(July 15, 2019 at 5:12 pm)Belaqua Wrote:(July 15, 2019 at 12:44 pm)Grandizer Wrote: If God just IS existence, then that's not anywhere close to the God that most Christians believe in. I don't even think Aquinas saw God that way either.
Christians believe in God as First Cause. As has been pointed out, showing that the First Cause is also good, conscious, etc., is not part of the First Cause argument. You need additional arguments for that.
(July 15, 2019 at 3:31 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: But, if things exist necessarily; if existence is not contingent on any other pre-condition; if stuff exists simply because there is no alternative, why call it a “cause” at all? My understanding of the way most theists utilize this argument is to say that there has to be some uncaused thing that caused stuff to exist, and that thing is god. God, in this commonly presented version of the argument, is entirely separate and categorically different from the reality it caused to exist.
I despair of ever getting people to see what Aristotle used the word "cause" for. The word has a very specific meaning in modern English, and it seems hard to get past that.
In the First Cause argument, it just means "something you have to have for something else to exist."
So for example, if you have a bronze statue, the bronze is called the "material cause." Not because the bronze took some action to make the statue, but because a statue has to be made of something, and in this case it's bronze.
(It's not so unusual for philosophical language to have a special sense. If you talk about Plato's Eros, or Kant's Intuition, those words don't mean the same thing as in common English conversation. To talk about those philosophers, we have to learn the vocabulary. Also Gothic art has nothing to do with the Goths, and the World Series excludes most of the world.)
The First Cause is separate and different because it doesn't depend on anything else for its existence. Everything else relies on the First Cause (and a chain of other stuff) to exist.
Quote:So, if this is the correct philosophical interpretation of first cause arguments, then I can’t see why theists think it’s an argument for god.
It's part of an argument. To show that the First Cause is also good, conscious, etc. needs more argument.
Then the word you seek is contingent. Your bronze statue is contingent upon the existence of bronze in the first place. That does not mean the bronze caused the statue, it means there had to actually BE bronze for any agent to make a bronze statue.