Why does God exist?

Abstract

Many philosophers have appealed to the PSR in arguments for a being that exists a se, a being whose explanation is in itself. But what does it mean, exactly, for something to have its explanation ‘in itself’? Contemporary philosophers have said next to nothing about this, relying instead on phrases plucked from the accounts of various historical figures. In this article, I analyse five such accounts – those of Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz – and argue that none are satisfactory. Should we abandon or restrict the PSR, then? I think that would be hasty, for many reasons. I therefore consider the prospects of explaining everything, including God, given the constraints of certain features of good explanations, and conclude with several observations about future approaches.

Recent Work on Traditional Arguments for Theism I

“…This was in fact the aim of most cosmological arguments historically, premised as they were on an unrestricted PSR. This approach, however, requires that God himself have an explanation, and theists have been short on the details of how that works (McIntosh, 2022).…”

Existence exists, and it is God

“…Second, we would have an answer to the vexing question, ‘why does God exist?’. In a recent paper, Chad McIntosh (2022) notes that contemporary theistic philosophers typically deal with this question rather dismissively, merely stating that God is ‘self-existent’ and therefore ‘self-explanatory’ in some sense, and thus that God's existence is non-problematic. As he argues, it is difficult to provide an account of ‘self-explanation’ that is not obscure or contradictory (McIntosh surveys attempts at formulating this by Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and finds none of them persuasive).…”