Why Does the World Exist: An Existentia - By Jim Holt Page 0,95
when I talked to him in Oxford. God can’t be an abstract principle, Swinburne had insisted, because an abstract principle cannot suffer. And, when we suffer in a good cause, our creator has an obligation to suffer along with us, the way a parent has an obligation to suffer along with a child. The world would be a less good place if it weren’t created by a God who shared our suffering—so Swinburne had claimed. And an abstract principle of goodness can’t do that.
“Hmm,” said Leslie very slowly. “That sounds like an argument for the existence of a Supreme Masochist. I find it hard to swallow the notion that the world is improved by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it’s all better.”
Perhaps Leslie was more a pantheist then, in the style of Spinoza. Spinoza’s God was not a personal agent, like the traditional deity of Judeo-Christianity. Rather, Spinoza equated God to an infinite and self-subsistent substance that encompassed all of nature.
“A lot of people thought Spinoza wasn’t talking about God at all,” Leslie said. “They called him an atheist. And if you want to call me an atheist, that’s fine by me. Words like ‘theism’ and ‘atheism’ and ‘God,’ they’ve moved around so much that they’re practically meaningless. Who really cares? I do consider myself a Spinozist, however, for two reasons. First, I think Spinoza was right that we’re all tiny regions in an infinite mind. And I agree with him that the material world, the world described by science, is a pattern of divine thought. But I also think that Spinoza himself was really a Platonist. That’s not the standard view, of course. In his Ethics, Spinoza argues that the world exists as a matter of logical necessity. But the Ethics was not Spinoza’s best book. His best book was an earlier one, A Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being. And there Spinoza pretty clearly runs the view that it is value that is creating everything—that the world exists because it’s good that it should. When he got to Ethics, he wanted to prove everything in geometrical fashion, so he gave what looks like a logical proof, and not a very convincing one, that there must be an infinite substance. Consistency is the virtue of small minds, and Spinoza had a great mind—he was inconsistent all over the place.”
Whether Platonic or Spinozistic, Leslie’s view of reality had a certain beauty about it, I thought: the beauty of an ontological pipe dream. Yet, for all the rigor of his arguments—and he was never at a loss for an argument to rebut any objection—could his axiarchism (value rules!) really be taken seriously as the ultimate explanation for all existence?
As I was to discover, many thinkers have taken it quite seriously. Among them was the late Oxford philosopher (and staunch atheist) John Mackie. In his powerful book-length case against the existence of God, The Miracle of Theism, Mackie devoted an entire chapter, titled “Replacements for God,” to Leslie’s axiarchism. “The notion that the mere ethical need for something could on its own call that item into existence, without the operation of any person or mind that was aware of this need and acted so as to fulfil it, is, no doubt, initially strange and paradoxical,” Mackie wrote. “Yet in it lies also the great strength of extreme axiarchism.” Leslie’s theory, he went on to say, “offers the only possible answer to the question which underlies all forms of the cosmological argument, the question ‘Why is there anything at all?’ or ‘Why should there be any world rather than none?’ ”
Obviously, Mackie observed, no explanation in terms of a “first cause” could answer the ultimate question of existence, for such an explanation would merely raise the further question of why that first cause—whether it be God, an unstable chunk of false vacuum, or some other still more exotic entity—itself existed. But Leslie’s explanation for the existence of the world did not have this defect, Mackie observed. The objective need for goodness that he posits is not a cause. It is rather a fact, a necessary fact, one that does not call for any further explanation. Goodness is not an agent or a mechanism that creates something out of nothing. It is a reason for there being a world rather than nothingness. In the end, though, Mackie remained skeptical of