On the Nature of Existence, and the Existence of Nature

A response to Ed Feser’s Aristotelian Proof for the existence of God

“Cosmic Cliffs” in the Carina Nebula (NIRCam Image) Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

This essay was written for my book club. Because I’m batting way out of my league here, the style is more formal than my essays typically are. Still, the content is relevant to the sorts of topics I usually talk about on Bracero, and will likely be relevant to future essays I post here, so I want it to be accessible to my readers. Cheers.

Should We Argue About Religion?

In recent years, there has been a re-evaluation of the value of Scholastic-style arguments for the existence of God, with certain notable apologist philosophers leading the charge, such as Edward Feser, Trent Horn, and William Lane Craig. This resurgence of philosophical arguments to defend traditional theistic religion has, I believe, been unusually influential on an emerging generation of young, well-educated people, who have felt alienated by the sociopolitical status quo, and a certain unwillingness in mainstream intellectual circles to seriously consider heterodox ideas about philosophy, science, politics, and religion. It has long been well-established that the American academic community skews left on political issues, and it is true that the academic community is less religious than the overall American population (though claims that it is overwhelmingly secular are overblown). The result seems to be an environment in which certain ideas simply don’t receive consideration, and therefore do not receive carefully-considered rebuttal.

Arguably, this approach to discourse has backfired for the mainstream left, invigorating a new strain of reactionary thought which can be broadly described as a “New Right.” The New Right is simultaneously highly intellectual, conspiratorial, and deeply religious, and I believe it constitutes a new type of reactionary politics–new insofar as it defines itself in contradiction to “wokeism,” but also a surprising willingness within certain factions to criticize the effects of capitalism on western culture. Thus it does not regard itself as a conservative wing of classical liberalism, as would Burkean or even neoconservatism–instead it is “postliberal” and seeks to return to an earlier, pre-capitalist form of social life.^, To those with secular and progressive values–such as the importance of free speech, the separation of church and state, the right to abortion and contraception, the rights of LGBTQ groups, the social equality of men and women, and other key points–this movement poses a real threat, as was seen by the successful overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the passage of bills banning gender-affirming care in many states. More fundamental than how one feels about these specific issues, the culture war serves as an anchor for many voters to a Republican party which is increasingly fundamentally opposed to basic notions of representative government, and even expresses skepticism towards the legitimacy of elections such as to oppose the peaceful transfer of presidential power in substantial numbers. While these issues are nuanced and complex, and my own positions on such issues make me as much a heretic to the secular left as to the religious right, I believe the conversation around them is made far less constructive by the injection of dogmatic religious belief. 

Why do I believe this? In the course of rational discussion of any political or social issue, there will come a point where an appeal is made to a shared understanding of how the world is, such that we can agree about what would be the right thing to do in that world. Religion introduces an epistemological firewall into any discussion, where a person who has accepted a certain type of religious belief thereby has accepted a set of views about those issues which normal rational discussion cannot penetrate. If one is debating a topic like abortion with a Catholic, both participants could come to agree that, for instance, the consciousness of a person does not exist in the fetus until somewhere between 20-24 weeks after conception, yet still disagree about whether the presence of this consciousness is relevant to whether or not an abortion is permissible, because the Catholic has a fixed and predetermined belief in the immortal soul of the fetus, which makes the termination of its life impermissible regardless of the presence of any other quality which may cause it to lack the rights of a human person. The premise of the discussion is therefore misconceived–what appears to be a debate around the nature of consciousness proves to be undercut by a much more fundamental debate about whether or not human beings are characterized as conscious brains, or as souls with conscious brains attached in some way. I say “undercut” because no amount of discussion about the nature of consciousness can ever penetrate the real source of disagreement, and the real source of disagreement is not simply one arbitrary belief, but rather is a fixed plank in a whole system of beliefs.

To be clear, this goes both ways. If the Catholic believes that they have rationally apprehended the truth of the existence of the God recognized by the Catholic Church, then it is I who have been cut off in the discussion by an epistemological firewall–my commitment to a belief in a naturalistic and deterministic universe, one in which souls do not exist, miracles do not occur, and things happen necessarily as parts of a causal chain stretching back through time is limiting my ability to consider what is ostensibly an unrelated policy issue. Regardless of our position in this landscape, it is up to those who wish to preserve a healthy social discourse, and who assign an independent value to truth, to attempt to break through those firewalls. 

