Philosophy Now Magazine has published a letter of mine in issue #129 responding to an article in issue #128. For reasons of space and others editors edit. That’s what they do. But in this case, the editors deleted some of the logical structure of my argument, particularly in the last part, my four-point summary. For reasons of completeness I replicate my original letter below. Interestingly, this particular letter, in only 500 or so words, encapsulates much of my philosophy work here on the blog and in my books. In particular see: Why Free Will?

The letter…

To: Editors, Philosophy Now

Oct. 13, 2018

Re: Reply to “Why Is There a World” Carlo Filice October, 2018

If there is a God questions about his (this pronoun for convention) motives will inevitably be speculative because our perspective is narrow while God’s would be, by definition universal. But the range over which we speculate can be narrowed. Answers must accommodate everything for which God is purportedly responsible directly or indirectly. For example, if God exists he must be “necessary being”. A contingent God is not God. By the same token, he must have certain other absolute qualities: infinity, unity, free (and unconstrained other than by logic) will, eternality (existence outside time, uncaused cause), unified purpose, and so on.

Speculation must also accommodate human experience, the physical universe of time and space, that we are made out of this physical stuff, that nevertheless we are minded, have an apparent(constrained by space and time) free will, and are in a vague way aware of values: truth, beauty, goodness, love, and so forth. From necessity, infinity, and unity, we get Leibniz’s correct deduction that God must create the “best possible universe”, something that we, on Earth, have certainly not got. If we can imagine better (a hate-free world for example), so can God.

An answer to the question why God created “this particular universe” or “anything at all” must accommodate all of these data points. This is not a project for a letter and I have written books and essays on the subject, but perhaps the editors will indulge a quick summary.

1. “Best possible universe” must be taken diachronically. It isn’t the “best possible” now (we are in time) but will become so.
2. Human free will must have something to do with this process. God’s purpose(s) must be unified. A physical universe of purposeless mechanism (the mechanics of the physical are not teleological) conjoined with the appearance of limited, purposeful, value sensitive free-will in this universe must have something to do with the process of achieving #1
3. #2 works to achieve #1 when persons (likely on many worlds) freely choose to avere truth, produce beauty, behave lovingly, when they use their free will in time to instantiate values into the physical world.
4. God created this particular universe to have partners (should we so choose) in the achievement of #1. Only by that partnership (apparently) will there come to be, eventually, the “best possible universe” as God conceives it — and nobody thinks bigger than God. If there was a better way to get there God would have chosen it.

Now the original question is answered and the answer isn’t merely for fun.

Matthew Rapaport
San Francisco, CA.