(November 28, 2018 at 6:22 am)Belaqua Wrote:(November 28, 2018 at 5:50 am)Mathilda Wrote: No engineer builds a bridge for example using the 'law' of Causation.
All engineers use the law of causation when they build a bridge.
They know that if a lot of cars are on the bridge, it will cause the load on the bridge to increase. Without the law of causation, they could imagine that lots of cars on the bridge would not cause the weight to increase. They assume that the continued properties of the steel and concrete will cause the bridge to behave in certain ways. (These assumptions, not ideas about origins, are what the first cause arguments refer to.)
Engineers take it so much for granted that they don't have to name it, but they know it applies.
You're referring to material and/or formal causation, it seems ... if we're talking Aristotelian language, that is. Or maybe final cause, I don't know. But it still wouldn't get us to the logical need for a supernatural "sustainer" of the universe. This universe may very well be due to -say- an absolute logical principle behind modal realism (all possibilities are necessarily actual). Since this universe is clearly possible, it necessarily is actual (if modal realism is [necessarily] true, that is). This is just one example of course, and perhaps it's something else happening that's nevertheless purely naturalistic, but there needn't be any "first cause" in the traditional sense (as far as I know).