Is “first cause”. Obviously true?

A fundamental argument of creationists is that there must be a first cause... first mover. Arguing that everything has a cause, and that therefore it must be true that the universe has a cause, a first mover.

This seems so obviously true, that to dispute this argument seems to flout what seems like common sense. But does the world typically conform to our common sense?

We see things around us.... and can divide those things into ever smaller pieces... and so far, common sense holds. At some point we get to pieces as small as proteins, germs and viruses; and at this level, we sort of know it is true, even though such ideas are at the edge of our common sense.

then we get down to molecules. The further divide to atoms. And we can still sort of conceive of pieces so small as atoms. But then we learn that atoms are mostly empty space composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. I think few of us can say that this vision of reality corresponds to our common sense.

But still, the division continues. Protons and neutrons are composed of quarks. And quarks themselves are still not fundamental.

As we pull things apart into ever smaller components.... we get to something called quantum field theory. This theory holds that the entire universe is subsumed by various “fields”. And everything that we perceive as reality is simply Quantized vibrations of these fields.

As far fetched as all the above seems, the fact is that it is not just fanciful speculation; it is pretty solid science based upon experimental evidence.

So what is my point? I am saying that our scientific view of “reality” has moved very far beyond anything remotely resembling common sense. Given this indisputable fact, I think we have long ago left common sense behind as any sort of reliable guide to reality. No one can pretend that it is just common sense that all reality is composed of vibrating fields.

so, if our common sense has been discredited.... how can we continue to argue that there must be a first mover based upon our common sense? The indisputable scientific fact is that the world is quite strange and simply is not limited to our conceptions of common sense.

 

Your point is well taken, but the first mover(FM) is a bad argument anyway since something must have created the FM, and leads to an infinite series of creators.

 

Intersting post. I don't have anything to says that mostly I agree with your point.

 

Wish I was studied up enough to have an intelligent discussion on this topic. At the very least I can say I enjoyed the read.

 

G Gordon Kiddy’s concept of God is that everything is built upon something else so go back to the beginning and that is God.

Quite frankly we may not be capable of ever knowing that.

 

It is a pretty bad argument now that we know about inertia . . . and the fact that absolute rest doesn't appear to exist. And it is just another "argument from God" that consists of shifting the goalposts further and further back and finally claiming some kind of special exception while denouncing any other claim to special exception.

 

if you want a simple explanation, check this link



but I gotta say, even when the science is simplified... it moves into ideas that would seem far fetched in science fiction

the above link does an admirable job of reminding us that the scientific basis for these ideas extends much further into the past than seems possible (Michael Faraday more than 150 years ago)

 

Thanks for the link! Not able to watch it now, but I’ll give it a watch later.

 

As my philosophy prof said. ..that aint necessarily so. Your argument has been addressed but you didnt get the memo.

 

I appreciate this/your logic path.

In logical terms, there is no more proof of creation than there is proof of the lack of it. OIOW: theres no way to know for sure what happened. Yet.

Heres to hoping a few less folks can read your breakdown and stop telling others they 'know' how it all went down

 

I'll start with your latter point. What you are describing is the fact that we don't know anything necessarily. Everything we know we know contingently. In other words, we come to know, and our coming to know is contingent on something else. Even what we know is the effect in a cause and effect sequence. To us contingent beings, it's not so much that ideas are really ever proved as much as it is that all of the other ideas that we have considered have been disproved. Whatever remains is what we are left to believe, then that's tested, and so on, and so on.

As to your first point - A cause and effect sequence cannot begin with an effect, but it can begin with a cause.
An efficient cause would be necessary in its being. In other words, it would necessarily be what it is. It would be simple actuality; it would have no potentiality. A necessary being would have no potential to come to know, come to emote, come to will, come to be or not be.

Personally, I am left to believe in necessary being because I cannot honestly and logically deny that contingent being exists. If contingent being exists, necessary being must exist. If effect exists, cause must exist. Furthermore, no effect can transcend its cause.

 

the only argument to counter the infinite regression is special pleading, which is a logical fallacy

 

This is word salad gibberish, just like the first time you posted this.

 

Not really.

Bricklayer is simply saying that for every discernible (observed) EFFECT there must be a CAUSE...and for every discernible CAUSE there must be an EFFECT. It's a relativistic, not an absolute perspective...and must necessarily be so because reality is, essentially, a 'holographic fractal'. That is, you can observe a 'single cause' for any 'single effect' you arbitrarily observe...but you can't determine ALL (infinite) causes. Hence, the ability to discern cause/effect relationships does not mean there is a 'FIRST cause' or 'FIRST effect'...but that the absence of either one negates the other. The causes are a function of the effects...the effects are a function of the causes. However, the causes and the effects are INFINITE. This negates any 'first' cause or effect.

For example, I hear scientists talk about the 'butterfly effect', which is defined as..."(with reference to chaos theory) the phenomenon whereby a minute localized change in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere." But is the butterfly THE cause of a thunderstorm? No...it is ONE of INFINITE causes of the thunderstorm. A person's breath, the replication of a single cell in a leaf, even a single THOUGHT would be included among the infinite causes of the thunderstorm. And just as the butterfly's wings fluttering would have infinite causes, so too would it's effects be infinite.

I have in earlier posts referred to the vortex pattern formed in a glass of water that's stirred as an analogy to the nature of all Reality...namely that All is One, and in Oneness (like in the vortex), there's no discernible beginning or end...and hence, no discernible first cause or first effect. Even when the water is begun to be stirred there's no part of the water that begins moving before the other parts. The entire vortex moves in unison...and continuously feeds in on itself...so no start, no end. However, within the vortex one may observe infinite cause/effect relationships...but never a FIRST cause/effect. So how it ALL came to be (exist) will never be answered...not even by the Oneness it-self...for when one approaches the concept of 'existence' itself, one has already failed because one is making an observation on a single cause/effect relationship.

 

Our language has an interesting feature in that it can create abstract concepts. We have an understanding of what it means to "cause" something, even if we don't understand all the ways in which causes can happen, or in what way it did happen for a specific event. You are right in that there were probably things that happened towards the beginning of the universe that wouldn't make sense to us, but the concept of causation doesn't require us to understand it.

I think causation is well-enough defined concept. It is a human concept that we happen to be able to apply to things we don't understand, and as such, I would argue that we could apply it to the beginning of the world. If we try to formalise it, there will be some issues (for instance, if Alice slips on ice, was the cause the cold weather, the water on the road or Alice deciding not to take the bus? Or did a soldier cause the death of a person if that person would definitely have been killed by the next soldier?) but I believe they are fundamentally resolvable. As such, I would expect the concept of a first mover is valid, even if we mistrust our common sense.

Besides, like in the soldier example above, we can make different abstractions should we need to. Was it a specific soldier that killed the person, or was it the war? Did the war cause the soldier to cause the person's death? etc. As such, unless things are happening truly spontaneously, the line of causality should still be there. For instance, "time" is probably a concept that doesn't make sense towards the beginning of the universe. However, following the concept of causality might find us saying that something was caused by the sudden existence of time. While we don't understand the process, we're by no means unable to consider that idea. I think we are even able to consider causation without the concept of time, although it is a bit tricker.

I would say causes are an abstract concept, and nothing is stopping us from applying it to different things that we don't understand. Potentially, we could question the idea of "first" once time has stopped making sense, but I think we could still single out an overarching cause, even if there is no time for it to be present in. And if nothing else, if there is ambiguity, we could call the entire ambiguous system a thing, and call that the first mover (like we could answer "what came first, the chicken or the egg" by saying "this is just the process of life").

 

I would say that first cause is possible
But to say that there must be a first cause and that cause must be god
All based on “common sense” is dubious

All of your arguments and analogies of this type rely upon situations that are “normal” to us.
My argument points out that the further away from normal that we explore... the less it seems true that common sense provides intuitively good explanations. And, I think there are few situations that are further from normal than the beginning of the universe.

Yes!

Yes, but going from that nebulous idea of causation... to the highly specific identification of god as the necessary cause seems a step too far.

In all of my discussion about the potential defects of common sense versions of causation,
I do not assert that a common sense view is inherently wrong...
Only that is obviously grossly limited
Given the clear reality that our common sense view of reality is so extremely divergent from what we actually discover when we look at eithe very small, or very large scales


The simple fact is that our view of reality is shaped by the scale in which we experience life.. our human scale of life experience. And so, as we step further and further outside our human experience.... the common sense that emerged from our human experience could be less and less applicable. And I have presented evidence that this is true

I think that is a huge understatement..... our idea of causation Is inexorably bound to the framework of time.... any question about what happened “before” the Big Bang already presumes time.... which we agree did not have exist... at least as we understand it

