Does the World need an External Explanation?  Four Versions of the Applicability Objection against the Cosmological Argument and why they are not as convincing as they first might seem

Jan Seibert

Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen

The Cosmological Argument classically claims that our world’s existence is a contingent matter and therefore needs a sufficient explanation, which is then argued to be found externally in the existence of God – a self-sufficient being that created the world intentionally. To do so, versions of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) or the Causal Principle (CP) are used to infer that there has to be a sufficient reason or cause for the world’s existence. Therefore, critics often target the overall plausibility of PSR or CP. Yet, there is also a more specific way to doubt their usefulness for cosmological arguments. This more specific critique, which I call the Applicability Objection, holds that, while everything in the world might have a sufficient reason or cause, cosmological arguments still go wrong in extending this thought to the whole world in a way that infers some external explanation for its existence.
I present four versions of the Applicability Objection that can be found in the works of philosophers like Hume, Kant, Mackie, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Although their thoughts are well known individually, I will show that they are different expressions of the shared idea that principles like PSR or CP are to be restricted to certain uses only, and that this excludes the uses cosmological arguments propose.
This objection deserves critical recognition of its own, since by avoiding denying PSR or CP in an unspecified general manner, it seems like a strategically modest alternative at first. However, despite this initial appeal, all four versions of the objection rest on substantial metaphysical, epistemological, or linguistic commitments about the status of the world, the justified range of our concepts of cause and effect, or the correct grammar of questions like “Why is it the case that there is this or that?” Since those commitments turn out to be highly controversial and not very intuitive, maintaining the Applicability Objection isn’t so cheap.

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