My goal is not to make people atheists–religion is an important part of life to many people, and I do not believe one needs to be rid of it to be a member of a functioning democracy. What one does need, however, is a certain kind of belief which is non-dogmatic, and therefore allows opposing arguments to make their way through the firewall. My goal is not to eliminate belief so much as to erode what I would regard as undue confidence in it, my concern being that excessive confidence in belief leads to a greater willingness to impose that belief on others. The ideal, to me, is a society in which every participant in ongoing social discourse has a position which they are willing to act on and defend, but about which they are not overwhelmingly certain, and therefore are more hesitant to take drastic steps to enforce.

Therefore, I believe that to have meaningful discussions of political and social issues, we must first do the work of seriously challenging and considering one another’s beliefs about the nature of the world-including and especially such taboo topics as the existence of the soul, of God, or of free will. It is deeply unfair to religious believers for secular thinkers to refuse to give serious credence to their reasons for belief insofar as those reasons claim to be knowable by human rationality. It will not do to simply demur, declare ourselves mortal and irreconcilable enemies, and commence upon a battle of all against all. If we wish to convince the other side that they are wrong, we should have the humility and presence of mind to offer compelling reasons as to why. Further, it is necessary that engaging in that project, we ought to be willing to reconsider and, if necessary, revise our existing beliefs. That is our due diligence as partners in a shared civil society.

The State of the Argument

Like many, I have largely ignored questions pertaining to religion and God for most of the past decade, mainly out of boredom with the tired state of the argument. When I was just starting to think about religious issues in the late aughts, New Atheism was in its ascendancy. New Atheism, most commonly associated with figures like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, as well as less famous but nonetheless influential figures like PZ Myers and Alex Rosenberg, argued that the non-existence of God was not just true, but obvious in light of modern science. Broadly speaking, it claimed that there were no compelling arguments for religious belief, and that a purely “scientistic” outlook was the only suitable alternative. Not only this, but religion was in fact a deeply pernicious force in society, and one which ought to be abandoned. At the time, as a young man raised by non-religious (and in my father’s case, militantly atheist) parents, I was deeply moved by these arguments, and like so many philosophically-inclined people of my age, New Atheism is a movement I look back on with the same cringing embarrassment as one feels looking back at one’s adolescent music taste or political beliefs. The arguments made by the New Atheists were, in retrospect, exceptionally bad, and only had the appearance of force because they typically only engaged with the worst representatives of religious belief–usually fundamentalist Christians, and in particular Young Earth Creationists. Few among the followers of New Atheism noticed that one could fully believe in religious doctrine of one sort or another without having to, for instance, reject Darwinian natural selection, or believe the English translation of the King James Bible was the literal word of God. It was only in moments where New Atheists accidentally encountered competent opponents that an uneducated viewer would get the sense that, perhaps, nearly every philosopher and scientist from Plato up to Kant and Newton actually wasn’t a total idiot, and the things they had to say about God and religion were perhaps worth closer consideration.

Those who did notice this, however, were largely left to their own devices–very few non-religious intellectuals actually saw a need to say anything on the subject beyond what had been said by the New Atheists. This isn’t to say that there were no atheist philosophers who handled the issue well (figures like Graham Oppy and J.L. Mackie come to mind)–even most theistic philosophers admit this–but the popular discourse had moved on to the culture war mire we’re still stuck in by the time the only arguments which no New Atheist had made yet, were any of the ones actually worth making.

The culture war has, as I argued earlier, circled back around to the realization that, in fact, religion is very important and this is a conversation we do need to have. In the intervening years, some excellent treatises on theism for popular audiences have been produced. Which brings us to the subject of this essay: a response to Ed Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Specifically, I wish to respond to Feser’s Aristotelian Proof. In so doing, I will argue that Feser’s argument depends on claims about the nature of existence which are logically inconsistent–specifically, the belief that existence is a potentiality is, I will argue, self-refuting. In making this argument, like Feser, I will try to minimize philosophical jargon and keep my language as intuitive as possible. Like Feser, I will present the argument informally first, then offer a formal list of propositions leading to a conclusion, and finally discuss potential misunderstandings and attempt to anticipate objections to the argument. Unlike Feser, I will not use the term “proof,” because I believe it goes too far to claim that a philosophical argument can offer a “proof” of anything–human reason not having evolved to ascertain absolute truths, but rather to make useful predictions and inferences, and absolute knowledge of the objects of human reason being ultimately unavailable to us. Thus I do not think we can “prove” that a proposition is true in philosophy, but instead only demonstrate that any ideally rational human observer should agree that the propositions of an argument necessitate its conclusion-conferring a justified, but not necessarily true, belief. Whether or not you accept the propositions ultimately depends, I believe, on intuitions which cannot necessarily be challenged through argument, and the truth of which is therefore quite probably unknowable.

