Why This Universe? Toward a Toxonomy of Possible Explanations

objects, like mathematics, universals and logic, manifest real existence on some plane of existence not in spacetime.) Platonic Forms, abstract entities that are perfect and immutableentities that are perfect and immutable and exist independently of the world of perceptions, are occasionally suspected of possessing some kind of causal or quasi-casual powers.72 3.9 Principle or Feature of Sufficient Power. An all-embracing cosmic principle beyond being and existence, such as Plato’s “the Good” or John Leslie’s “ethical requiredness”73 or Nicholas Rescher’s “cosmic values,”74 or some defining characteristic so central to ultimate reality and so supremely profound that it has both creative imperative and causative potency to bring about being and existence. Derek Parfit says it might be no conincidence if, of the countless cosmic possibilities or ways reality might be, one has a very special feature, and is the possibility that obtains (actually exists). “Reality might be this way,” he says, “because this way had this feature.” He calls this special feature the “Selector,” and two candidates he considers are “being law-governed and having simple laws.”75 Note: Cyclical universes of Eastern religious traditions can be consistent with all of these nonphysical ultimate reality generators,76 although the Western Theistic Person (3.1) would normally be excluded. To Derek Parfit, if we take the apparent fine-turning of the universe to support, not some multiverse or many-worlds hypothesis, but some theistic hypothesis, this should invoke a creator who may be omnipotent, and omniscient, but who isn’t wholly good, or indeed significantly good. What we can see of reality, he says, counts very strongly against this hypothesis.77