(January 31, 2017 at 11:19 am)emjay Wrote:(January 30, 2017 at 2:25 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Your notion of causality rests on a pre-commitment to the notion that the phenomenal world does not reflect a rational order. Why make that assumption? And having made that assumption, to throw out causality, where does that leave you with respect to the acquisition of knowledge? Just something to ponder.
Just to be clear, what is exactly do you mean by rational order? Intelligently designed or just causality? If the latter then I wouldn't call it a pre-commitment to the notion that there is no causality, but just to the possibility that there is no causality outside of our frame of reference.
Not intelligently designed in the modern sense of a one-time set-up from which the physical universe proceeds on its own merry way. The point of the 5th Way is that the regularity with which causes produce particular effects suggests a transcendent principle that binds them together. Of course it is possible the phenomenal world could only appear to be ordered is actually an absurd cartoon world. The lack of such a transcendent principle wouldn’t bode well for the scientific method. To be an advocate of reason requires making an ultimately unjustifiable existential choice in favor of the notion that a prescriptive rational order underlies the apparent phenomenal one.