An Argument For the Self-Sufficiency of Substance: Informal Statement

Can something be the cause of itself? This seems impossible, because we live in a world of proximate causes and effects. I am held up by my chair; my chair is held up by the floor; the floor is held up by the frame of the house; the frame of the house is held up by the earth; and the earth is suspended in orbit by gravity. Beyond this, things get complicated, but the point is clear-I cannot understand myself without understanding how aspects of me are caused by other things. This is true of my accidental properties–such as my position in the chair, suspended off the ground–and of more fundamental and fixed properties such as my being 28 years old, caused by my birth in 1995, or my being male, caused by my chromosomal makeup established at conception (the cause of these facts being something I’d rather not discuss). 

It is immediately apparent to us that most things have many causes. I am certainly not merely caused by my birth, but also by my conception, by my genetic code, and by all the experiences I have had and the historical circumstances in which I have found myself. But of all the things which could be said to have caused me, probably the last thing we would feel tempted to say is that I “caused myself.”

The common sense reasoning involved here is the reasoning which underlies the first argument for the existence of God given in Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God, namely what Feser terms the Aristotelian Proof. The logic of the Aristotelian Proof is derived from the account of causality given in Aristotle’s Physics. 

In the Physics, Aristotle is concerned with the fundamental principles of nature–specifically with the principles of motion, cause, and existence. To explain how it is that motion occurs, Aristotle introduces the notions of actuality and potentiality:

The solution of the difficulty that is raised about the motion-whether it is in the movable-is plain. It is the fulfilment of this potentiality, and by the action of that which has the power of causing motion; and the actuality of that which has the power of causing motion is not other than the actuality of the movable, for it must be the fulfilment of both. A thing is capable of causing motion because it can do this, it is a mover because it actually does it. But it is on the movable that it is capable of acting. Hence there is a single actuality of both alike, just as one to two and two to one are the same interval, and the steep ascent and the steep descent are one-for these are one and the same, although they can be described in different ways. So it is with the mover and the moved.

The cause of motion–and therefore of change–is the actualization of an individual entity’s potential. I had the potential to type this sentence–once I reach the end of it, I will have actualized that potential. From this it follows that I have a rather large set of potentials-of sentences I could write, of movements I could undertake, of thoughts which could occur to me, etc. That I actualize one of these potentials, to the exclusion of any of the others, at a given moment demands explanation. It is from this that we derive the notion of cause. 

Aristotle’s account of causation is, unsurprisingly, complex and nuanced, and a full account of it is beyond the scope of this essay. What is relevant for our purposes, and for Feser’s, is that there must always be something from without a subject which actualizes some particular set of its potentials at any given moment. For this reason, no individual subject is self-contained and offers a full account of itself–it must always be understood at least partially by the actualization of its potentials from external actualizers. My potential to sleep is actualized by the texture of my bed; by the exhaustion of my muscles from the day’s activity; by the position of the earth relative to the sun rendering it dark outside; by the white noise and cooling provided by my air conditioner; and so on. As Feser argues in propositions 1-4 of the formal statement of his Aristotelian Proof:

1. Change is a real feature of the world.

2. But change is the actualization of a potential.

3. So, the actualization of a potential is a real feature of the world.

4. No potential can be actualized unless something already actual actualizes it (the principle of causality).

If this is true, Feser argues, then there must be something which actualizes the potential of a thing to exist. He introduces this concept in proposition 7:

7. The existence of S at any given moment itself presupposes the concurrent actualization of S’s potential for existence.

If substance S has a potential to exist, and this potential is actualized from one moment to another, there must be a cause. As Feser will go on to argue, the actualizer of S’s potential to exist from one moment to another must be actualized by an actualizer which is not itself actualized, else we be left with an infinite regress of actualizers (propositions 9-11). So the actualizer must be a purely actual actualizer, one with no potentials and therefore unchanging (propositions 12-14), which we learn at the conclusion of Feser’s argument (proposition 50) is God. 

