Efficient Cause Definition: "the immediate agent in the production of an effect"
An efficient cause brings something into being or sets it in motion (e.g., a sculptor is the efficient cause of a bronze statue). With this in mind, one might ask whether it's possible for the universe to be its own efficient cause. Thomas Aquinas' answer is below:
"There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for then it would be prior to itself, which is impossible" (Aquinas).
Hence, it seems highly unlikely, to say the least, that the cosmos could be its own efficient cause. Just as a house needs a builder, so the universe needs an efficient cause outside itself. See Hebrews 3:4.
In this regard, Origen of Alexandria uses autotheos which means something like "Godself" or God Himself, a term that distinguishes the Father from other "gods" (theoi) and that includes the Logos. I guess Origen wants to say that while the Logos and other ontic deities are gods by participation in the Father's divinity, the Father is God by his very nature (John 17:3) and he is the source or fount of divinity. The Father also does not need an efficient cause.
Sunday, November 03, 2024
Can A Thing Be the Efficient Cause of Itself?
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I think autotheos in Origen, like ungenerated in Eunomius, can be understood as a claim that only the Father is A Se, the next issue is whether or not an "essence" can include hyposteses one of which is A se, and others (one or two) of which are dependent and contingent (contingent in the sense of caused), I don't think that would make sense.
There was a recent debate between a monarchian trinitarian catholic, a unitarian theologian and a muslim theologian, much of this debate was around the question of Aseity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdv27Ptp7iI&t=3s&pp=ygUUc3RldmVuZSBuZW1lcyBqb3NodWE%3D
Thanks for the comments and video. I will check it out. Eunomius was an interesting figure.
https://www.academia.edu/51528054
The article is a good survey, but it does misrepresent Origen a little bit, Origen, although trinitarian in some sense, had positions about the fundementality of the Father, and his having his own self-existence, and essence, that would have been considered eunomionism or arianism in later centuries.
I don't think it was for lack of vocabulary, I think it was just that was his best theological interpretation.
https://philarchive.org/archive/HAMECA-3
Regarding the last link posted by Duncan, I concur with the main claim of the paper that efficient causation took some turns in the middle ages and Suarez (et al.) offers a unique perspective on the subject. But this whole notion of efficient causation is rooted in Aristotelian thought: Aristotle discusses the subject in his Physics and Metaphysics. In Metaphysics 12, he develops an argument for the existence of his god, which is pure thought thinking pure thought (absolute nous).
From a book by Etienne Gilson:
"in physics, they [final causes] are impertinent, and as remoras to the ship, that hinder the sciences from holding their course of improvement" (Francis Bacon quoted in Gilson, page 132).
Gilson then writes: "These final causes, however, are not false, or unworthy of inquiry in metaphysics, but their excursion into the limits of physical causes has made a great devastation in that province” (132).
Some people have said that final (and formal) causation have been making their way back into evolutionary biology as of late.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10529506/
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-14017-4
https://towardsdatascience.com/stop-using-the-occams-razor-principle-7281d143f9e6
https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/most-scientists-dont-know-what-science-actually-occams-razor-can-bring-clarity
https://www.openmindmag.org/articles/the-deceptive-allure-of-simplicity
https://thelogicofscience.com/2018/06/26/occams-razor-is-about-assumptions-not-simplicity/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10952609/pdf/NYAS-1530-8.pdf
"We should, following the giants of modern science, keep Occam’s razor close when practicing or teaching science, not least because simple theories are more easily communicated and understood. The message that science is, ultimately, the method by which we use the tools of experimentation,
mathematics, and logic to find the simplest explanations of the complex phenomena of our world provides a clear mission statement for the whole of the scientific enterprise."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04186-3
https://luthert.web.illinois.edu/blog/posts/592.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/occams-razor
P1: Every future action of a free agent is unknowable.
P2: Peter is a free agent (i.e., has free volition).
C: Therefore, the future actions of Peter are unknowable.
The argument is logically valid, but is it also sound? Sound = true premises and a true conclusion. You be the judge.
Peter breathes because Peter has been breathing and we expect this to continue. Peter suddenly stops breathing - the END.
We might say that we always knew that Peter would stop breathing eventually - but this was not when we expected it.
