The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Nothing at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever? ultimate why question: why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

3. The Ultimate Why Question: Avicenna on Why God Is Absolutely Necessary

65 Jon McGinnis 3 S The Ultimate Why Question Avicenna on Why God Is Absolutely Necessary The question “Why is there anything at all rather than absolutely nothing ?” was not a question medieval Arabic-speaking philosophers were prone to raise, at least not in this exact wording. Instead, they were more concerned with the related question, “Why is there a world rather than no world at all?” or more exactly, “Why does the world have the particular features that it has?” Certainly in the classical and medieval periods the standard answer to this latter question was simply, in one form or another , ‘God.’ Plato invoked the need for a demiurge to explain the orderly existence of our world; Aristotle argued that there must be an unmoved mover to explain the manifest motion in the world; and Neoplatonists later appealed to the One to explain the unified existence of the world. What is common to all of these thinkers is that they began with what might be called a ‘physical fact’, that is to say, some particular feature about the way the world actually is, whether it be its order, motion, unification or the like, and then they invoked God as the required cause of these physical facts. Since all these proofs for the existence of God begin with what I am calling a ‘physical fact’ about the world, one might call them ‘physical’ arguments for the existence of God. The medieval Arabic philosopher Ibn Sīnā (980–1037), the Latin Avicenna , found the use of ‘physical’ arguments to prove the existence of God wanting and complained that what was needed was a ‘metaphysical ’ proof for the existence of God.1 I understand his complaint to be that 1. See Commentary on Lambda, in Aris. tū ῾inda l-῾Arab, ed. ῾A. Badawi (Cairo: Maktabat an-nah. da al-mi. srīya, 1947), 23–24; Ta῾līqāt, ed. ῾A. Badawi (Cairo: Maktabat-al-῾Arabīya, 66  Jon McGinnis ‘physical’ arguments for the existence of God prove only the conditional necessity of God: since some physical fact exists, then God exists. If that physical feature of the world had counterfactually not existed, and some physically different world existed, then a necessary premise of the proof would be lacking and so that particular argument would fail to prove the existence of God. In contrast, a ‘metaphysical’ argument, or so I contend , would prove the absolute necessity of God regardless of any physical facts or specific features about the way the world actually is, as such a ‘metaphysical argument’ would show that if anything exists, no matter how it might exist, then God necessarily exists. For Avicenna such an argument must begin from an analysis of existence itself, or being qua being, and more precisely the irreducible modal structure of existence.2 In this study I want to consider Avicenna’s ‘metaphysical’ argument for the existence of God and the modal metaphysics that underpins it, but I also want to consider how Avicenna’s modal metaphysics provided him with the means to argue for another historically important philosophical thesis, namely, the eternity of the world. Avicenna’s argument for the existence of God attempts to show that if anything exists, then a Necessary Being, namely God, must exist; his proof for the eternity of the world attempts to show that if it is even possible that the world exists , then the world must be eternal. What is of particular interest about Avicenna’s proof for the eternity of the world, I shall argue, is that, when it is coupled with his proof for the existence of God, the result is an even stronger proof for the existence of God, namely, one that shows that if anything whatsoever is simply possible, then necessarily God exists. In other words, in response to the ‘ultimate why question,’ “Why is there anything at all rather than absolutely nothing?” Avicenna’s answer comes down to “Because something is possible.” 1973), 62; and the distinction was implied though not explicitly made at al-Isharāt wa-ttanb īhāt, ed. J. Forget (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1892), nama. t 4, fa. sl 29, 146–47. For a discussion of the historical context for this distinction see Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition : Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 261–65. 2. For an excellent study of the historical context for Avicenna’s doctrines of existence as well as the necessary and possible...