Feser does not claim that this is an original argument–rather, he argues that until recently, this was a generally acknowledged problem in philosophy, for which God was the only answer any worthwhile philosopher (Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, etc.) could come up with. I think criticism of his view should not try to demur. The instinctive reaction of the secular reader who has not encountered the problem before, is to simply scoff at it. “Of course everything continues to exist, that’s just common sense. Why are we wasting our time with this?” But exasperated scoffing and appeals to common sense are the reaction of someone who has just encountered a very compelling but annoying idea, and seeks to avoid its implications. This argument from existence has force–if we can ask “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, as nobody denies we can, it seems obvious that we should also be able to ask “Why does something continue to exist, rather than not?” So long as we are doing philosophy, we are committed to the idea that at least in principle this question ought to have an answer, rather than simply embracing it as a brute fact which does not admit of further examination. My answer to the question, of course, will differ from Feser’s, but he shouldn’t thereby be faulted for asking it.

For the most part, this essay will not deal with Feser’s argument beyond proposition 7, because I wish to argue that his claim that substances have a “potential to exist” does not yield an actualizer distinct from all other substances, even if we ignore arguments rejecting the claim that existence is a predicate–something which a subject can be caused to have.

There are two important notions in the proposition. Notice that Feser slips in as given the idea of a “potential to exist.” This seems unremarkable to the reader, and passes by unchallenged. But the use of “existence” as a predicate of any subject is, historically, highly controversial in philosophy, and this should clue us in to the problem. The problem with the use of existence as a predicate is that it is an absolutely universal predicate, and thus, its status as a predicate at all is suspect. For predicates exist in subjects–if I did not exist, neither could my predicates. My position on the chair is impossible without my existence; my birth in 1995 is impossible without my existence; my height and weight, my thoughts, the color of my skin, etc. all rely upon my own existence for theirs.

This could be thought of as a “wholes-first” ontology, wherein I’m claiming that my parts depend upon my identity as a whole for existence, rather than the other way around. But, to be fair to Feser, we should be clear about what it is he means by “existence.” Taken from a 2015 lecture:

The potential of the coffee to exist here and now is actualized, in part, by the existence of the water; which in turn exists only because a certain potential of the atoms is being actualized; where these atoms themselves exist only because a certain potential of the subatomic particles is being actualized… 

…Now, since what is being explained in this case is the actualization of a thing’s potential for existence, the sort of first cause we’re talking about is one which can actualize the potential for things to exist without having to have its own existence actualized by anything. What this entails is that this cause doesn’t have any potential for existence that needs to be actualized in the first place.

The use of the coffee example can be extrapolated as follows: the existence of the coffee is partly actualized by the existence of the water. If the water’s potential to become a gas is actualized through evaporation, then the coffee would go out of existence. This potential to exist has to be continuously re-actualized, the same way the water in the coffee is continuously re-actualized as a liquid, rather than a gas (though this re-actualization is presumably only partial, since some evaporation is always happening above a certain temperature).

But this raises some complications with Feser’s idea of a “concurrent actualization of S’s potential for existence.” By the use of this terminology, he adds a temporal element to the nature of potentiality, and this makes our discussion much more complicated than it might have otherwise been. Instead of a broad assertion that “S has a potential to exist,” Feser’s argument rests on the claim that S’s existence potential must be constantly actualized at every moment by a divine being. So we can think of existence potential not as a constant, but as a long series of potentials–not “the potential for S to exist,” but “the potential for S to exist at time t, t1, t2. . .tn.” Each separate potentiality requires a separate cause of its actualization.

What are the implications of this temporal element? Let’s try to understand how we might conceptualize the idea of “concurrent actualization.” At time t, I am sitting down. If one interval of t is taken to be a tenth of a second, for instance, I do not think we can claim that I have a potential at time t1 to be running at full speed–because of the nature of physics, it takes me a few seconds at least to overcome inertia and accelerate to a sprinting pace. Therefore, my potentiality to sprint between t to t1 is zero–it cannot be actualized even conceptually, and therefore it doesn’t exist. And yet, we would not deny that, in a general sense, I have a potential for sprinting. But this seems to amount to saying only that “In the course of Adam’s life taken as a whole, he has the potential to sprint.” But nothing about this seems to conflict with a statement like “When Adam is sleeping, he has no potential for sprinting whatsoever,” since I’m not always sleeping. If we wish to claim that I have a potential to sprint which is somehow a real feature of me at every moment, even when I’m asleep, swimming, or paralyzed, then we have made a new and different assertion from the earlier claim that, broadly speaking, I have a potential to sprint which can be actualized under certain conditions. But on its own terms, there is nothing in the logic of potentiality and actuality which grants us this.