We guess based on our limited previous experience. We are probability machines with insufficient data.
P2 is also a problem/illusion.
I understand that calling a fallacy can also be a fallacy but in this case because free agents simply do not exist in an open system - everything has interaction and is not in a vacuum, I reference this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause and regardless of arguments about reductionism in physics or biology the fundamental energy distribution and laws of thermodynamics do not reduce in any meaningful way. They show no indications of efficient cause. Big bangs and all other theories of cause do not explain what appear to be static characteristics. It is a desirable thing to think that we can predict future events.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOf61GCQpAA
Like that deck of cards would we know of initial factors prior to the test - ie. these cards have just been pulled from a freshly manufactured pack. Its just the general way that human thinking works and it difficult to grasp strategy, but strategy is always present even if not detected.
In any case, I think the majority reading this thread will like your route but "The argument is logically valid" is an illusion.
I will write more later, but I would say that the example you give of Peter is not a deductive argument, but it's inductive. So, the arguments are different. Secondly, some things are fairly certain in this life. For example, if someone jumps off the empire state building without a parachute or if you plant corn, you won't get green beans.
Validity has been assigned a meaning in logic: it's not illusory. You can quibble with how validity has been defined, but given the definition with which logicians commonly work, one can't rightly deny the argument is valid.
Sextus Empiricus constructed a dilemma to show that Socrates never died. Although I would say the argument has a false conclusion, it is logically valid.
Will somebody also show me a tree or baby, which had no efficient cause?
Every house has a builder.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhonism
How someone chooses to build an argument is not really my problem.
A built house is built by someone, or something. One can always live in a cave which develops due to a large range of factors.
If you plant corn you may get nothing at all.
My point about arguments is to show that an argument can be logically valid, yet have false premises or a false conclusion or both. There is a difference between validity and soundness.
Caves don't begin to exist without a cause and while you might not reap from planting corn, you can be highly certain that you won't reap green beans.
https://www.theologie.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ffffffff-fbd6-1538-0000-000070cf64bc/Quine51.pdf
Caves don't begin to exist without multiple causes.
Without an initial cause, the cave cannot begin to eist anymore than a tree or human embryo can exist without an efficient cause.
Ok, you bring Quine into the discussion. I've read and taught the piece before. Has he been critiqued? You bet. Another thing about Quine is that he wrote about logic, so he too had to comment on arguments and logical form.
https://journals.openedition.org/philosophiascientiae/1046?lang=en
Duncan,
The counter example you gave to Fosters syllogism isn't a good analogy.
in P1 Foster uses the term "unknowable" not "unknown," i.e. the problem is not insufficient data but that in principle no amount of data is sufficient, that's not the case with Peter stopping breathing, unless it involves Peter's free actions.
The claim that we don't live in an open universe is not a knock against free will, it's a necessary condition, as Maurice Blondel (among others) pointed out, a free agent can only make decisions if there is regularity and determinism such that outcomes of actions can be predicted, and thus the agent can actually bring about effects.
As far as the universe is concerned, the idea that the laws of nature and initial conditions are not reducible to a single cause is a claim, but what reason is there to believe it? I mean if something like the PSI is true, it seems as though we have good reason to reject it, and to reject all forms of the PSI seems to undercut all explanation (science and otherwise) as real forms of knowledge (as opposed to just tools).
I mean if we are just going to accept the existence of laws and energy and mass distribution as brute facts, then why not posit more of them whenever we find phenomena that don't fit, why look for some unified theory?
David Bentley Hart's maxim that reason abhors a dualism has a good amount of truth, ultimately reason presupposes a prior unity to diverse phenomena, and if the reason we're gonna just stop at individual "laws" (whatever they might be) and initial distributions of energy, is because we don't want to go beyond the physical sciences, that's just a prejudice.
BTW, I'm NOT talking about reductionism in the atomistic sense, I'm just talking about the explanation, I'm an idealist, so ultimately I think everything can be accounted for in terms of rational relations, grounded in the mind of God, but that's for another day (maybe).
Caves don't begin to exist without multiple causes, you're right, but each of those causes only cause insofar as they themselves are caused, their existence and causal power are not self-caused or self-explained, the whole point of the classical cosmological arguments is that one needs a self-explained (necessary) first-cause, whose causal power is intrinsic.
