[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[Neo-Scholastic]

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!)

I disagree with your argument.  Time absolutely is part of causality.  I won't argue which is primal (physicists disagree), but either time determines what we understand as causality, or else causality determines what we understand as time.

Time gets invoked only when there is a change. What about persistence in any given moment? Yes, any embodied object has a history that brought it to whatever present moment it abides in. At the same time, in order for any object to be what it is, often it must have in the present moment other qualities that make it what it is...qualities independent of where that object is positioned in time. Those qualities may include having a specific organization (like a truss), material composition (like an acid), or function (like a kidney). Now, in some sense, and this came up in @vulcanlogic 's video of Nussbaum. Are these types of qualities just part of discourse, linguistic conventions, about appearances at a human scale or are they representative of something real? The choice seems to cut both ways. I cannot imagine doing any kind of calculation without the concept of a unit. As such, if an objection to the 4W rests on the idea that there are no degrees of perfection, then you can kind of forget doing science too.