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?

5. Causa sui and Created Truth in Descartes

109 Tad M. Schmaltz 5 S Causa sui and Created Truth in Descartes Why is there anything at all rather than absolutely nothing? This paradigmatically philosophical question is a request for an ultimate reason that renders existence fully intelligible. Some have insisted that this request is reasonable—indeed, the very foundation of rationality—and have urged that, when pressed, it leads us to some ultimate cause of contingent objects that itself exists necessarily and so provides its own reason for its existence. This is of course the line of thought behind the socalled cosmological argument. Others have objected that the request is unreasonable, given the possibility that there is no ultimate cause of contingent objects, and thus no ultimate reason why there is something rather than nothing. In this view, the existence of such beings is a brute fact, incapable of further explanation. But once the possibility of brute facts is rejected, it may not suffice to posit an ultimate cause of contingent objects. For there will remain the question of why this ultimate cause produced such objects in the first place. Once the question of why there is anything rather than nothing is accepted as legitimate, it seems that a complete answer requires the postulation not only of an ultimate cause of the contingent universe, but also of an ultimate reason for the activity of that cause. Descartes accepted as axiomatic that there is a “cause or reason” for the existence of everything. He appealed to this axiom in support of the conclusion that God is the cause of his own existence, and thus is a causa sui, a conclusion that I label the ‘causa sui doctrine’. In the first section, I consider this doctrine and its relation to the distinction between reasons 110  Tad M. Schmaltz and causes. We will see that, when confronted by the scholastic objection that nothing can be an efficient cause of itself, Descartes twisted himself in knots in order to explain how his causal axiom can apply to the only being that requires no efficient cause, namely, God. His ultimate conclusion is that this axiom applies to God only in a very special sense, since there is, in the case of his existence, a reason without an efficient cause. However, this understanding of the causa sui doctrine seems to bring it into conflict with Descartes’s notorious doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. This doctrine, which I call for short the ‘created truth doctrine ’, is the focus of the second section. According to the created truth doctrine, God not only is the efficient cause of eternal truths, but also is a wholly indifferent cause who is unconditioned by any antecedent reasons in creating them. An initial problem concerning the relation of this doctrine to the causa sui doctrine derives from the occasional suggestion in Descartes that the scope of the created truth doctrine is completely unrestricted , and thus includes even the truth that God exists. If the scope of the doctrine is unrestricted, however, it seems that, contrary to Descartes ’s understanding of the causa sui doctrine, there is in fact an efficient cause of the truth that God exists. A second problem concerning the relation between Descartes’s two doctrines arises from the requirement of the causa sui doctrine that there be an ultimate reason for God’s existence. If the truth that God exists is subject to the created truth doctrine, then it seems that there can be no such ultimate reason. For God is supposed to be wholly indifferent with respect to all created truth, and so to lack any reasons that lead him to act in one way rather than in another. The solution to both problems that I propose on Descartes’s behalf depends on the restriction of the created truth doctrine to truths concerning creatures. Though Descartes himself did not consistently restrict the doctrine in this way, the most notable of those who later defended this doctrine did. In light of this later development, we can take the created truth doctrine to be compatible with the result of the causa sui doctrine that the truth that God exists has a reason without having an efficient cause. However, such a development also serves to reinforce the suggestion in Descartes that created truth has an efficient cause without having a reason. It turns out that in both cases the divergence of efficient causes from reasons is linked to the incomprehensibility of the divine es- [3.144.113...