Foundational Grounding and the Argument From Contingency∗

The argument from contingency for the existence of God is best understood as a request for an explanation of the total sequence of causes and effects in the universe (‘History’ for short). Many puzzles about how there could be such an explanation arise from the assumption that God is being introduced as one more cause prepended to the sequence of causes that (allegedly) needed explaining. In response to this difficulty, I defend three theses. First, I argue that, if the argument from contingency is to succeed, the explanation of History in terms of God must not be a causal explanation. Second, I argue that a particular hypothesis about God’s relation to History – that God is what I call the foundational ground of History – is intelligible and explanatory. Third and finally, I argue that the explanatory advantages of this hypothesis cannot be had within the confines of naturalism. Unlike the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God (Craig 1979), the cosmological argument from contingency is not a request for a cause of the origination of the universe. Rather, it is a request for an explanation of the total sequence of causes and effects in the universe. (Call this sequence ‘History’.) Many philosophers have, however, been puzzled as to how there could be such an explanation and, especially, as to how God could serve as such an explanation, as the cosmological arguer desires. This puzzlement stems from the fact that proponents of the argument from contingency are often seen as introducing God in just the same way as the proponents of the Kalam argument do, that is, as one more ‘billiard ball’ prepended to the causal sequence studied by natural science. If this is the case, then no progress has been made. We have merely added one more cause to the sequence of causes that (allegedly) needed explaining. ∗Forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion.