There are various formulations of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, a principle which, roughly speaking, states that everything must have a cause.  What are some of the different formulations of the Principle of Sufficient Reason?  How have they been criticized?  Are any of the formulations of the Principle of Sufficient known to be true?  What is the Kaalam Cosmological Argument?  How plausible is this version of the Cosmological argument?  How has it been criticized? 

     Stairs and Bernard outline the history of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in their text (p. 68-74). It begins with German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), who stated:

     "No fact can be real or existent, no statement true, unless there be a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise."

     The problem here is that it is overly stringent; it doesn't allow for any exceptions.There are some facts/true statements that can exist without a sufficient reason. For example, the average adult human has roughly 100,000 hairs on their head. It may very well be a true statement that no human on the planet today has exactly 99,999 hairs on their head. But while that property could exist as a fact, there's no real sufficient reason. It's incidental, just a random fact that is meaningless.

     The next version offered by S&B comes from American philosopher William Rowe (1931-2015). (That's quite a time gap from Leibniz, but some philosophers have been omitted, probably for the sake of brevity). Among those are Sir William Hamilton (1788-1856) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason (Links to an external site.)

     Rowe: "There must be an explanation of the existence of any being, and of any positive fact whatever."

     This takes care of the incidental (or negative) facts that slipped through Leibniz's filter; the fact that no human has 99,999 hairs is a negative fact. (Although it seems like splitting hairs to me... sorry). Criticism of Rowe's amendment falls on the semantics of the term "explanation"- S&B offer the example of "horses and cows exist", which although a true statement is not an explanation. I agree, I guess... but one only need add that we have (empirically) witnessed horses and cows, and that they breed and make more, and that they are still around. Correct? That's sufficient enough for me, but maybe I'm missing the point.

     Apparently so, when I read further and learn that the Principle of Sufficient Reason has never been proven. The logic is complex; science (and physics in particular) weigh in against it. But my spin on it is simply this- there are facts out there that have no explanation unless either "God willed it to be so", or minus a God that they somehow just sprang into existence from nothing: The universe begins with a Big Bang- what is the sufficient reason? The ratio of pi is 3.14159....etc. with an infinitely continuing series of numbers that never repeat. It's an example of an irrational number- the term itself implies "no reason."

     The Kalam Cosmological Argument arose from Islamist philosophy during the 9th-12th centuries, and briefly stated is:

     1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

     2. The universe began to exist.

     3. Therefore- the universe has a cause.

     This is certainly plausible, but only if the universe indeed had a beginning, and more importantly, that there was an entity (God) that caused this beginning. One of the main problems with any concept involving a beginning involves infinity.

     How can it be true that negative numbers never end, but that the past somehow does? If everything has a beginning, then a God has to as well. But how could a God just suddenly come into existence from nothing, without a cause? God could have no beginning- otherwise, something created God. That's just my personal spin of the quite in-depth explanation offered by S&B, which goes into some of the concepts we experienced from mathematician Gregor Cantor in an earlier discussion.