Q&A: A Rambamist/Thomist Cosmological Proof in Contemporary Formulation
A Rambamist/Thomist Cosmological Proof in Contemporary Formulation
Question
Below I will briefly formulate a cosmological proof of the kind proposed by Maimonides and Aquinas, one that rests on the existence of some contingent being and infers the existence and activity of a being whose essence is existence. As anyone who reaches the conclusion will be able to see, it has several advantages. I would be glad to hear from the Rabbi, and really from everyone, what the strongest objections are that can be raised against it.
Where does the metaphysical necessity of causality come from, and where does it end? According to Maimonides/Aquinas: from the fact that the world is not so irrational that it contains properties that do not derive from the essence of things without a cause. “Why is the sausage hot?” Because the hot water in the pot heats it. “Why is the water hot?” Because the fire heats it. There is nothing in the intrinsic essence of a sausage or of water that entails heat, and therefore there must be an external cause. Why is the sausage wet? Because the water wets it. Why is the water wet? Assuming the appropriate conditions for that state of matter, at that point one would probably say that you simply do not understand what water is, or we would provide an analytic explanation deriving the property of wetness or liquidity from the molecular composition that follows from the essence of water (the examples are only meant to illustrate the principle, and I am not getting into precision in the physical/chemical description), but we would not look for an external explanation. Likewise, if we now ask why fire is hot, the answer would be that perhaps you do not understand what fire is. But once you understand how heat necessarily follows from the essence of fire, you have answered all that can in principle be answered. One must, of course, distinguish this from the question of how fire is produced, for which an appeal to an external cause would be accepted, but that is not the same question as “why is fire hot.” But unlike fire, even if we explain how the sausage was produced and derive everything that follows from the essence of sausage, we would still require an additional explanation for why it is hot. The distinction between properties that follow from the essences of objects and those that do not is marked in philosophical jargon as “necessary properties” and “contingent properties,” respectively.
With respect to any specific object in the universe, say a peach or some grain of sand, once we grasp its essence it is immediately clear to us that there is no logical necessity in its existence, by analogy to the way it is clear to us that there is no necessity in the essence of sausage that it be hot. In any case, we know that it began to exist at some point, whereas that whose existence is necessary cannot begin to exist, since its nonexistence would be a contradiction, just as there is no historical stage at which fire could be non-hot. As for every such object, we also know that it is in principle destructible (physically, and certainly logically), and in fact it will be destroyed at some point in the future history of the universe.
We now need to distinguish between a relative contingent property and a non-relative contingent property. A relative property does not reflect an inherent state in the object but an external relation between it and other objects. For example, the location of bodies in space or the unchanging velocity of a body that persists in its state. Examples of a non-relative property: the heat of a sausage or of water, the exertion of force (as opposed to frictional forces) by a railcar moving at constant speed on train tracks. In addition, we distinguish between a negative property and a positive property. Blindness is a negative property (the negation of the ability to see); darkness is the absence of light. But light is not the absence of darkness in the metaphysical sense of the term.
Claim: if the cause of some contingent property (positive, non-relative) ceases its activity, the contingent property is nullified.
Why think the claim is true?
Take as an example connected, unpowered railcars passing us at constant speed. Suppose the train is very long and we are unable to see whether it has a beginning. But we can see that there is nothing in the essence of the railcars themselves that enables them, on their own, to overcome frictional forces, and we immediately infer that there must be an object different from the railcars—one that is capable by its essence of bringing this about—which grants them that ability at every moment (a locomotive). Notice that this inference is called for even if we imagine that infinitely many such railcars have already passed before us. For the reason for the inference has nothing to do with one consideration or another about the possibility of infinitely many railcars or causes, but with the simple fact that none of the railcars is capable of explaining the contingent property added to its essence here and now—the ability to overcome frictional forces. On the contrary: adding more and more objects with a similar contingent property only heightens the need for an external cause, because now such a cause is needed to explain each and every one of them.
An example to which the claim is not relevant: a father begetting a son. Once the son exists on his own, he no longer needs the father, and the son will still be able to beget children (even if the father no longer exists). Here one can in principle think (according to Maimonides and Thomas, unlike the Kalam) that the causal chain of begetters never began. Why the difference? The very capacity of each son to beget is an essential property of the son, and therefore does not require the father’s activity, as opposed to each railcar’s overcoming friction, which does not follow from its essence and therefore requires the activity of the locomotive. From here we can arrive at the distinction between an accidental causal chain and a hierarchical causal chain. Accidental dependence: a causal dependence in which each member depends on the previous member in some respect, but does not depend on it for the very performance of the action on the member after it. Hierarchical dependence: a dependence in which every cause (except the first) causes its effect only insofar as it is itself an effect. The ability of each member to act on the member after it is created by that very action caused by the preceding cause.
