RE: The Principle of Contingent Causation: The Impossibility of Infinite Regress.
July 4, 2023 at 12:25 am
(This post was last modified: July 4, 2023 at 12:27 am by Belacqua.)
(July 3, 2023 at 11:47 pm)Paleophyte Wrote: In the instant that you admit the possibility that this non-contingent cause could be a natural event you'll find that you have no argument. Your religion requires One Being complete with capitalization. Philosophy does not.
Nishant might disagree with me on this, but as I understand the Thomist argument, it does not posit an event that happened in the past.
Again, people read it that way because the word "cause" in English refers to an efficient cause -- the thing that pushed the first domino so that all the other dominoes fell. It's different in Aristotelian and Thomist arguments, however. They aren't talking about the Deist God, who makes the universe, winds it up like a clock, and walks away. Their God is necessary to sustain the universe in being, continuously.
So when asking about a cause of X, we have to ask "what has to exist in order for X to exist?" Then we get a chain of essential, not temporal, causation. So for our sun to exist, we need hydrogen (among many other things). If our sun disappeared, hydrogen would still exist, but if hydrogen disappeared, our sun would disappear too. That's what is meant by "essentially prior."
So our sun needs hydrogen, hydrogen needs subatomic particles, subatomic particles need this and that and the next thing. Eventually you get to a "deepest" level. What does physics call it these days? Space/time? Matter/energy? I'm not sure. But of course for space/time to be, there must be being, which is what the philosophers call the First Cause.
Your argument is still relevant, in that scientists can still posit that the deepest level, the one thing that is necessary for everything else to exist, is natural. We could argue that being itself, which is necessary for space/time to be, is itself natural. But I don't think this argues against a First Cause. It just claims that we should call the First Cause natural. And I don't think theologians would have any problem with that - the natural/supernatural distinction is notoriously tricky.
As always, to associate this First Cause with the Christian God requires many other arguments, which aren't addressed in the Five Ways.
