Q&A: The Cause of Causality
The Cause of Causality
Question
With God's help,
Hello,
I wanted to ask: what is the reason to accept the principle of causality? It sounds completely reasonable, just as analogy sounds like a reasonable form of thinking.
But for what reason do we really have to accept this principle at the noumenal level? Actually, I also do not understand why analogies should be accepted, but I have a feeling that this is based on that principle.
Answer
You are simply asking why one should accept what I think. This is mere skeptical wondering. I have no answer to that, other than that this is what I think. After all, even if I explain it to you, you will ask why my explanation should be accepted.
Discussion on Answer
There are indications that it functions properly. Scientific theories work. But I already answered above. These are skeptical doubts, and I have nothing more to say about them.
I will address the last line in the first answer — it says this:
"After all, even if I explain it to you, you will ask why my explanation should be accepted."
I do not think this is a correct claim at all. There must be some mediating factor between thought and the world. If there is no such mediating factor, or if we do not know whether it functions properly, then it is not reasonable to claim that this is just skeptical wondering. Because if so, how do scientific theories work? It is completely unreasonable that they would work. We would expect not to be able to know anything about the world, like people walking in the dark.
And no matter how much you say that this is factor A, we still have to know whether it itself is a factor that genuinely supervises thought or a corrupting factor. But since we are not A, we will never know the answer.
And so a bleak situation is created in which the claim that the factor indeed exists and functions properly is no more justified than the claim that it does not exist or does not function properly. And that is the conclusion of postmodernism.
I did not understand your argument. If I offer you an explanation, you will say that it too depends on assumptions and on a mediating factor, and you will not accept it. So this is indeed pure skepticism.
Right.
But until you offer a reasonable explanation, do you agree that there is no reason at all to trust the implications of thought at the noumenal level?
One could say that somewhere in here there is God as a God of the gaps.
This really is God of the gaps, but as I explained in my books, this is an essential gap (one that will not be filled by scientific research), and therefore the argument is sound.
But the Rabbi agrees that there must be some connecting factor between thought and the world itself. So then the question is why assume that this connecting factor really exists or functions properly.
And regarding it, we can never know the true answer,
since we are not it.