A world that need not have existed calls for an explanation outside itself

Question: Why do we exist?
Position‹2 of 3›: We exist because God wants us to
Argument1 of 2›: A world that need not have existed calls for an explanation outside itself

The argument

Proponents of this position begin from a feature of the world they take to be undeniable: it did not have to be here. Nothing about a stone, a galaxy or a person explains why there should be any such thing rather than nothing at all. Each depends on conditions it did not supply, and those conditions depend on others. Asking why we exist, on this reading, is not asking what caused us in the way one fire causes another; it is asking why there is a chain of causes to belong to. The argument is that a question of that form cannot be answered by anything inside the chain. Any item one points to is one more thing that need not have been, and so it reopens rather than closes the question. What would close it is something whose existing is not borrowed from elsewhere, and that is what the tradition means when it speaks of a creator rather than merely a first event. Defenders are usually careful here: the claim is not that the world needed a push to get started, but that a world which could as easily not have been requires something that could not as easily not have been. From that they draw the answer to the question as asked. If existence is given rather than merely occurring, then it is given by someone, and a gift has an intention behind it. We exist because we were meant to, and the meaning of a life is on this account not invented by the one living it but discovered as something already addressed to them. Proponents note that this is the only one of the three positions that answers the question in its own terms, since the others either redescribe how we came about or decline the question.

Premises

[P1]Everything we encounter in the world might not have existed, and depends for its existing on conditions it did not supply. [P2] Pointing to another such thing cannot explain why there is anything of the kind at all, since it reopens the same question. [P3] A satisfying answer would therefore have to come from something whose existing is not borrowed. [C] Existence is given by a creator and is therefore intended rather than accidental.

Counter-arguments

Critics question whether the question is well formed. To ask why there is anything at all may be to misuse a word that only does work within a world, in which case the demand for an answer is confused rather than unmet. Others accept the question and deny that the proposed answer helps: a being whose existing is not borrowed is either asserted without argument or is simply the universe under another name, and in neither case has anything been explained. They add that even if something unconditioned exists, nothing yet follows about intention, and still less about intentions concerning us.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] An explanation need not terminate to be an explanation, since an unending chain of conditions is a coherent possibility in which each link is accounted for by the one before it. [Rejecting P3] Calling for something whose existing is not borrowed names the desired conclusion rather than showing that anything answers to the description. [Rejecting C] Even granting an unconditioned source, the step from it to a purpose concerning human beings is a separate argument that this one does not supply.