Some Obscure Natural Theology

Earlier (February 2009), as a reason to believe that God exists, I offered the fact that the universe existing as the result of the free choice of a rational, necessarily existent being maximizes feasible intelligibility, i.e., it is an account of the world at large which explains as much as we could reasonably hope to have explained.

This reasoning presupposes two things that might not be easy to believe. One is that we can sensibly ascribe necessary existence to things, not just necessary truth to statements. The other is that there is a necessarily existent being which has a distinct character.

This latter conflicts with the common supposition that matters of necessary truth are fundamentally straightforward, regular, bland, monolithic, predictable, uninteresting, etc., and that anything unique, individual or unexpected, anything with character, belongs to the realm of contingency. Yet this assumption does not survive an encounter with the domains of necessary truth we best understand, viz., logic and mathematics. Here it soon becomes apparent that the realm of necessity is inhabited by things which have quite particular, unexpected, and often plain “quirky” natures. Consider the endlessly surprising discoveries in number theory, e.g., facts about the distribution of the primes, or the profoundly counterintuitive properties of cellular automata, the bizarre zoo of objects generated by a few simple rules from a simple beginning. These are arenas in which what’s true is what must be true, yet what’s true is often very far from anything we find simple or obvious. I don’t know how to put this sense of a connection between necessity and unique character clearly, let along construct a natural theological argument from it, but without it I would find it harder to take seriously the idea of a necessarily existent free person. I conjecture that these things we discern as the characteristics of such abstracta as sets, numbers, cellular automata, and so on, somehow are just a pale reflection of the concrete reality of the divine logos himself.