(March 22, 2015 at 6:36 pm)Mezmo! Wrote:Most things that we observe existing for a time are only abstractions for organizations of other things (the Earth, a human body, a nation, etc.). The time of birth and death we assign to these abstractions depends on when certain properties of the abstraction begin to exist and cease to exist.(March 21, 2015 at 2:32 pm)watchamadoodle Wrote: I don't know if anybody has mentioned this, but what does "a cause"/"cause"/etc. mean? Why should every change in reality have a cause from the past? The cause and effect model may be something that works well for our hunter/gatherer brains, but it doesn't work for cosmology?A cause basically reduces down to the idea of what makes something the thing that it is, i.e. its nature. In the case of efficient cause, which one of the four types of Aristotelian causes, the question it answers about a sensible body is "How did it come to be?"
As noted in other posts people easily misunderstand the origin of the phrase 'begins to exist'. The original dilemma from which it sprang initially had nothing at all to do with the gods. The problem concerned the tension between how things remain the same throughout change: Paracelsus versus Heraclitus. Anyone can see that things come into existence, persist for a time, them cease to be. How does this apply to the whole of reality. If All of Being could change then what keeps it from ceasing to be? But if All of Being were unchanging then nothing would happen. Thus began the search for the universals that persist within all things subject to change.
How about things like truth? Does truth begin to exist and cease to exist?
Just as a layman who doesn't know philosophy, I'm not impressed with what I've heard of the First Cause argument for God. It seems very shallow.