So we have learned something in this example–that some potentials do, and others do not, exist at a given moment–I did not have a potentiality to sprint in the next moment at t1, but if I initiated the action at t, then by t15 or t20 I probably do have a potentiality to sprint in the next interval, and once I actually am sprinting, I am concurrently actualizing my potential to sprint in the last moment while also manifesting a potential to sprint in the next. This is an example of how we could do this with a predicate like “sprinting.” How could we apply the idea of concurrent actualization of potential to “existing”?

We can start by asking what it is my potential for existence depends upon. We noticed in the sprinting example that my potential to go from rest to a full sprint from t to t1 is nonexistent. The existence of a given potential, then, is not taken for granted. For instance, there are potentials I do possess–like the potential to die, which could happen at any moment. But, if I didn’t exist, how could my potential to die exist? Or, for that matter, to sprint? If my potential to die or sprint doesn't actually depend on my existence, then we must be faced with an infinite number of potentials which apply to subjects that do not exist! 

Grant me that this would be absurd, or at the very least lavishly un-parsimonious, and we can arrive at another observation: Potentials constitute potential predicates, potential qualities or modifications of an existing subject. It is this fact which would make it absurd to utter a phrase like “is sprinting” or “sprints,” apropos of nothing. These words are left hanging, demanding a subject to affix them to. Thus, predicates require subjects, which themselves already exist, to grant existence to those predicates. All this leads us to the question which we now need to consider: What causes existence to exist? 

If existence depends upon its subject, then it makes no sense to claim that “I exist,” or that “I have a potential to exist”–the word “exist” adds nothing we did not gain from “I”--the predicate is already entailed in the subject. Likewise, “he is nonexistent” is not a coherent statement, because both “he” and “is” necessitate existence. It might make sense to claim that I am real, or embodied, or alive-a mere reference to me does not imply these things, because I could conceivably be fictional, disembodied, or dead. But if I can be conceived of, then my existence is already demonstrated in the mere conception, even if it is only as a concept. So to say that I exist adds nothing and changes nothing–therefore there doesn’t seem to be any potential which has been actualized.

It may be sufficient to let the argument lie there. But it is worth asking: how can this be? Clearly, after all, I do exist–the only alternative being that I do not. This statement, while technically redundant, intuitively has meaning, and everyone can make sense of it. Existence is quite plausibly a predicate of something, and if it can be applied to me, I would appear to be involved in that something in some meaningful way.

As we stated earlier, anything that is predicated of something, depends on that something to exist. My upright gait is predicated of my two legs, my sightedness is predicated of my eyes, my humor is predicated of my personality, etc. But I am not the only thing which has the properties of walking upright, sightedness, or humor. So sightedness, for instance, belongs not to any individual, but to a category–let’s say animals. So sightedness the universal (as distinct from my sightedness the particular) depends on animal, the universal. Insofar as I am possessed of sightedness, then, I possess it qua animal. Insofar as I possess uprightness; I possess it qua biped; insofar as I possess humor, I possess it qua mammal. And animals, bipeds, and mammals all exist. By what universal, then, do I (or anything else I’ve discussed so far) possess the property of existence?

It is at this point that I’ll introduce another philosopher to the discussion: Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s Ethics offers a unique conception of substance, which can be most readily grasped in definitions I and III of Part One:

I. By cause of itself, I understand that, whose essence involves existence; or that, whose nature cannot be conceived unless existing.

And;

III. By substance, I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; in other words, that the conception of which does not need the conception of another thing from which it must be formed.

The implications of these definitions are explicated later, in Proposition 7:

Proposition 7.  It pertains to the nature of substance to exist.

Demonstration. There is nothing by which substance can be produced (Proposition 6, Corollary). It will therefore be the cause of itself, that is to say (Definition I), its essence necessarily involves existence, or in other words it pertains to its nature to exist. Q.E.D.

