Leibniz’ cosmological argument

Leibniz agreed with Aquinas that reflection on the nature of necessity and possibility was enough to show the existence of God and also found a line of reasoning for the conclusion which avoids 2 issues with aquinas’ argument (partially gay if im to be honest).

Why is there any world at all, and why is it the way that it is

1. that this question must have an answer2. only satisfactory answer to this question will imply the existence of God

PSR: take any feature of the world. If the world could have failed to be that way, then there must be some explanation of why the world is that way

any contingent fact about the world must have an explanation

Leibniz MP: “if nothing existed besides the sorts of things we find in the world, there would be no explanation of why these things exist”

the example he uses is that of the geometry books: “Let us suppose that a book on the elements of geometry has always existed, one copy always made from another. It is obvious that although we can explain a present copy of the book from the previous book from which it was copied, this will never lead us to a complete explanation, no matter how many books back we go, since we can always wonder why there have always been such books, why these books were written, and why they were written the way they were.”

Even if one can explain one state of the world in terms of the preceding state of the world, we lack an explanation of the fact that there is a world at all.

2 kinds of necessity: physical/hypothetical and absolute/metaphysical

physical: is what is necessary, given the way the laws of nature happen to be.metaphysical: what is necessary without qualification.

Since the laws of nature could have been different than they are something can be physically necessary without being absolutely necessary.ex: the existence of things in the world arent metaphysically necessary. i.e. things that exist contingently

1. the reason that there is contingent things must have an explanation2. the fact that there are contingent things cant be explained by any contingent things

^ simply meaning that there must be a being that is metaphysically necessary

p1: any contingent fact about the world must have an explanation (PSR)p2: its a contingent fact that there are contingent thingsp3: the fact that there are contingent things must have an explanationp4: the fact that there are contingent things cant be explained by any contingent thingsp5: the fact that there are contingent things must be explained by something whose existence isnt contingentc: there is a necessary being

p1, p2, p4 are independent premises.