I still think that Scotus's treatise on the first principle is one of the best treatments of this argument, although there are more modern versions.
But I think the mistake being made is just the idea that the theist is appealing to an arbitrary terminus, as opposed to other arbitrary termini (laws of nature, initial conditions), the theist is not doing that, the theist is positing the need for a necessary being whose causal power is intrinsic, if the arguments work saying that the universe can be caused by the laws of nature and initial conditions is just to not understand the argument.
Thanks Roman. When you typed PSI, did you mean PSR instead? Could you please clarify? I think Aquinas is difficult to refute in terms of what he writes about efficient causes and I agree that Scotus' argument has to be one of the best theistic arguments.
As I'm sure you also know, determinism doesn't necessarily rule out free volition. Only hard determinism does that, but it also seems to vitiate moral responsibility.
I meant PSR, sorry about that.
I know that many argue that determinism doesn't necessarily rule out free volition (I take it you mean the view of compatibilism), but personally, I fail to see how one can have morally significant free will given compatibilism. If X exhaustively causes Y which causes Z, where X is some set of physical causes, Y is an act of volition, and Z is an act, then I'm not sure why Y is responsible for Z more than X, and if X ultimately goes back in a chain of causes to God, I don't see how God isn't ultimately then responsible for Y.
However, much smarter people than myself are assured it works, so perhaps the problem is just I havn't been able to wrap my head around it yet.
I only brought up PSR because I was racking my mind trying to decipher PSI, but thanks for clarifying.
To be clear, I'm more sympathetic to Aquinas view of free will or Ockham's/Scotus rather than contemporary compatibilist views of freedom. I don't advocate theories like you mention above, but I just don't think they rule out free volition altogether, only libertarian free will (volition).
Those who are compatibilists have to redefine free will and they're often lookking at the matter from a strict physicalist POV. On the other hand, Peter van Inwagen has argued vociferously that free will and determinism are utterly incompatible. He and David Lewis had an interesting exchange. From what I recall about these discussion, not everyone defines "could have done otherwise" in the same way. See the following:
1. Derek Pereboom (editor), Free Will (second edition). ISBN: 978-1603841290. Publication date: 2009.
2. John Martin Fischer (author), Four Views on Free Will. ISBN: 978-1405134866. Publication date: 2007.
3. Gary Watson (editor), Free Will. ISBN: 978-0199254941. Publication date: 2003.
4. Peter King (editor/translator), Augustine: On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings. ISBN: 978-0521001298. Publication date: 2010.
https://philpapers.org/rec/VANAAF-3
Roman, breathing is an autonomous function, try to just stop breathing and see how far free action gets you. There is no free agent, that is a fantasy, so you cannot use logic as if this is in any way factual. There will come a time when the bacterial makeup of the gut will be used to predict responses when we can collect enough data in its sheer complexity.
I am not going to attempting analogy for a flawed example.
In physics the further back you go the more causes you get, not less. Thermodynamics means that each effect has multiple causes. So how exactly does one boil it down to a first(singular) cause? This is why I don't accept the second "Law" of Thermodynamics.
"entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time." - BUT there is NO "isolated system" & Mandelbrot open set is about as close as we dare get to understanding the interactions.
We have to be careful with what we want to know or think we know -
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/03/16/ask-ethan-could-cosmic-redshift-be-caused-by-galactic-motion-rather-than-expanding-space/
First cause is a dogma.
The ALL is already unified but how we are ever going to have a good theory about an open system, we don't have the capability. If we had AI the size of this planet but as capable as a human brain by area we still wont do it.
Define "moral" as a hard category? surprise me.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0732118X23000405
Duncan, I'm going to let Roman address you, but you can't eviscerate or vitiate free will/free agency that easily. No one in the history of this world has been able to do it: not even the greatest scientists or philosophers. To deny free will is to abnegate moral responsibility. But you can't disprove free will anyway.
Secondly, you say that positing first cause is dogma. No, it's actually a carefully reasoned position and comforts with our experience much more that an infinite regress of causes does. Without a first cause, one can't have intermediary causes. Plus, Aquinas' challenge goes unanswered. Show me anything, X, that is clearly it's own efficient cause.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/517941/how-do-we-know-that-the-idea-of-entropy-is-true
Hold your horses. Demonstrate an isolated system?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system
A theoretical construct.