From these examples one can see that causal chains of contingent properties (positive and non-relative) express hierarchical dependence, which by definition requires the existence and continued actual operation of a first cause on which the entire chain depends; as opposed to causal chains involving essential properties, which express merely accidental dependence. This seems true of every positive, non-relative contingent property: suppose the locomotive’s causal influence is removed—immediately all the railcars stop performing the act of resisting frictional forces (and begin to slow down). Take hair dyed purple: if we could instantly cancel all the chemical bonds and forces (which follow from the essential properties of things) that attach the dye to the hair, the property of purpleness in it would be nullified.
To summarize,
we have seen that
- If the cause of a contingent property (positive, non-relative) ceases its activity, the contingent property is nullified.
- The existence of objects in the perceived universe is a positive, non-relative contingent property. (The assumption of contingency was explained earlier; existence is a positive property inherent in the object, not the negation of absence of existence.)
It follows: if the cause of the existence of objects in the universe were to cease its activity, their existence would be nullified.
In addition, we saw how
- Causal chains of contingent properties (positive, non-relative) are hierarchical chains.
and also that
- A hierarchical chain by definition requires the existence and continued actual operation of a first cause on which the entire chain depends.
Conclusion: the existence of any contingent being is enough to indicate the “I Am That I Am,” whose essence is existence, on whom the being’s existence depends here and now.
Answer
Three main comments:
- I do not understand how this formulation differs from the usual formulation of the cosmological proof (see the second notebook). Contingent beings (like those in our experience) need a cause that creates them (you also speak of a cause that sustains them now, and I am not at all sure about that). The objects around us are of that sort, and therefore there is a cause that created them. In the background there is, of course, the assumption that an infinite regress is not an explanation (as in the train example).
- You move from a contingent property to objects whose existence is contingent. I do not understand the justification for this move or why it is needed.
- Why are you focusing specifically on non-relative properties? Relative properties also satisfy all of this. In my view this distinction contributes nothing to the argument.
Discussion on Answer
1. With all due respect to the Rabbi’s Torah scholarship, there are enormous practical differences between the different formulations:
A. The writer means a cause that sustains them now, not a regular causal cause.
B. It seems to me that the writer accepts an infinite regress of causes. As he writes:
An example to which the claim is not relevant: a father begetting a son. Once the son exists on his own, he no longer needs the father, and the son will still be able to beget children (even if the father no longer exists). Here one can in principle think (according to Maimonides and Thomas, unlike the Kalam) that the causal chain of begetters never began.
Rabbi,
As I noted, it seems that this version has several advantages over many of its counterparts.
A. God’s existence is proven from any object whatsoever. You saw a grain of sand in the sea? Immediately you become aware that there is a God. You see a raindrop? Immediately you become aware of the divine activity that grants it existence.
B. There is no need to generalize over all the objects in the universe or to view them as one organic totality about which the claim of contingency is made. Some argue that this is the logical fallacy of attributing the properties of the part to the whole—the Fallacy of Composition—but that objection is not relevant to the argument here.
C. The present and ongoing dependence of every single thing in the universe on God more faithfully reflects the religious intuition according to which an intimate current bond takes place between every single object and the Creator, and His activity is present within it at this very moment.
D. The principle of causality is based on the most general metaphysical considerations (every contingent property/principle compels a cause) and is not a kind of special pleading focused specifically on the principle of existence in order to show the existence of causality that leads to God.
E. There is no need to rely on the assumption that an infinite regress is not an explanation, because in this version it is explicitly admitted that it is an explanation in standard cases of accidental causal dependence (for example, fathers begetting can go backward in a causal chain to infinity), but hierarchical dependence requires a first cause by definition, and not only with regard to existence but with regard to every parallel causal chain we know from familiar everyday reality as perceived by the senses.
The fact that God constitutes a cause that sustains them now follows from the definition of hierarchical causal dependence (whose source is both in Maimonides and in Aquinas) presented in the proof. Does the Rabbi think there is something incorrect in the definition?
2. This follows from the consideration presented at the beginning. I wrote: “Where does the metaphysical necessity of causality come from, and where does it end? According to Maimonides/Aquinas: from the fact that the world is not so irrational that it contains properties that do not derive from the essences of things without a cause.” It seems to me that this is the most basic, comprehensive, and plausible metaphysical principle of causality I have ever heard. The principle of existence is a special case of something that does not derive from the essences of objects in the universe, and therefore requires a cause just like them.
3. Relative properties do not satisfy all this. There is no need for a cause to act at every moment on an object moving at constant speed in space devoid of gravitational forces in order for it to persist in its motion. On the strength of this example, the philosopher Mortimer Adler attacked this argument of Maimonides and Aquinas (in his book How to Think about God), claiming that there could be inertia regarding the principle of existence just as with the motion of a body persisting in its state. But in my opinion he made a fundamental mistake by failing to distinguish between relative and non-relative properties.
The God of the Greeks.
Copenhagen still fails to understand that from the fact that, by applying his own logic to his own conceptual world, he infers the existence of a first cause, it follows that his logic precedes the first cause. In other words, Copenhagen is the first cause.
And that is why Copenhagen enjoys talking about God as though He were his son.
