In honor of Mohan's post, I wanted to pose the following multiple choice exam about Leibniz' question.
The question, "Why does anything exist?" is
(A) Meaningless,
(B) Meaningful, but such that it cannot be answered.
(C) Meaningful, and can be answered by using naturalistic methodology.
(D) Meaningful, can be answered, but cannot be answered using naturalistic methodology.
I think that exhausts logical space, but feel free to add (E), (F), (G), etc.
Of course there are problems with all of these. (A) is positivistic (the horror, the horror), (B) is skeptical at best and veering into transcendental idealism at worst, (C) runs afoul of the fact that science just describes how adequately constrained systems necessarily evolve, and (D) risks onto-theology, which is a fancy way of recapitulating some of the earliest critiques of transcendental idealism (crude theistic (D) type answers always tend towards inconsistent claims about causality, the natural universe being causally closed and such that God caused it to exist).
On the other hand Hitchens provides a howl of rage and damning arguments against the specific ways that religious people historically have answered Leibniz. Paradoxically, I find Hitchens' open hostility much more respectful in part because I recognize the raw spiritual/metaphysical hunger informing it. Religion only lets Hitchens down because he makes demands of it. Though reasonable, it may be impossible to fulfill such demands. . . but that may reflect something deeper about existence. If you think there is something right and deep about Derrida on the necessary impossible, then you will resonate with this, and I think if I were to come up with an (E) approach to the question, it would probably start in the vicinity of Graham Priest's dialetheist reading of Derrida, but informed by Derrida's later work. Maybe Caputo and others have already started such a project.
Anyhow, if you are willing to share, please let me know how you would fill out the above multiple choice.
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