Duncan, the breathing example makes my point, I CAN stop breathing, except my will here hits a limit, i.e. I can intentionally hold my breath, and then factors beyond my control override my intention, the whole process only makes sense given free will and intentionality, otherwise how could one distinguish between the attempt (holding breath) and the failure (being forced to breath)?
There will not come a time when agential action will be exhuastively predicted, btw, that some activities of the human organism can be predicted is not suprising nor an argument against free will, we always knew that, it doesn't take modern biology to know that nails grow without a movement of the will, or that I don't choose when my heart beats.
In physics, you absolutely don't. If what you mean is that isolating a single phenomenon will give you multiple causes then sure, but that doesn't mean that you get more causes going back simpliciter, only in relation to an artificially isolated phenomenon, but in the world as a whole single causes can have (and do have) multiple causal relations, so it just doesn't follow that because one phenomenon has multiple causes that writ large causes multiply as you go backwards.
Infact, the entire POINT of physics is to take these isolated cases, find their causes, so that you make generalizations and thus explain multiple effects through simpler and more general causes where the explanatory (and causal) chain becomes simpler and more general as one goes back.
This is the whole point of explanation, i.e. to explain complex and disperse phenomena by more general simple causes, if you're not doing that I don't know what you're doing.
Therefore first cause is NOT a dogma since that's what reason, explanation, all aim towards. If first cause is a dogma then so is reason.
You can't say "the ALL is already unified" and then say "first cause is a dogma" because wither we have a reason to believe the ALL is unified, and an explanation for it's unification, or we don't.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_system#:~:text=Truly%20isolated%20physical%20systems%20do,(possibly%20very%20long)%20times.
Interesting how it gives multiple references to isolated system not existing, or that we have no evidence of it including the "Universe". As for our ability to achieve near perfect isolations, it gives no references whatsoever.
Early days on this, but - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p3fSwd1cF08
Papers like this only scratch the surface of the question - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.07326
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/141321/what-is-the-conceptual-difference-between-gibbs-and-boltzmann-entropies
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11985
We can go off on a bunch of tangents, but even simple examples demonstrate antinomies that can't be removed with the wave of as hand. As Roman suggests, there is a difference between a wink and a blink.
Demonstrate an "isolated system" ?
More dogma.
"An isolated system is one that cannot exchange either matter or energy with its surroundings. A perfect isolated system is hard to come by, but an insulated drink cooler with a lid is conceptually similar to a true isolated system. The items inside can exchange energy with each other, which is why the drinks get cold and the ice melts a little, but they exchange very little energy (heat) with the outside environment.'"
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/cellular-energetics/cellular-energy/a/the-laws-of-thermodynamics
Its another deeply flawed analogy. Thing is, I already know how to heat the liquid in a flask without even directly heating the flask itself.
This is all slight of hand.
https://theory.physics.manchester.ac.uk/~judith/stat_therm/node65.html
If you cannot go beyond the theoretical "isolated system" then you have a really big problem proving Entropy as it is usually understood.
You like videos like this? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbGxtfboRhQ
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/246613/uncovering-bacteria-swap-genes-could-help/
As rationalism has demonstrated, some things start as ideas/hypotheses or axioms before it becomes evident that such things exist in reality. Something can start out mathematical before it's confirmed by experimentation. E.g., relativity theory.
Show me a human baby who's been produced without an efficient cause, then we'll talk or a house that came into existence without a builder.
I watch all kinds of videos, but still prefer reading to viewing. By your own admission, it still takes an efficient cause to heat liquid. Something puts the process in motion.