Possibly.... but when we then talk about necessary causation in the context of no time.... that seems suspect to me. As I said....I grant that causation may exist. What I claim is that since reality is proven to far exceed our conceptions.... we cannot ague about the necessary nature of causation in contexts far beyond our comprehension or experience

sure... we could conceive of things as you say
But, on the other hand it seems as speculatively certain as string theory to me
And this gets back to my main point
We cannot use our common sense to tell us about what must be true about the origin of the universe
There “may be” a first cause... although that is far from certain
And certainly not certain based on an argument from common sense
The more likely common sense reality is that the universe emerged from ongoing processes that are outside our current comprehension
The universe has no obligation to operate in ways that we find comprehensible
nor to operate in ways that conform to our common sense
And for that reason we cannot use common sense to argue about what must be the origin of the universe

thanks for taking the time to share your inputs

 

this still leads to an infinite regression, or you're forced to use special pleading.

 

I've never believed that the first cause necessarily indicates an intelligent creator.

That's not to say an intelligent creator does not exist, but just that the first cause does not logically translate into proof of an intelligent creator.

 

Infinite regression requires that some-thing be created.

All is One...so there's no time/distance/motion/change...so there's no creation...no creator...hence, infinite regression is irrelevant. All that can exist (ie, can be experienced) already exists...and it is infinite (self-feeding) & eternal (no beginning/end, no time).

 

I agree, "common sense" seems to me a phrase people resort to when they've run out of actual good arguments.

Well, my examples so far simply highlight certain potential problems, which can be valid at any scale. I don't wish to imply that they are the only problems, or that problems can only exist in that range.

Well, that certainly depends. I am a theological non-cognitivist (or an ignosticist, I can rarely remember the difference). I find that the identification is rarely highly specific, is often inconsistent with others, etc. This seems true both among theists, atheists and even agnostics. We have to be very careful when we make the step you describe, and we have to be very careful when criticising others for taking that step.

Aquinas' arguments contain two to four arguments which effectively boil down to first movers. In those, his definition of God only requires to be the first mover. When he has argued that there is a first cause, he basically says that it is defined to be God. As such, he didn't supply or assume any other highly specific identification.

There are things to be careful about here, we shouldn't allow equivocation, using an argument for a first mover god as an argument for a personal god, but insofar that we believe the first mover argument (which, I appreciate, this thread calls into question) it seems like a valid argument for one kind of god.

I would agree, common sense is most often a shortcut to remember some things that are true. "Things fall down when you push them off a table" is common sense, on earth, it is a very sensible idea and it will stay true under many circumstances. However, if you understand why things fall down, you may understand that it doesn't hold true in space, etc.. Common sense is often right in some sense, but it is often simplistic and can often be successfully replaced with better logic.

I think causation still applies, although we have fewer examples. If I were to define addition, like "the sum of two integers is what you get when you count instances of both numbers" (there are better definitions out there, but I can't be bothered with their length), it follows that 2+2=4. One caused the other, but there was no time angle to it.

Well, then we could make a watchmaker argument. Let's say there is no such thing as causation before time. Then we could say that the state of things before time started is God. Instead of figuring out which bit causes which bit, we just include all of it in a big black box, slap a "God"-label on it and we're done.

I think this argument fundamentally boils down to the fact that causation is something that we humans have thought up to describe a real phenomenon. We can expect causation to be valid because it's a description, and our descriptions can be consistent even if the things it is supposed to describe makes no sense.

Causation can apply to abstract concepts. "War" can "cause" a country to topple, even if we don't know the movements of individual soldiers or political decisions. If a thing fails to make sense to us, we can construct an abstract concept which includes those things that don't make sense, and causation will apply to that abstract concept.

What do we mean by ongoing processes? It seems to me you were fully able to pin causation on this ongoing process, making the ongoing process either a first mover, or an infinite regression.

 

this is special pleading

 

Now you are trespassing on rahls turf!

 

huh?

 

The existence of a first cause is proven mathematically here:

http://alexanderpruss.com/papers/MeyerProof.html

I am confident that there is no one here who is mathematically sophisticated enough to understand the argument (save myself) as it involves mathematics like the Axiom of Choice and Zorn's Lemma.

I remember studying the proof some time ago and decided it was bogus, if that is any consolation to the atheists.

 

The author of the article you link to has serious reservations about calling this "proven," which should give additional "consolation to the atheists."

" . . . the argument itself is valid, though of course the question of the correctness of its premisses is non-trivial . . . To prove or disprove Premiss 2, however, is non-trivial. Obviously, until a justification of Premiss 2 is given, the "proof" remains inconclusive."