[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[Belacqua]

As for final cause - this seems to come about because living things appear to work by different rules.  Of course, Aristotle wouldn't know about DNA, cell differentiation, energy metabolism etc, so describing life as having some built-in purpose or function is a catch-all for his lack of understanding (but it still isn't wrong).

I think people are shy of admitting to a final cause because they assume it means an intelligent designer. They think it means that somebody decided the purpose of something in advance. But that's not necessarily true. 

Imagine you're teaching a basic anatomy class, and you do a two-hour lecture on the heart. You describe its growth, muscle tissue, and structure. (Efficient, material, and formal causes.) But at no point do you explain that the heart serves to pump the blood around. (Final cause.) That wouldn't be a very good lecture, I think. 

The final cause of the heart is what it does for the body. The reason it's there. The final cause of the acorn is an adult oak tree (but also as squirrel food). None of these requires an intelligent designer, or conscious planning in advance. Evolution works just fine as an explanation.

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As far as I'm aware, the first thinker recorded as positing the First Cause argument for the existence of god was Aristotle.

This is about right, I think. And a lot of the problem with discussions on this forum is that people don't understand Aristotle's vocabulary. If you Google "aristotle cause in greek" you'll get this at the top of the page:

Aitia (Greek: αἰτία), the word that Aristotle used to refer to the causal explanation, has, in philosophical traditional, been translated as "cause." This peculiar, specialized, technical, usage of the word "cause" is not that of everyday English language.

Yet people don't seem to get that. They continue to use "cause" in its conversational English sense. I mean, everybody's comfortable with the fact that words can have different meanings depending on context. We know that the word "theory" in science is not the same as "guess," although we might use it that way in conversation. It's the same with "cause." 

Here's what it means when used as a translation of Aristotle's αἰτία: the causes of X are all the things that need to be the case in order for X to be the case. 

This set of things may include an Efficient Cause, but not necessarily. 

A misunderstanding of this vocabulary leads some people to make a spurious argument. They think that it is relevant to point out that (apparently) some type of quantum decay lacks an Efficient Cause. They think this means that some things are uncaused. But that's not what αἰτία means. Lots of things have to be the case in order for quantum decay to be the case. For example, the universe has to exist. If there were nothing rather than something, then quantum decay wouldn't happen. You need the prior existence of quantum particles, because without that they couldn't decay. Most importantly, you need the laws and regularities of nature which allow for quantum decay to occur. So there are LOTS OF CAUSES for quantum decay, if "cause" is a translation of αἰτία.

So the argument that a lack of Efficient Cause works against the Aristotelian/Thomist argument is false. 

Another common misconception is that the A/T causal chain is a temporal chain, with one thing leading to another in time. It is not that. It is an essential series, not a temporal one. That means that in order for Z to be the case, Y must be the case. In order for Y to be the case, X must be the case, etc. In fact all these things may have come into existence at the same time, or not -- that's not important. The important thing is that the thing farther down on the chain depends for its existence on the things that are higher. 

So for example, the existence of the sun depends on the existence of Hydrogen atoms. You can see this because if the sun stopped existing, this wouldn't make hydrogen atoms impossible. But if hydrogen atoms stopped existing, then the sun would be impossible. So the existence of hydrogen atoms is prior in an essential chain of causation. The time order isn't a part of the argument. 

Those are the main two misconceptions I've seen on this topic. There are others. I don't know why these errors are so basic and yet so difficult to dispel. 

(By the way, I love your screen name. I am no longer so young either!)