Roger Penrose writes:
Usually when we think of a ‘law of physics’ we think of some assertion of equality between two different things. Newton’s second law of motion, for example, equates the rate of change of momentum of a particle (momentum being mass times velocity) with the total force acting upon it. As another example, the law of conservation of energy asserts that the total energy of an isolated system at one time is equal to its total energy at any other time. Likewise, the law of conservation of electric charge, of momentum, and of angular momentum, each asserts a corresponding equality for the total electric charge, for the total momentum, and for total angular momentum. Einstein’s famous law E = mc2 asserts that the energy of a system is always equal to its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light. As yet another example, Newton’s third law asserts that the force exerted by a body A on a body B, at any one time, is always equal and opposite to the force acting on A due to B. And so it is for many of the other laws of physics. These are all equalities—and this applies also to what is called the First Law of thermodynamics, which is really just the law of conservation of energy again, but now in a thermodynamic context. We say ‘thermodynamic’ because the energy of the thermal motions is now being taken into account, i.e. of the random motions of individual constituent particles. This energy is the heat energy of a system, and we define the system’s temperature to be this energy per degree of freedom (as we shall be considering again later). multiplied by the square of the speed of light. As yet another example, Newton’s third law asserts that the force exerted by a body A on a body B, at any one time, is always equal and opposite to the force acting on A due to B. And so it is for many of the other laws of physics. These are all equalities—and this applies also to what is called the First Law of thermodynamics, which is really just the law of conservation of energy again, but now in a thermodynamic context. We say ‘thermodynamic’ because the energy of the thermal motions is now being taken into account, i.e. of the random motions of individual constituent particles. This energy is the heat energy of a system, and we define the system’s temperature to be this energy per degree of freedom (as we shall be considering again later). For example, when the friction of air resistance slows down a projectile, this does not violate the full conservation law of energy (i.e. the First Law of thermodynamics)—despite the loss of kinetic energy, due to the projectile’s slowing—because the air molecules, and those in the projectile, become slightly more energetic in their random motions, from heating due to the friction. However, the Second Law of thermodynamics is not an equality, but an inequality, asserting merely that a certain quantity referred to as the entropy of an isolated system—which is a measure of the system’s disorder, or ‘randomness’—is greater (or at least not smaller) at later times than it was at earlier times.
Duncan, unfortunately I think you're barking up the wrong tree.
of COURSE there are no isolated systems within the universe (it there were they would be separate universes), and of course the physical sciences haven't discovered an isolated system because to do so they would require a kind of theory of everything in which they've full accounted for the universe.
The first cause arguments do not, and never have, depended on empirical confirmation that the universe is a closed system, is if there could actually be such empirical evidence. They work back from the simply reality of cause and effect, nor that effects only have one cause, nor that the universe isn't totally causally intertwined (in fact, many arguments assume this), or, they work back from the PSR.
If, what your claiming, is that there is, in fact NO closed system AT ALL, i.e. there can be in principle no sufficient cause for anything since the causal conditions are, in fact, infinite, then what you end up in absurdity (as the scholastics already knew), i.e. not only can we never account for effect at all, there can be no effect at all, since the causal conditions for that effect are literally infinite. Not only that, but if there is no closed system, they why assume there is a system at all? Systems presuppose that there is a set of principles governing a finite set of disperse parts, at that point why don't we just be Humeans? Why are scientists trying to unite quantum theory and general relativity, if not under the assumption that the universe is a unified system?
1) Roman's post reminded me that we need and work with axioms, which by definition are supposed rather than proved, but are still assumed to be true. E.g, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
2) It's possible for a mathematical construct to map onto or predict reality.
3) Aristotle famously suggested 4 causes for things or events: so I'm not saying that efficient causation exhausts how things might be caused, but my OP dealt with efficient causes.
Have you banned me?
No, I haven't, but my blog will only operate until year's end. Then I will stop blogging.
Roman, Why state a LAW that refers to "isolated systems". I would have supposed that a LAW requires proof beyond axiom and supposition?
Not at all, a universe could be infinite with infinite uniformity or could be very different even in the parts that radio telescopes have supposedly reached.
That would be supposed cause and effect, and how many of those have been overturned over time?
"Why are scientists trying to unite quantum theory and general relativity, " - its a great little game isn't it, and they get paid for playing, I am not holding my breath for any meaningful answers.
Edgar, I asked if you found that video to be good because I have multiple explanations for each phenomena and I know of some that have not been published yet. For each phenomena, if you are going to apply Occam's razor then the alternatives are more efficient in of themselves that require no grand collection of guesses that is generally know as the big bang.