As we have demonstrated, sightedness exists in animals; humor exists in mammals. But these subjects themselves are predicated of other subjects–mammals are predicated of vertebrates, animals are predicated of eukaryotic organisms. What is existence predicated of? For Spinoza, the answer is substance–substance, and substance alone, is predicated of itself and is self-sufficient.

Spinoza himself saw the problem the Aristotelian Proof posed, and believed that this conception of substance (which he regards as indistinguishable from God) met all its demands:

Hence it follows that God is not only the cause of the commencement of the existence of things, but also of their continuance in existence, or, in other words (to use scholastic phraseology), God is the causa essendi rerum. For if we consider the essence of things, whether existing or non-existing, we discover that it neither involves existence nor duration, and therefore the essence of existing things cannot be the cause of their existence nor their duration, but God only is the cause, to whose nature alone existence pertains.

Why is this problematic for the Aristotelian Proof? The problem is that everything exists, and therefore everything exists insofar as it is substance, or everything that exists, exists qua substance. That is, it doesn’t exist because of a God to whom I’m simply giving the name substance but whose role is essentially creative, but rather exists as substance, but with other more particular qualities, the same way all human beings are human while also being distinct individuals. Insofar as everything is substance, everything self-actualizes its potential to exist–or taken another way, there is no potential to exist, because there is no conceivable potential not to exist, anymore than my heart has a potential to become the heart of a frog. Existence is necessary for anything which exists qua substance. But it seems quite odd to rephrase premise 7 of Feser’s proof to say that we have a “potential to necessarily exist.” There’s nothing “potential” about it! We exist necessarily, because we are part of a thing whose essential quality is existence.

Another problem this introduces is the need to divide substance so as to preserve the God of classical theism, as Feser seeks to do. It could be argued that substance is self-caused, but only because there is a part of substance which is God, and a part of substance which is the world. But this is absurd, because the same properties which we used to define substance are the ones we are using to define God–conceived purely within itself and therefore purely actual, and the actualizer of existence. If this is the property of substance, and the property of God, then substance must not be one but two, part God, and also part nature. But this is hopeless, because substance must be indivisible if it is purely actual, for the same reason Feser insists that there must be only one God, and not many–if we have two things which are purely actual, then we don’t have two things, but one. Whatever God we wish to put forth must be one which not merely sustains the world, but is in fact its substrate. Whatever exists in this God, necessarily exists, but a further discussion of necessity is beyond the scope of this essay. 

An Argument For the Self-Sufficiency of Substance: Formal Statement

1. Every potential is either a predicate or subject in unactualized form.

2. Every predicate is allowed existence only in a subject.

3. Existence is a predicate.

4. Everything which exists must be the kind of subject which has existence

5. Therefore there must be some subject of which existence is an essential predicate, which we will call substance.

6. Substance exists, and so it must exist because of that which allows existence to exist.

7. Or, substance exists because of substance.

8. So, substance is self-sufficient.

Objections

Aren’t you running away from the actuality/potentiality language of the argument in the first proposition?

Frankly, yes. If one accepts Feser’s claim that existence is a potential in the sense that he claims, the whole aim of the argument is lost. One could imagine that a theistic reader will protest that existence is presented in Feser’s argument as a potentiality, not a predicate. But the whole point of the argument is to demonstrate that existence is not a potential, because it is predicated of something which exists without cause. It isn’t really a predicate insofar as it doesn’t add anything to its subject, meaning it certainly cannot be a potential. To do this, we first need to talk about the kind of thing existence would have to be to be a potentiality. If the existence of substance is found within substance, there is no potentiality involved–substance and its existence (to the extent it even makes sense to talk about such a thing) is purely actual. If the reader agrees that all potentials are either unactualized predicates or unactualized subjects–as they most certainly should if they accept potentiality at all–and existence is a predicate, then there should be no objection to the first proposition. If they do have a problem with this, they should consider the phrase “X has the potentiality to Y” and try to think of a Y that is not a predicate.

Didn’t Kant think existence is not a predicate, contra proposition 3?

I do not believe Kant’s contention that existence is not a predicate is a meaningful objection, because I believe my argument ultimately agrees with Kant, though I grant premises he rejects with the aim of cutting off the branch I’m standing on. The conclusion, that substance is self-sufficient, demonstrates that existence is always an analytical proposition, whereas using existence as a predicate treats it as synthetic. The only way the claim “x exists” could be a meaningful synthetic proposition is if it were possible for x not to exist. But existence, being a property of substance, is already entailed in every subject–it is not a potential which demands actualization, because everything being substance, there is no potential. To say that existence is not a predicate is the same as saying that existence is absolutely infinite. And the absolutely infinite, and therefore self-sufficient nature of substance is what was concluded in the argument.

As stated earlier, it is not the goal of arguments to be correct-it is the goal of arguments to be logically consistent such that if one accepts the propositions, one is logically compelled to accept the conclusion. This argument contains the proposition that existence is a predicate, something said of a subject–a proposition shared by Thomism and by Feser’s Aristotelian Proof. The purpose of the argument is to demonstrate that this claim logically collapses, so that even if we conceive of existence as a property, it is a property dependent on substance, because substance does not depend on the property of existence, but the other way round–to relate it to Thomism, existence is immanent in the form of every subject, not separate from it. Thus I would argue that Kant’s claim is consistent with Definition 6 and Proposition 11 of Part 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics:

VI. By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite—that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.

PROP. XI. God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists.

It seems useful to present the argument in this way, because it is a common and entirely reasonable intuition that existence is a property of things. If it is not a property of things, yet things do undeniably exist, what sort of a thing is existence? But from this we cannot argue that the property of existence is conferred by something external to substance. To be external to substance, we have shown, is to be nonexistent.

Couldn’t substance simply be God?

What I have not done in this argument is give a sufficient account of substance–the goal is only to show that substance does not need anything else to actualize its potential to exist. But the most natural objection for a theist is simply to claim that by describing substance, I have only succeeded in describing God.

I don’t reject this assertion, but as Spinoza argued, it raises enormous problems for someone who wishes to assert the God of classical theism, because substance is not merely one thing that exists, but anything that exists–anything whose potential to exist is made actual, is made actual because it is also substance, in the same way I actualize the potential to have a spine qua vertebrate, and actualize the potential to do philosophy qua human being. Whereas in any other area we derive the actualization of that potential from some prior cause, the actualization of our potential to exist is imminent in our identity as substance, as that which exists. If God is substance, therefore, God is indivisible from nature. If we wish to deny that God is indivisible from nature, then we must assert that there is that which exists, and that which exists`, or substance and substance`. But existence is the same in both cases–both are identical substances qua substance, so there can only be one substance–just as, while many different and distinct animals exist, there is only one animalia in which they all participate, insofar as they are animals. Insofar as things belong to substance–insofar as they exist–they are the same. But it was from the conferring of existence that we supposedly derived all of the other aspects of God which make Him God. Our options at this point are pantheism–to say that God and nature are one and divine–or atheism, which would commit us to the belief that while there must be something which possesses the qualities ascribed to God in a philosophical context, this is not what religion has rendered the concept of God to be, and therefore we’re just as well off setting the idea aside. I don’t feel excessively committed to the term “atheist,” and often call myself an agnostic, but given that the God offered by Spinoza really just is nature, I think it’s at least as legitimate as a pantheist reading to consider this an atheist view, so for simplicity’s sake I defend it as an atheistic view, or better yet a naturalistic view in which atheism is entailed.

Isn’t this just a word trick? Couldn’t you say that because “tallness” exists, there must be some Platonic Form of Tallness from which all tall things derive existence?

If you’re willing to take on the other commitments entailed in accepting Platonic Forms, you could potentially make this work, but as Parmenides explains to Socrates in the Parmenides dialogue, you’ve only created further problems for yourself in doing so. 

In any conceivable ideal Form–Redness, Shortness, Swiftness, etc.-existence is assumed. What we are asking here is, “How is it that existence can exist?”, and in asking that question, we are asking how it is that any conceivable entity, even an ideal Form, can exist. So for Redness, for instance, its existence does not need to be explained by itself, but by whatever it is that confers existence. Insofar as Redness exists, it must belong to the subject upon which existence depends, which we have identified as substance.

Even if we accept that God isn’t needed to actualize a potential to exist at any given moment, couldn’t we still argue that God was needed to bring substance into existence?