Point keeps insisting (because he actually does not sound stupid) on understanding nothing.
Indeed, as far as drawing conclusions about the world is concerned, Copenhagen’s logic—and everyone else’s logic—comes before the first cause and before everything. So what? Essentially, the first cause precedes everything. You need logic only in order to understand that, and only in that respect does logic precede the first cause.
(Also, in the dictionary “eel” comes before “God.” Apparently, in Point’s opinion the dictionary is a heretical book and should be burned along with the rest of the Greek books.)
D, it seems you thought I just casually wrote “his conceptual world”; perhaps you did not understand the meaning of that in the context of this whole story.
From the standpoint of psychic reality, the concept of a first cause precedes logic. The malfunction happens when he applies his logic to other concepts and then infers the first cause—when in fact the concept of first cause was already there beforehand.
The lie is that Copenhagen presents it as though logic compelled the existence of the first cause. And why would he present it that way? What is the interest? He wants to be the first cause, God’s father. The grandfather.
And when you write “essentially,” if you mean physical reality, know that Copenhagen is not talking about it at all. In physical reality there is none of the things Copenhagen talks about. Everything exists in his mind and imagination.
That is, Copenhagen is always talking about his own mind, about himself, about the concepts he created and wove within himself through reading, study, and thought. It has nothing to do with physical reality.
If you read all of Copenhagen’s claims on the assumption that they refer to himself, everything will become clear and coherent to you.
Point,
You raise various claims that presumably you imagine are true—otherwise why bother thinking them? My question is: in your view, is the fact that they are true connected to objective reality, or does it all come from the conceptual world that exists in Point’s own soul and imagination?
I’d like to hear a reasoned answer.
Point, everything is clear and coherent to me even without your suggestions (I am pretty sure that with them it actually would not be coherent).
You think you are some kind of genius, and so you do psychological analysis of Copenhagen’s motives (“he wants to be the grandfather”), even though it is obvious that he does not. He is trying to prove the existence of God. If in your opinion there is a problem with that (that way his logic precedes God! Heaven forbid! The God of the Greeks! etc.), you need to explain what it is. As I noted, even in the dictionary “lake” comes before “God.”
And I also didn’t really understand what you mean by “from the standpoint of psychic reality the concept of first cause precedes logic.”
Psychic reality does not matter. What matters is philosophy/thought, not feelings.
D, thought, which is part of psychic reality, uses concepts that are part of psychic reality. As for what matters—that is exactly the point I raised. In the end: what is Copenhagen’s interest? That is, what matters to him there in all that verbiage.
Copenhagen, once again a question that arises from your failure to distinguish between yourself and what is outside you.
I read what you write. And I relate to what you write. And when I ask about the interest, then of course that is a question about your psychological reality as I perceive it.
It is clear to me that what the words “true” and “objective” point to is some mental perception of yours such that by using them something happens. As though if you did not say them then it would be something else. Magic.
What is really happening outside my perception? How should I know? Maybe some demon is transmitting to me everything I perceive.
Point,
You say that this is about “your psychological reality as I perceive it.” Is there any connection at all between how you perceive it and what it is?
If not, why does it matter what you say about it?
And if yes, why and how exactly does that happen?
Beyond that, do you attribute to various claims about my psychic reality the property of being “true” or “false”? If not, what meaning do you have for a claim about someone’s state when your own thought holds that it is neither true nor false?
If yes, why and how exactly does that happen?
Thinkers such as Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas, and others answered questions like these. Are you capable of answering them?
Gilad,
1. Not at all.
A. I wrote that I do not understand why there is an advantage to a cause that sustains them in the present over a cause that created them in the past. Nor do I see any necessity for there to be such a cause.
B. If he accepts an infinite regress, then one can do that with present causes as well. I do not agree that one can think that the father-son-son chain never began. That is a problematic regress like any other regress. How is that different from the infinite train he brought as an example?
Copenhagen,
A. That is also true in the usual formulation. You see a grain of sand, you know there is someone who made it (or its father and grandfather).
B. In the usual formulation too there is no need for that. Even if they are not one totality, each of them requires a cause (in the past or in the present).
C. That makes no difference to the validity and strength of the logical-philosophical argument.
D. I did not understand.
E. As I wrote to Gilad, I do not see why there is no problem with an infinite chain of procreation.
2. I really do not see a substantive difference between this and the principle of causality. If anything, the opposite. The principle of causality specifically seems more intuitive and reasonable.
3. It is not because of the difference between relative properties and non-relative ones. Obviously there is no need for a cause to act at every moment on an object moving at constant speed in space devoid of gravitational forces in order for it to persist in its motion. That is not because of relativity but because when there is no resistance there is no need for a force. In your sense too, the persistence of an object’s existence or an object’s red color do not need a cause to sustain them at every moment, even though they are not relative properties (existence is not a property at all). Simply because there is no force trying to change their existence or color, and so there is no need for a cause to oppose it (as in motion without friction or external forces).
Copenhagen,
Why ask pointlessly after you already know what my answer is? At the end I wrote: “What is really happening outside my perception? How should I know?”
Are you digging in because you are unable to deal with the answer?
Rabbi,
A. It seems from the wording (“who made it…or its father and grandfather”) that the Rabbi attributes deistic causality to the grain of sand. If a first cause created a universe billions of years ago and since then everything has been there by inertia, then the grain of sand no longer needs the first cause here and now, and the same would apply to every point in the past at which it exists (except creation). Such an argument leaves some room for the skeptic to doubt whether perhaps one can keep going backward in the chain of causes and thus “get rid of” the first cause. By contrast, when the causality is hierarchical, that forces me to explain an action of a first cause that is happening right now, for which explanations cannot be borrowed on the account of the past.
B. The fact that each one requires an adjacent contingent cause means that I still have a long way to go before the first cause. Why? Because when the chain is not hierarchical, the causality is not transitive. It is not correct to say of the grandfather that he caused the father to beget the son. But when the causality is hierarchical, the relation is transitive: the locomotive causes railcar A to cause the property in railcar B, and so on (A causes B to cause C). That is, according to the Rambamist/Thomist argument, God Himself is the cause of the grain of sand’s existence, which is not the case in other formulations where He is only the cause of the totality as a whole (in which case they will claim Fallacy of Composition) or of the first contingent event (leaving room for the skeptic to try to get rid of a first cause).
C. If a certain version of the philosophers’ God is closer to the God of revelation, is that not a reason to place greater trust in it than in others? It depends on whether we have independent reasons to believe in the God of revelation.
D. In philosophical proofs there is room to place greater trust in an assumption that we had prior reasons to accept anyway, independently of the narrow subject under discussion in the proof. The present version is of that type. It makes use of a principle motivated by independent considerations regarding the metaphysics of causality, considerations accepted apart from the proof and concerning the concept in general.
E. I agree that there is problematicness even in an infinite accidental causality, but not with the same force as in hierarchical causality (where the question of infinity is uninteresting). Again, when it comes to accidental causality in an infinite chain on the axis of time, every point on the axis is explained (the fact is that there were “Aristotelians” who did not think there was a problem with it—including scientists in the 20th century—until the evidence for the Big Bang became too strong to deny), unlike hierarchical causality, where not even one point is explained.
2. What is at issue here is something that itself constitutes a principle of causality, and beyond that does not restrict itself to one specific type of it (existence or coming-to-be) but addresses the more basic question: when does causal necessity begin and end in general? The examples I brought in the proof illustrate how intuitive the principle is, which in my opinion can be seen at least as clearly, or even more so if one reflects on it, specifically in the general principle. We see that every contingent property has a cause (not only existence or coming-to-be), and we receive endless everyday confirmations of this.
3. In my opinion this follows from the fact that we are dealing with a relative property, and not because “when there is no resistance there is no need for force.” Even if there is no resistance, if it is a positive contingent property describing an aspect of the thing itself, the cause that adds the property to the thing must continue its operation. The example of the color red shows the opposite: without the forces (chemical and/or physical) linking the color to the object, there would not be a red object here. There may indeed be red-colored materials near the object, but there will be no connection between them and the object except temporary proximity in place, and any slight movement of it will show that this was only in appearance and that it was not a red object at all. As for existence, I hold that it definitely is a property or principle in the objects themselves that differs from their essence, but that requires elaboration and I have already gone on long enough.
Point,
If you have no idea what is happening outside your psychic reality, how do you explain statements you wrote about things outside your psychic reality?
Here are examples:
“Copenhagen still fails to understand…”
“And that is why Copenhagen enjoys talking about God as though He were his son.”
“The malfunction happens when he applies his logic to other concepts…when in fact the concept of first cause was already there beforehand.”
“The lie is that Copenhagen…he wants to be the first cause, God’s father. The grandfather.”
“Copenhagen is always talking about his own mind, about himself, about the concepts he created and wove within himself through reading, study, and thought.”
“Copenhagen, once again a question that arises from your failure to distinguish between yourself and what is outside you.”
“It is clear to me that what the words ‘true’ and ‘objective’ point to is some mental perception of yours”
You are only proving what I claimed—that you perceive your perception as identical with the universe. Therefore all your questions, when they are in this context, are empty questions.
It also seems that you know the answer to the questions you asked me, since I already answered them in the previous question. You are just babbling because you are not willing to accept the fact that there is a universe outside you.
Copenhagen,
You’re dealing with a skeptic.
I am not a skeptic; I know with absolute certainty that Copenhagen is not God.
Why are you the god of God, deciding for Him what He can and cannot do?
Y.D.,
Did you mean the Rabbi or Point?
Point,
Let’s try to focus on the issue, on the literal meaning of the words, and afterward we can move on to the rest. You say that “thought, which is part of psychic reality, uses concepts that are part of psychic reality,” and also that you have no idea “what is really happening outside my perception? How should I know?” All this in the sense that perception is an inner-psychic event and nothing more.