"It's possible for a mathematical construct to map onto or predict reality." Absolutely not. It is possible to predict small localized phenomena that may appear to work in a general sense within the localized constraint.
https://philarchive.org/archive/CARTLO-40
Duncan, I wouldd not deny that phenomena have multiple causes just like producing a tree does. But one can distinguish the primary/ultimate cause from secondary causes and as I mentioned last time, Aristotle spoke of more than one cause being involved when things like brone statues are produced. I think most humans guess at things because most of this stuff (almost all) is above our pay grade, no matter how much training or intelligence a human has.
https://mindmatters.ai/2020/02/why-does-mathematics-interpret-reality/
Yes, well its just one of those things, when it comes to math. eg. How long is the coast of the UK if you measure it? It all depends on how much resolution you can muster. The higher the resolution the longer it seems to get.
I think you have seen this one before, but I just want to focus on universal constants. https://youtu.be/sF03FN37i5w?si=g4M6ihVGfgUX8Y8K&t=551
I think we can give fairly precise measurements for things like the UK coast or the earth's circumference and a person's height, etc. As for the video, did he ever mention that the speed of light is a constant in a vacuum? Also, why did Sheldrake pick Newton's theory of gravitation to critique rather than Einstein's general relativity theory?
https://www.samwoolfe.com/2013/07/the-problem-with-rupert-sheldrake.html
https://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/ftp/pages/pdfs_pubd/braude--Radical%20Provincialism.pdf
https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_relativity_light.html
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2013/03/06/tedx-talks-completely-discredited-rupert-sheldrake-speaks-argues-that-speed-of-light-is-dropping/
resolution - https://youtu.be/m62ntuQS7xc?si=fl_9_zmyYZGBDfZJ
"According to the CIA Factbook, the length of the UK coastline is around 12,429 km or 7,723 miles. According to the World Resources Institute, the length is around 19,717 km."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
https://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html#:~:text=This%20defines%20the%20speed%20of,based%20on%20very%20practical%20considerations.
If you cannot measure with ultimate resolution then you cannot claim a constant. Fluctuation may exist beyond the resolution of the measurement device. Its something I know quite a bit about as I design NDIR technologies & spectroscopy devices.
He is not the only one looking at this - https://www.livescience.com/29111-speed-of-light-not-constant.html
https://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/2013/03/26/speed-of-light-may-not-be-constant/#:~:text=The%20speed%20of%20light%20has,all%2C%20but%20instead%20can%20fluctuate.
1) The coastline paradox clearly does not mean that measuring material obects are impossible one cannott generalize from the UKK coastline to all other objects in the cosmos. I can precisely measure my home, rooms in my home and my own height, etc. Scientists even provide measurements for galaxies, clusters, and for superclusters and the earth's circumference. Your coastline example obviates none of those things.
2) I respect your background and expertise and I'm no mathematician or scientist, but when physicists talk about C as a constant, it''s qualified by the terminology, in a vacuum. I alsoo posted an article above which addresses this issue. The claims of Sheldrake are exaggerated, to say the least.
3) https://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html
Please read Penrose on the 2nd law of thermodynamics. He makes very astute remarks about entropy and shows it's highly probable and about as certain as one can get. Put an ice cube on a hot stove eye and let me know what happens.
"Finally, we come to the conclusion that the speed of light is not only observed to be constant; in the light of well tested theories of physics, it does not even make any sense to say that it varies."
https://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html
Regarding light and resolution, see https://www.teledynevisionsolutions.com/learn/learning-center/scientific-imaging/resolution-and-numerical-aperture/
Many scientist now claim that with respect to light and it characteristics, there is not such thing as an absolute vacuum in "space".
"Scientists even provide measurements for galaxies, clusters, and for superclusters and the earth's circumference." this is a silly response. You know they are correct, how?
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/fast-radio-bursts-gravitational-lensing
I am not arguing that something on the small scale of the earth cannot be measured to an average degree, but - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/science/earth-size-mass.html#:~:text=None%20of%20these%20processes%20actually,size%20isn't%20quite%20constant.
There never was an absolute vacuum in space although it's almost that way, but that's beside the point when it comes to the speed of light. Who ever claimed that space is a 100% vacuum?
Quite frankly, I think most stuff you've said here has been silly although I'm sure you think it's not. That whole mSheldrake stuff is silly, but I'm not going to focus on it.
