Q&A: The Principle of Sufficient Reason in the Cosmological Context
The Principle of Sufficient Reason in the Cosmological Context
Question
In the book The First Being, p. 252, the Rabbi explains why the principle of sufficient reason is "rather weak in the cosmological context and becomes sharper in the physico-theological context," because in the cosmological context it only asks why the world exists at all, whereas in the physico-theological context the question is why the world has precisely this kind of complexity.
Is the Rabbi's intention to argue that, aside from the intrinsic weakness of the cosmological argument itself (as already explained in the second discussion dealing with it), there is an additional weakness in the principle of sufficient reason as it relates to it? Does the Rabbi hold that the question "why is there something rather than nothing at all" is not a sufficiently strong question?
Besides that, the question of why the world exists specifically as it does (the principle of sufficient reason in the physico-theological context) can be answered by a multiverse theory (although one can always say that Ockham's razor requires preferring one God over many universes), whereas the question of why there is anything at all (the principle, etc., in the cosmological context) seemingly has no answer.
Answer
It is weaker than in the physico-theological case. Why anything exists at all is a good question, but why it is as it is is a better question (here the space of possibilities is defined: other kinds of entities of various sorts could have existed).
Multiplicity can answer all questions of this type. There is one universe that exists and other universes that do not exist. Another way to formulate the same thing: if you wait long enough, then one of the possibilities—that something will exist—can be realized.