It follows from this that you have no way of knowing what is happening in the psychic reality of others, and no idea whether sentences like “Copenhagen perceives his perception as identical with the universe,” “knows the answer to the questions he asked me,” or “is not willing to accept the fact that there is a universe outside him” are true or false.
Do you understand that the problem here is that there is simply no meaning to the sentences you are saying?
To Copenhagen,
What does the Rabbi have to do with it??
Your whole argument lacks logical continuity. Something there does not add up.
The possibility of knowing is not a verbal matter.
“It follows from this”? It does not follow from this—that is the claim itself, that I do not know what is happening outside my perception.
I do not understand the unnecessary verbiage including the examples. What is that supposed to add beyond the claim itself?
If the sentences have no meaning, why did you bring them as examples, apparently understanding them very well.
Perceptions are not divided into true or false, but into perceptions that you believe are correct or believe are not correct.
You tend to inject truth and falsehood into everything, which shows your inability to distinguish the domain of logic from the domain of language and perception.
And again, everything you say keeps showing that you think what you know is the whole universe—or that it imposes things on the universe.
Point, where did Copenhagen say—or how does it follow from what he said—that his knowledge is the whole universe? So far the only one who hinted at that is you (when you said that what is outside your perception is imagination).
There is meaning to the sentences you wrote about Copenhagen, but according to your own view they have no meaning (after all, they are only imagination).
And the fact that you used them anyway shows that you do not really believe what you are saying (don’t bother replying to me. I’m imagination).
D. Once again you ignore things I wrote.
Of course they have meaning; otherwise I would not say them. What defines meaningfulness is feeling (not thought—feeling; you should begin to understand where you live). If you feel the feeling of meaningfulness, then you say it is meaningful to you, and in short you say it is meaningful. That is the entire meaning of meaningful; it has no other mystical meaning.
What aroused that feeling? Probably some combination of thought, logic, and conceptual world.
As for Copenhagen, he does not say it, he assumes it as a basic assumption. It precedes all his statements. Copenhagen assumes that when he relates to me, my existence is identical with his perception, that is, he hallucinates to himself that he knows me. That is how it is for everything he relates to; in other words, for him the universe is identical with his perception.
Of course this fits with his perception that he is the first cause, and it is clear that psychologically a person perceives things. Only Copenhagen confuses cause and purpose. Perception is not a cause but an effect. And thus he turned things upside down. Magic.
And I say that a person knows nothing about what happens outside his perception. In other words, there are things a person does not perceive.
Does no one, apart from Rabbi Michi’s comments, have any objections to the proof?
Point,
Several of the sentences you said do indeed have independent meaning on their own, but their combination lacks meaning. If you claim that you are incapable of knowing things in the world as it is outside your thought, then you have thereby lost the ability to give any rational meaning to the pretension of knowing what motivations drive other people, or the degree of fit between their concepts and the world. From the outset you denied yourself the possibility of knowing such things. You are trying to hold the rope at both ends under some guise of pseudo-psychological sharpness, when in fact it is a jumble of random syllables trying to masquerade as meaningful sentences.
According to your view, the moment we encounter fire there is no reason to assume it needs a sustainer.
How did you get that?
Try to distinguish what the essence of fire is and whether there is something in it that implies not needing a sustainer.
You wrote that. Because heat is not a relative property but an essential one in fire. So if we see fire, that means there is no problem that this is an essential entity.
B. Why do you assume that a property that is not essential to an object has to disappear? This sounds like unclear philosophizing. Why isn’t it like a train without friction?
With God’s help, 26 Elul 5778
Copenhagen’s neighbor is the Swedish city of Malmö, one of whose wonders is the tower that appears as an upright human body in twisting motion. Within the material that appears static, a double motion is revealed—rotation around a central point and growth upward.
Dynamism in the physical sense signifies movement also on the perceptual plane: the “what?” leads to the “why?” Existing reality leads us to the insight that there is a cause and a purpose, and from defining the “what” we ask: “why?”
And from the perception that the universe does not merely “revolve around itself,” and from the feeling that besides the self there are also others similar to me yet different from me, between whom there can and should be relations of giving and receiving, there grows a “merchants’ harbor” (“Copen-hagen” in Danish), where each one gives and receives, casts his bread upon the waters, and brings his bread from afar.
And from openness to space in the manner of “take and give,” there grows a gentle and pleasant spaciousness of “Tivoli Gardens,” where a person cleaves to the altruistic goodness of his Creator and broadens and sweetens life for his fellow without calculation.
And between Malmö and Copenhagen there is connected the “Öresund” bridge, the sound of the shofar awakening and calling one to leave the captivity of constriction for the expanses of openness, openness to God and openness to our fellow, and from the straits of “Sweden” we emerge to the expanses of “Denmark.”
With blessings, S.Z. Levinger
At the beginning of the title:
From the dynamism within the statics turning…
Gilad,
A. I did not write that heat is a non-relative property in fire, but that it is not a contingent property. If it is not contingent, then all the more so it is not relative—there is no need to write such a thing. I recommend that you go over again the meaning of the distinctions among the examples brought in the second paragraph.