I think Kalam-style cosmological arguments like this one are perfectly fine to propose, and I don’t think my argument refutes them. If it is accepted, however, I believe it does restrict them. The force of cosmological arguments is that they suggest that God answers a particularly difficult question: what caused nature, if nothing is uncaused? This is a common sense answer which people often cite when asked to explain why they are convinced of God’s existence. Obviously, if nature can be its own cause, the explanatory power of these arguments is lost–God either becomes an added assumption rather than a necessary logical outcome; or he becomes indistinguishable from nature itself.

Conclusion

I have not contributed any new ideas to this debate in this essay–nor, I think, is it possible for anything at once truly new and also useful to be added to ground this old and well-harrowed. All I’ve aimed to do is point the reader to what I consider an interesting debate, and point out some old ideas which I think need repackaging for a new audience which seems little acquainted with them. I’ll say a bit here about what I think the particular flavor of atheism I’ve described has to offer, and why I feel committed to it on a level which is not merely intellectual.

As stated earlier, my goal here is not to cast aside religious belief. Ultimately, when it comes to deep spiritual and metaphysical beliefs like the existence of God, I think people probably ought to believe whatever allows them to live a good life. What I do firmly believe is that there is at least one atheistic viewpoint which meets this need. The Spinozist alternative to theism I’ve defended here, in my view, offers fertile ground to find agency, meaning, and transcendence in nature itself, not least of all because in identifying nature itself as self-sufficient, it is made free–not a work of art by a cosmic artificer, but a self-creating process of continuous development, acting necessarily through its own intrinsic nature, always changing, and always striving to become itself, altering its structure to respond to new stimuli, building organic wholes or remarkable beauty, complexity, and stability. It should not be a source of shame to imagine that conscious creatures like ourselves emerged from non-conscious constituents, but should rather lead us to ask what it is in nature which, even at the level of organic molecules, has in it the potential to become something which pursues goals, experiences affections, or hopes for things. Rather than being an idolatrous, rebellious act of insubordination to a higher power, I regard this concept of nature as empowering, trusting us as natural beings with absolute responsibility for our actions and a deep sense of connection with all other aspects of nature. That, at the very least, is an idea worth defending, and it wouldn’t be so terrible to live in a world of people who believed it.

---

Works Cited

Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Edited by Patrick J. Deneen, Yale University Press, 2018.

Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Penguin Publishing Group, 2018.

Feser, Edward. An Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God - Edward C. Feser, PhD. 10 July 2015. Youtube, Seeking Truth, Accessed 2 July 2023.

Feser, Edward. Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Ignatius Press, 2017.

Gross, Neil, and Solon Simmons. “How Religious are America's College and University Professors?” Religion and the Public Sphere, Social Science Research Council, 6 February 2007, http://religion.ssrc.org/reforum/Gross_Simmons.pdf. Accessed 2 July 2023.

Gross, Neil, and Solon Simmons. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS OF AMERICAN PROFESSORS. 2007. citeseerx, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc/10.1.1.147.6141. Accessed 2 July 2023.

Hamilton, Edith, and Huntington Cairns, editors. The collected dialogues of Plato : including the letters. Princeton University Press, 1963.

Hardie, RP. “Physics by Aristotle.” The Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.3.iii.html. Accessed 25 June 2023.

Hill, Adam. “The Communitarian Consensus: A Leftist Review of Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen/ /.” Bracero, Substack, https://bracero.substack.com/p/the-communitarian-consensus-a-leftist. Accessed 23 June 2023.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html#chap91.

Miller, Robert T. “Medieval Sourcebook: Thomas Aquinas: On Being and Essence (DE ENTE Et ESSENTIA).” Internet History Sourcebooks: Medieval Sourcebook, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/aquinas-esse.asp#f1. Accessed 6 July 2023.

Nelson, Michael. “Existence (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 10 October 2012, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/. Accessed 1 July 2023.

Nortey, Justin. “Most White Americans who regularly attend worship services voted for Trump in 2020.” Pew Research Center, 30 August 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/30/most-white-americans-who-regularly-attend-worship-services-voted-for-trump-in-2020/. Accessed 2 July 2023.

Pogue, James. “What Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Others Are Learning From Curtis Yarvin and the New Right.” Vanity Fair, 20 April 2022, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets. Accessed 23 June 2023.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. Ethics. Translated by W. H. White, Wordsworth Editions, 2001.

YouGov, editor. YouGov Poll: Capitol Protest. yougov.com, https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/7e6digtwqp/capitol-protest-crosstabs-adobe.pdf. Accessed 2 July 2023.