Oh, so you think it's impossible to know how big the Milkky Way is or how far the earth is from the sun? Science says the earth is approximately 93,000,000 miles away from the sun or 8 light minutes away. Do you believe the scientists who make this claim? Why or why not? The way they know such things is how they also know the size of clusters, etc.
Have you ever taken your issues up with actual scientists? Maybe you could write an email to Lee Smolin or Brian Greene or Max Tesler. They could correct you better than I could.
I meant Max Tegmark
https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/local_supercluster_info.html
We got away from the actual point about efficient causes, but it's all right. I'm ready to move on. Just let me know when some baby appears without being efficiently caused.
Lensing is a phenomena that some astronomers want to use to see things beyond the range of a standard space radio telescope. It will allow them to do that but unless you can map all entities in 3D over vast areas of gravitational influence it leave you just guessing how far away the new objects actually are and triangulation becomes approximate.
I am not talking about dust in the vacuum of space, I am saying that there is no such thing as a true vacuum to light. If you plow through the papers you can see that for yourself.
Also see - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.3987
"Just let me know when some baby appears without being efficiently caused." what could it prove? Just as babies are not the universe.
The original point of this thread was about whether a thing can be the efficient cause of itself. "There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for then it would be prior to itself, which is impossible" (Aquinas).
I mentioned a baby, but you could take your pick and Aquinas would still be correct (I'm aware that a baby is not the universe). A baby is just an illustration of things that cannot be their own efficient cause. I could have said a tree, car, computer, a house or the cosmos. It's not possible for a thing to be the efficient cause of itself and nothing in our experience has caused itself in this way. A thing cannot be existentially prior to itself.
"A thing cannot be existentially prior to itself." Agreed, but that does not prove a beginning for Hydrogen.
Aquinas would not insist that hydrogen had to have a beginning nor would he insist that the cosmos had to have a begginning per se. However, hydrogen, a baby, the universe and so on, would need an efficient cause. Hydrogen could not be its own efficient cause and I would conversely say that you cannot prove that hydrogen always existed or why that would be the case.
Believing that hydrogen is existentially prior to itself sounds logically incoherent. That's like a baby actually existing before it's conceived.
https://www.tutorchase.com/answers/igcse/chemistry/can-elements-be-broken-down-into-simpler-substances - you are assuming a beginning. Go back and re-read - https://philarchive.org/archive/CARTLO-40
also
http://philosophy-of-cosmology.ox.ac.uk/penrose.html#:~:text=He%20has%20also%20argued%20that,10%20to%20the%20power%2010131.
Far to many assumptions going on here.
I straightforwardly said a beginning does not have to be assumed for Aquinas' view to work and he assumes no such thing and neither have I although I believe there was a beginning too the cosmos. But I plainly stated that a thing can have an efficient cause even if there's no beginning and I've read tons about causation/causality, so no need for me to reread that piece although I read some of it earlier. I think you're misunderstanding my statements/position, but I was ready to move on anyway. If you think the cosmos has always existed, more power to you.
I guess people who allow for an eternal cosmos with no efficient cause never work with any assumptions. Newsflash, we all work with prior assumptions, and my comments about Penrose had nothing to do with a beginning, but more about the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Can we move on now? Hope you see that I did not make a beginning one of my priors in this case.
Sorry if I sound a little exasperaated. However, I felt misunderstood and that views/positions were being imputed to me for no good reason. I also believe that we strayed too far from thee initial focus of the thread, but nuff said.
Lastly, I will say that I hope you're not suggesting an infinite regress by posting the simpler substances link. Infinite regresses come with their own logical difficulties and they lack explanatory value.
Duncan, did you read that paper about causality because he's actually closer to my position than yours :-)
He winds up on basically Aquinas' side regarding this issue.
Duncan, a law's proof is generally abductive, i.e. positing it explains regularities we see.
A universe that is infinite (I take it spacially) with uniformity still needs an account of its uniformity, i.e. a simple unifying cause, its still a closed system given its uniformity.
Overtime the scientific goal of constructing simple models that predict phenomena universally hasn't been overturned, specific models have, and better models have been put in place.
Maybe they won't find meaningful answers about the quantum/relativity disjunction, maybe they will, my point is the goal presupposes a unified system, and a unified system presupposes a single cause.
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