Since we perceive that heat is derived from the essence of fire, there is no need for an external object to explain why it happens to be hot. For heat in fire is not something that happens to fire (as in water or a sausage), but a necessity that follows from its essence. But this concerns only the heat itself, not the question whether fire exists or whether something is needed to bring it from potentiality to actuality. There is no way to carry out a logical deduction from the essence of fire to the claim that it does not need a sustainer. Those are two different principles. Take the example of the father. To explain why he begets the son, we do not need the grandfather (or some other external thing) to cause him to do so, since the capacity to beget lies in his own essence, and so we need only explain the internal principle by which this is done (that he is a creature with a reproductive system, the reasons he had for doing so, etc.). But there is no connection between the capacity to beget and the question whether he needs a sustainer.
B. First of all, without a cause there is no way to give an account of why the property is there or not there, and the world would be irrational. Properties could appear and disappear out of nowhere without a cause, and we do not seriously think the world can be like that. (You are probably thinking of cases where a cause actualizes some essential property, in which case there is an internal necessity for why it can remain there—because that is the thing’s essence—but we are dealing with contingent properties.) Second, so far we have not found any example that refutes the principle. Every non-relative contingent property we find in the world is there only so long as the cause that attaches it to the object continues its activity. You are welcome to try to think of a counterexample.
S.Z. Levinger,
Indeed the “what” leads to the “why,” but the question is why. The answer of classical theism: because of the metaphysical necessity that contingent properties cannot exist without a cause.
I do not think your words are correct.
A. On the level of definitions between an essential property and a non-essential one—there is no basis for this, because the whole definition is our analogy; there is no such thing in reality. You can define the definition “hot sausage.” Then there is no problem with the sausage being hot.
B. You are talking here about actualization. And then you jump to the connection of causality instead of the proof you gave.
Suppose we have an eternal clock.
You assume that there is nothing that compels it to continue existing, and therefore the logical claim is that it will disappear/change. (In the train parable: infinite railcars with friction.)
But I disagree with that, and think that even so there is indeed no reason for it to change. But there is also no reason for it to disappear. For insofar as something exists, there is no reason to claim that it will continue to exist (railcars without friction).
So I did not understand the answer.
Gilad,
A. First of all, I must say that a definition is capable of grasping the essence of a thing, because otherwise there is no meaning to the claim that we know things about the world, and we are left in a world not essentially different from a hallucination.
Second, it is not that you first define random definitions and then try by means of them to grasp things in reality (that sounds like something between neo-Kantianism and postmodernism, contrary to common sense); rather, you first grasp things in reality and then perform on them an act of abstraction of the universal common denominator. First one perceives with the senses hot, lukewarm, or cold sausages, and then abstracts from them properties such as warmth and other contingent characteristics, and thus distinguishes between the essence of sausage and various events or properties that were added to it accidentally (that is, not for reasons that follow from its essence) and can also cease to characterize it accidentally.
In other words, if you define “hot sausage,” that will be an artificial definition not based on the normal process of intellectual abstraction. It is like defining “a person with dyed hair” as someone’s essential property—an artificial fiction that does not exist in humanity itself, the property common to all human beings. Therefore when at some point you see that this same person continues to exist even though his hair is no longer dyed, the intellect immediately whispers in your ear the reason: this was a contingent property all along.
B. I did not understand the first two sentences, and the following sentences are also not entirely clear. In the railcar example, what disappears immediately is the ability to overcome friction. Such an ability does not follow from the essence of the railcars and therefore requires a constant cause linking it to the railcars. You say, “Insofar as something exists there is no reason that it will (not) continue to exist (railcars without friction),” and I assume you accidentally omitted the “not.” But I already showed that the comparison cannot be to the motion of railcars without friction but to the very exertion of force against friction. Velocity in frictionless motion is an external description expressing a relation between other things and the railcars, not something inherent in the railcars. But when a railcar exerts force, we are talking about a concrete aspect in the railcar itself. If you wish to disagree, you will need to explain why, when it comes to existence, there is no need for a constant cause, whereas with every other positive non-relative contingent characteristic we always see that there is.
A. I don’t think that is agreed by everyone.
B. Existence is not a property. So it is not correct to compare between the cases.
A. I was speaking from the perspective of common sense. The problem for someone who claims we live in a hallucination is more serious anyway, so I was not addressing him.
B. There are philosophical reasons showing that existence is a property, but they require length and I will not go into that. In any case, this is getting hung up on words. The question here is whether some characteristic or aspect of a thing follows from its essence, no matter what we call it (property, principle, matter, etc.). Once it does not, the intellect looks for a cause. When some essence may or may not be x, there results a lack of logical necessity in the connection between it and x (in our case, existence), and that is what compels causal necessity. Some matter—whatever the name—that is added accidentally to a thing and does not follow from it necessarily. If such a state did not require a cause, the result would be a world irrational at least to the same degree as with any other causeless contingent property.
