender of GP can say the creation action is a necessary truth, but that the creation action was not something relativized to a particular BCCF. The necessary truth in question is "God performs the action that explains the BCCF, whatever the BCCF happens to be," not "God performs the action that explains this BCCF."

Then it need not be called an "event." The necessary truth I'm proposing is "the BCCF gets explained through the accidental action of some necessary being." It's epistemically possible and fairly plausible (especially because of its parallels with the Big Bang) that this is a necessary truth. If this is a necessary truth, it requires no explanation.

Mark Grant

Hey, Thomas. This is the same guy who's IMed you a few times and who used to have the livejournal name "immanuel." I decided to participate in some of these interesting discussions, though I may prove unable to properly keep up.

Gale and Pruss, in the article linked by SRB, seem to just find it completely obvious that W-PSR is completely true; the only rebuttal to it they seem to be aware of in that article is the (admittedly weak, in my opinion) charge that it begs the question. Well, I, for one, don't find it so obvious. Let me elaborate:

Say Jones caused a fire in a particular house. Now, it appears plausible at first that in another possible world, Smith caused the fire, instead. However, is this really true? Would it really be the same fire? There are some who, I believe, can legitimately answer in the negative. I may very well have misunderstood him (and if I have, someone please correct me), but Saul Kripke probably would think they're different fires, since he argued that a necessary property of a thing is the way in which that thing was created. To toss out another example to illustrate this, he would say that I couldn't have been born to different parents, or else I would be someone else entirely.

Now, if an object O was created totally at random and out of the blue - i.e., without an explanation - then one could say, at least plausibly, that it's a necessary property of O that it was created out of the blue. Perhaps in another possible world, something very similar to O had a cause, but that's still very different from O itself having one.

An intuitive objection to all of this is that I've been talking about objects having causes, whereas Gale and Pruss have been talking about propositions having explanations. However, I think this is pretty easily surmountable. If the aforementioned fire had no cause, we can pretty easily conclude that the proposition "That particular house burnt down" has no explanation. Thus, if an object is causeless, then some propositions about that object will also be explanation-less.

Those are my preliminary thoughts. Let me emphasize that I'm not trying to argue that W-PSR is false so much as it is less obvious than Gale and Pruss would have us believe, and that it's just as wrong to accept out of hand as S-PSR. Unfortunately, I haven't really thought about the position I've defended in this post very much, so it may contain some glaring flaws. What do you think? Does it have any validity?