RE: The Best Logique Evidence of God Existence
July 15, 2019 at 6:49 pm
(This post was last modified: July 15, 2019 at 7:15 pm by Belacqua.)
(July 15, 2019 at 6:35 pm)Abaddon_ire Wrote: 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.
In the vocabulary used to translate Aristotle, "there actually had to be X for Y to exist" is called "cause."
I agree that this is different from the way we use the word "cause" today. But I didn't decide the translation.
It's only important if we're talking about First Cause arguments; we have to know what the word means as used in that case. Aristotle and Thomas's First Cause argument means "there has to be a First Cause for other things to exist."
Wikipedia:
Aitia, from Greek αἰτία, was the word that Aristotle used to refer to the causal explanation that has traditionally been translated as "cause", but this specialized, technical, philosophical usage of the word "cause" does not correspond exactly to its most usual applications in everyday English language.[4] The translation of Aristotle's αἰτία that is nearest to current ordinary language could be "question" or "causal explanation",[5][2][4] although any such terms may mask the fact that Aristotelians consider the four causes to be more fundamental in nature than mere explanations. In this article, the peculiar philosophical usage of the word "cause" will be employed, for tradition's sake, but the reader should not be misled by confusing this technical usage with current ordinary language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes