RE: Thomism: Then & Now
October 18, 2021 at 8:35 am
(This post was last modified: October 18, 2021 at 9:45 am by emjay.)
I've just thought of an interesting thought experiment regarding potentiality and actuality in an essential series, as per the First Way...
Say you have one of those executive desk toys where there are five metal balls on strings, just looked it up, it's called a 'Newton's Cradle'.
But now say for the purposes of this thought experiment that this is going on in a frictionless environment, space for instance, so once the balls are put in motion, they can move in perpetual motion in this context.
Note 1: I am talking about motion here in this example, but I know Tommy (as my dad refers to him and I will now too
), is also talking about change. I don't think that makes any difference here though for this thought experiment, because I'm trying to think about it in terms of potentiality and actuality, rather than specific physics processes (which indeed, forgive me if I get anything wrong on that score - I'm not a scientist).
Now another issue to clarify before it confuses anything is that I do need to talk about time in this thought experiment, even though we accept that the first way... or any essentially ordered series... is not about time in it's relation to causality, as you've been clarifying... ie it's about tracking 'down' in an instant of time rather back in time. I need to talk about time in a different sense... I'll get to that...
Say we measure at t0 an essentially ordered series starting with say the hand as the first mover, accepting for the sake of argument that it is pure act. The hand starts the first ball moving, so if the essentially ordered series is essentially snapshotted at that time, t0, it goes down to a first cause that must be pure act. But if we then snapshot the series at a later time, t1, once the balls are bouncing back and forth in perpetuity, it appears a pure act cause is no longer required... that at that time/instant it can only be traced back in a circular loop of cause > act > cause > act, sorry, potentiality > actuality > potentiality > actuality. In other words it looks like it creates something like a self-sustaining causal loop, even if we substitute potential/act for traditional views of causality, that only needs something to, literally in this case, 'get the ball rolling' (or moving), but which can thereafter leave.
So this speaks more to the Sustainer argument (whichever one that is, sorry, it's still confusing), that says God would need to be ever-sustaining the world, moment by moment. It also potentially speaks to the underlying assumptions about whether an essentially ordered series can go on to infinity in practice... if it gets caught in a causal loop, and you could argue that everything after the big bang is now in such a causal loop, the law of conservation of energy and all that?
Say you have one of those executive desk toys where there are five metal balls on strings, just looked it up, it's called a 'Newton's Cradle'.
But now say for the purposes of this thought experiment that this is going on in a frictionless environment, space for instance, so once the balls are put in motion, they can move in perpetual motion in this context.
Note 1: I am talking about motion here in this example, but I know Tommy (as my dad refers to him and I will now too
), is also talking about change. I don't think that makes any difference here though for this thought experiment, because I'm trying to think about it in terms of potentiality and actuality, rather than specific physics processes (which indeed, forgive me if I get anything wrong on that score - I'm not a scientist).Now another issue to clarify before it confuses anything is that I do need to talk about time in this thought experiment, even though we accept that the first way... or any essentially ordered series... is not about time in it's relation to causality, as you've been clarifying... ie it's about tracking 'down' in an instant of time rather back in time. I need to talk about time in a different sense... I'll get to that...
Say we measure at t0 an essentially ordered series starting with say the hand as the first mover, accepting for the sake of argument that it is pure act. The hand starts the first ball moving, so if the essentially ordered series is essentially snapshotted at that time, t0, it goes down to a first cause that must be pure act. But if we then snapshot the series at a later time, t1, once the balls are bouncing back and forth in perpetuity, it appears a pure act cause is no longer required... that at that time/instant it can only be traced back in a circular loop of cause > act > cause > act, sorry, potentiality > actuality > potentiality > actuality. In other words it looks like it creates something like a self-sustaining causal loop, even if we substitute potential/act for traditional views of causality, that only needs something to, literally in this case, 'get the ball rolling' (or moving), but which can thereafter leave.
So this speaks more to the Sustainer argument (whichever one that is, sorry, it's still confusing), that says God would need to be ever-sustaining the world, moment by moment. It also potentially speaks to the underlying assumptions about whether an essentially ordered series can go on to infinity in practice... if it gets caught in a causal loop, and you could argue that everything after the big bang is now in such a causal loop, the law of conservation of energy and all that?
