[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[HappySkeptic]

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?

Interesting question.  I don't think your Newton's cradle is a causal loop (nor a chaotic system).  It is a simple repeating pattern, and the cause goes back to time 0 in a linear fashion.

As for the universe, it shows patterns and complex interactions, but it isn't a causal loop either.

What you might be grasping for is the idea of a mechanism which exhibits feedback in its causal chain (Newton's cradle being too simple to exhibit anything interesting).  Such a re-entrant system tends to exhibit chaotic behavior.  Chaos doesn't mean random - it means complex and hard to predict exactly, often with fractal patterns and surprising behavior.

The ring system of Saturn is a chaotic system, that exhibits fractal structure.  Consciousness is a re-entrant system, where the output of thinking feeds back into thinking