(December 6, 2018 at 5:10 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: Rahn already described what was wrong with the above, a few posts back.
Quote:Is a blind man no longer a human being because he doesn't have two functioning eyes ?-and to that we can add...if the car disappears when some part burns up...which it doesn't...then a man would disappear when he lost a leg.....which, again, just a friendly psa, we don't. If the type of cause we're referring to is the type of cause that makes some dependent x disappear in it's absence, neither car parts nor human parts are those kinds of causes...nor are cars and humans those kind of effects of those causes. I've got cars out in my yard missing parts, and I've got a chunk lost here and there.
According to P3, he's not. In fact he doesn't even logically exist until he has every functioning part that makes up a human being.
-this, just for completeness sake, has implications for both non temporal and temporal notions of any first cause - in that if this cause was like car part causes and human part causes...it only needed to exist just long enough to instantiate those effects..and could have blinked out immediately afterward.
If this were the case...then the first cause could very literally not exist in the present. Entirely like, as Belaqua pointed out.....our parents. So, if we insist that car parts and human parts -are- the kind of causes we're discussing.....then they are exactly like temporal causal chains in the respect specified.
Couldn't they argue that enough parts need to make up a car in order for the whole to be a car? So a car may not have all the expected car parts but could still be a car if it has enough parts to render it a car (albeit not a "complete" car). And Belaqua does address this part in response to T0 Th3 M4X (if not mistaken) by referring to "essentials" and "accidents".
So I don't think this is sufficient objection to P3 unless I'm missing something else here.