If we use Richard Taylor’s example, you see a transparent sphere in the forest and are immediately sure that there is a cause for it. Suppose you did not see such a sphere—you would not ask why there is no sphere. Suppose there were no contingent universe at all—we would not ask where is the cause that made there be no universe. But when one sees a universe, one asks. If the universe were made of an eternal lump of butter and nothing else, surely one would have to ask why it exists. By contrast, according to the supporters of “existence is not a property,” there will be no difference at all between the existence or nonexistence of a thing regarding the need for the principle of causality, and any possible universe we can imagine could exist without a cause (and for the same reason could also appear at any moment out of nothing without a cause, though I will not go into that), which is absurd.
Existence could be a cause if it were eternal.
I agree that existence cannot be carved out of nothing.
Just as change in that same existence requires a cause.
But insofar as something exists, it is not clear that it needs a cause. That is too big a question for us to answer, because it seems like philosophizing and throwing incorrect basic assumptions into the discussion.
To me the matter seems clear.
Gilad,
You are not addressing the arguments directly, so I do not see any point in responding. Try to think about them. They speak for themselves.
I do not accept the assumption that existence requires a cause. I have no good argument to say beyond that.
Why do you think that if I do not accept that assumption, then things can be created out of nothing? If indeed that follows, then apparently I would change my mind on the matter.
Because I do not accept creation from absolute nothing.
As opposed to the continued persistence of being, insofar as it already exists, such as an eternal universe.
?
Gilad,
Is it really the case that “insofar as something exists, it is not clear that it needs a cause”? If so, why can we not similarly say that insofar as some contingent property exists, it is not clear that it needs a cause? The metaphysical status of a property is lower than that of a substance (because it is only some characteristic in the substance and not the complete substance). If the continual actualization of some (contingent) property requires a cause, then all the more so the continual actualization of a substance. It certainly would not be rational to say that the continual actualization of some contingent property, such as the exertion of force by railcars against friction, requires a cause, whereas the continual actualization of a complete substance does not require a cause.
And again, as noted earlier, the claim leads to absurdity. According to it, any possible world could exist without a cause, and there is no greater likelihood that one or more of some imagined worlds would be actualized (continually, of course) than that they would not. For example, a Flying Spaghetti Monster that cooks kugel every five minutes, makes sure to eat it on every day of the week except the Sabbath, but in the end goes to war with Zeus (who also always existed, of course), falls in love with him, and gives birth to Apollo, who eats kugels only on the Sabbath.
It can exist eternally, but that does not mean be created.
Again, I agree that perhaps everything exists; it’s just that since I have not seen it, by Occam’s razor I assume only this world exists.
I do not accept that a world can be created out of nothing, and indeed you did not show an argument for that idea being possible according to my approach. Rather, I hold that whatever eternally existed exists, will be what will be.
I did not understand why, in your view, an existing thing needs more explanation than the question why another thing does not exist.
According to your view, one need not wonder that Zeus does not exist, whereas one must wonder why the world does exist.
But that is not right, because you should hold that since the actualization of a thing’s existence needs explanation, then we will also need to give an explanation and understanding of why another thing does not exist.
Obviously that weakens your basic assumption. Rather, we need not wonder at what exists any more than we wonder at what does not exist.
Gilad,
Your Hebrew is not clear to me. What do you mean by “exists eternally”? Do you mean an eternal substance (object, being)?
In any case, the claim is simple: if your view implies that it just happened by chance that some other crazy imaginary universe does not exist, but in principle there is no difference, and just as our universe exists so could any other universe exist provided it is eternal, then there is an absurdity here. Do you not see why it is absurd? It is self-evident that we would look for a cause as to why a lump of butter has existed forever. All the more so in a universe containing creatures like Zeus and Flying Spaghetti Monsters. This is the classic case, the paradigm, of intellectual wonder that leads to the search for explanation.
If anything can exist without a cause provided it is eternal, then yes, worlds can come into being from nothing. For there could be, outside our spacetime, a being capable by its nature of doing supernatural things (and thus, by its very nature, existing that way forever without a cause), such as creating a new universe out of nothing at every moment, or creating out of nothing a fairy that flies above your head only when no one can see and immediately disappears when someone does see, and so on.
It seems to me that I have never seen anyone dispute the simple fact that what requires explanation is the existence of things, and that the absence of something’s existence does not require explanation—and that, after all, is how all science works. No one needs to explain why force X does not exist, but the moment we discover forces such as gravity or electromagnetism we immediately look for an explanation. This follows from the metaphysical principle that contingent properties require a cause. The world is not so chaotic and irrational that things can simply happen like that with no cause at all. This is the working assumption of rationality itself, and we receive countless everyday confirmations of it.
The point is that when there is no necessity in a thing’s existence, you need something external that has within its own capacities the ability to cause it to exist. By contrast, we do not need an object with some capacity in order to explain the nonexistence of something, and therefore there is no problem in the absence of infinitely many possible objects that do not exist, and no researcher or scientist would think one has to look for an explanation for that. Alternatively, one can also say (after reaching the conclusion of the cosmological proof) that the fact that Zeus does not exist is rooted in God’s wisdom and will, who decided not to cause it.
