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 highlly 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 efficirent 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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47 comments:
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.
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