A correspondent asked me why not to simply believe in a restricted Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) that says that everything contingent that has a beginning in time has an explanation. (Graham Oppy has once proposed such an idea.)
One of the reasons for accepting the PSR is that without it we fall into skepticism. If violations of the PSR are possible, they have no meaningful probabilities, and in particular cannot be said to be unlikely. E.g., without the PSR, we have to say it is not unlikely that we just popped into existence five minutes ago for no reason at all, and so we cannot say that skeptical hypotheses about the past are improbable.
There are two types of skepticism. On weak skepticism about X, we conclude we can’t know about X. On strong skepticism about X, we conclude that we can’t have a reasonable belief about X. Weak skepticism is not a big deal. Strong skepticism is. This is strong skepticism about the past.
The specific case of the five minute past doesn’t survive if we have the PSR restricted to things with a beginning. But another argument does. Suppose the full PSR is false but the restricted PSR is true. Now consider the scenario where reality consists of a large number of persons who for an infinite amount of time have been caught in an endless five minute loop of experiences just like mine. Violations of the PSR have no meaningful probabilities, so we cannot say that this hypothesis is unlikely. So, we get skepticism. Of the strong kind.
2 comments:
This is your simplest argument from your book and I tend to find it to be the most convincing. It just seems to violate the consistency we experience if it were false. I don't recall if you touch on this as much (forgive me I hardly understood so much of your book it is far out of my league philosophically as I do not know how to reason with kodal logic the best) I know you discuss the act/potency structure in your book, but I tend to find the act potency structure neccesitates the PSR if one accepts act and potency. This is basically your argument just in Aristotelian terms because we could never discuss potencies unless they were grounded in nature's that are rational and those nature's themselves call out for reasons of why they are at all. I really am confused why so much philosophy nowadays rejects the PSR. I have tried to look into people like Oppy's work and it confuses me how such brilliant people try to work around it. I am mainly leaving this comment to ask how come you think people a r so anti PSR. I know Inwagen's argument is popular, but analytic philosophers should be able to recognize that the argument equivocates on neccesity and a neccesary being. And I do not understand why so mucu contemporary philosophy is hostile towards this. Is it a general hostility to metaphysics or theism or is there something deeper I am missing. I really feel like there has to be a gap in my knowledge and I would like to ask you Dr. Pruss if you could explain why people tend to be against the PSR when you yourself admit in your book on the PSR that you find it self evident.
hi , how could theists prove that god doesn't lie without using the divine moral perfection because a skeptic of omnibenevolent is not gonna comply easily
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