In any case, you did not answer the first paragraph quoted earlier, and I will quote it again:
Is it really the case that “insofar as something exists, it is not clear that it needs a cause”? If so, why can we not similarly say that insofar as some contingent property exists, it is not clear that it needs a cause? The metaphysical status of a property is lower than that of a substance (because it is only some characteristic in the substance and not the complete substance). If the continual actualization of some (contingent) property requires a cause, then all the more so the continual actualization of a substance. It certainly would not be rational to say that the continual actualization of some contingent property, such as the exertion of force by railcars against friction, requires a cause, whereas the continual actualization of a complete substance does not require a cause.
I am sorry, but I do not see why this is an absurd approach. In the butter example, we know that humans make things similar to butter, and therefore it is reasonable to assume that if there is butter before us, it was produced by a human. (The physico-theological proof / Bayes’ formula.)
But when you ask about the essence of the existence of things in general—for example, “the universe”—I do not see that it needs a cause. And yet, I accept that it is not its own cause.
Regarding creation out of nothing, as I assumed, you are unable to ground the assumption that a contingent reality can be created out of nothing. You rely on the assumption that the entity has a cause with “supernatural” power to create it. So this is not absolute creation out of nothing.
I did not understand why the nonexistence of something does not require a cause.
If I summarize your argument in this part, is it that this is an axiom?
I answered:
The difference is that a property is part of the substance and trails after the substance. But existence is not a property. Rather, it is actualization, and actualization does not require a cause.
And if you say it does require a cause, then you will also have to give a cause for the nonexistence of an entity.
Your remarks about butter mix unlike things together. Try again to examine what the butter example was meant to do, abstract what is relevant from what is not relevant, and see whether your response to it touches the point itself.
You do not see why it needs a cause, but as I noted, this is the working assumption of rationality itself, which does not accept the possibility of brute facts without a cause. The brute existence of some contingent universe is the most surprising brute fact imaginable, and therefore certainly requires a cause. It is not enough to hide behind “I do not see.”
So you admit that according to your view we have no way to assess the probability that in another second a flying elephant will suddenly come into being in your yard out of nothing, because there is no problem with some eternal being possessing supernatural powers for such magic existing forever outside our spacetime just like that without a cause (though of course, since the elephant would be created by that being, it would not be absolute creation out of nothing). But this contradicts the obvious, namely that the probability is negligible.
You are welcome to look again at the explanation of why the nonexistence of something is not the sort of thing for which one looks for a cause. The matter was explained well, and in two ways. The responses seem to me evasive.
A contingent property, by definition, is not an integral part of the substance but something added to it. Otherwise it could not exist without it, but that is exactly what follows from the definition of contingency—that the substance does not depend on it for its existence. The claim was that if continual actualization of a lower ontological order (a contingent property) in some substance compels a cause (as one sees in the railcar example), then certainly the continual actualization of a whole substance as such does. To that you did not answer on the merits.
The matter of non-being of existence was, as noted, explained well.
The assumption of the rationality of the world is a subjective assumption and is well explained by the methods of psychology and evolution. We have no reason to assume that the world is subject to our human way of thinking.
The world is not a health fund and not a school.
Indeed, I have no way to calculate the chance that a flying elephant will appear in my yard. But I do not rule out that it might appear. Whereas you consistently insist on the familiar and deny any possibility of scientific progress. All because it does not fit your rationalism… We saw how successful that was in discovering the laws of nature…
The nonexistence of something is no more than the actualization of something, and therefore if the first half requires a cause, the second half also requires a cause (all this according to your view). You argued that the presumption of contingency is that the object does not exist. But that fits your view that existence is a property added to the object.
The problem is that you define every object into classes and general entities, as I noted above. You need to understand that those definitions are ours for our convenience; they have nothing to do with reality. In any case there is no such thing as a contingent property. There is a contingent entity described by x,y,z,a,ab. You ask: if what preserves a as existing must preserve the whole entity as existing, then the entity itself is also a. It is not something accompanying it. The whole is made up of the particulars. There is no “whole” + properties.
Of course my sentences are meaningless to someone who thinks he is God and that he alone exists and that he is science, the knower and the known. Since my words cast doubt on the divinity of that serpent who tells God what He knows.
All your effort is only so that everyone will know that you are the grandfather, God’s father, since God is subject to the laws of logic, and you are the one who controls the laws of logic (so you believe, although in practice your logic is limited to kindergarten logic), so God is subject to you. You expect others to understand this on their own.
But what is revealed here? That there are many others like you who desire to be the grandfather, and each tries to prove—and thereby force or create—the existence of God. Each in his own unique crafty way.
Paragraph 4: “Light is not the absence of darkness, in the metaphysical sense of the term.” It seems to me that it should say “in the physical sense of the term.”