Cosmological Flashcards
Aquinas’ 1st way from motion – The unmoved mover
Following Aristotle, by motion Aquinas means any kind of change. Something can only change if it has the potential to change. So, we can understand change as the actualisation of a potential to change in a certain way.
-everything must be set in motion
-the mover must be actual – a thing cannot move itself
‘whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another’
Everything is in a state of actuality (what it is ) and potentiality (what it will be)
Convincing – newtons law sees a need for a first cause, as object remains stationary until force acts on it
P1. We observe motion.
P2. Motion is the actualization of a thing’s potential to be in motion.
P3. A thing can only come to be in motion by being moved.
P4. A mover must be something that is actual.
P5. A thing cannot move itself.
C1. So, all things in motion must have been moved by something else.
P6. If there were no first mover, there would be no motion now.
C2. Therefore, there must be a first mover which must itself be unmoved (pure actuality). That thing we call God.
Aquinas’ 2nd way from temporal causation - The uncaused causer
All objetcs have an efficient cause, this brings them into existence
-nothing cause itself – convincing objects cannot be their own agents; a river cannot choose to flow to sea
- nothing can be own sustaining cause always 1st cause, intermediate cause, and ultimate effect
- must be first cause or else no ultimate effect
P1. We observe efficient causation.
P2. Nothing can cause itself.
P3. There is a logical order to sustaining causes: the first cause, then intermediate causes, then an ultimate effect.
P4. If A is the efficient cause of B, then if A doesn’t exist neither does B.
C1. There must be a first sustaining cause, otherwise P1 would be false as there would be no further sustaining causes or effects.
C2. As there is a first cause, there cannot be an infinite regress of causes.
C3. The first cause must itself be uncaused. That thing we call God.
Aquinas employs Aristotelian efficient causation, which seeks the explanation for how a thing came into being. There are two types of efficient causation: sustaining and temporal
Casual principle
Casual principle - a philosophical claim that the cause of an object must have at least as much reality as the object itself. (that the universe must have a cause)
A strength of cosmological arguments is their support from the causal principle, which is the idea that every event must have a cause. It seems impossible for an event to happen without a cause, otherwise something could come from nothing, which is absurd. Ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing) is an idea going back to ancient Greek Philosophers like Parmenides. –
-“based on the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come out of nothing.” – W. L. Craig
Descartes basis - the cause of an object must contain at least as much reality as the object itself, whether formally or eminently.
A1) Hume; casual principle fails
Humes fork
Symbiotic language – truth that we derive a posteriori
Analytic language – turth derived a priori
Fact of the universe cannot be discerend by a priori knowlege
Defense – Leibniz principle for sufficient reason
Validates need for a 1st cause
we can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us” – Leibniz
This is the first premise. It does both the job of a causal principle and an argument about the infinite regress. This strengthens the argument by making it dependent on only one claim.
P1. For every true fact or assertion, there is a “sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise.” (PSR)
P2. It is a contingent fact that a series of contingent beings exists
C1. So, the contingent series that exists must have a sufficient explanation.
C2. So, it must be found in a necessary being, which is God.
3)cannot infer a cause from an effect;
analogy of the scales, on side is hidden, beyond empirical perception to know what weighs it down
4)Commits the fallacy of the composition
Assumes what is true for a things parts is true for its whole - simply as we see cause and effect in the world we cannot assume this applies to the universe as an whole
Russel – simply as humans have a mother, it doesnt mean the human race as an whole has a mother
A series is just a mental construction. We observe individual causes or beings and group them together in our mind. A series doesn’t need its own explanation because it isn’t anything over and above a mentally grouped set of sufficiently explained things.
Hume illustrates with 20 particles, a finite collection of contingent beings. Each part has an explanation, but the collection is not itself a thing which needs an explanation.
5)Causation is beyond our psychological understanding
is a psychological construct rooted in our understating of the world
Kant – we give things a purpose/cause, see effects thus psycohoically enforce
Leibniz law – is true when applied to empirical experience, but sense doesnt know truth of universe as a whole
Aquinas - 3rd way contingency
Aquinas’ 3rd way (contingency)
P1. We observe that there are contingent beings (things that can possibly not exist).
P2. If it is possible for something to not exist, then there is some time in which it doesn’t exist.
C1. If everything were contingent, then at one time nothing existed.
P2. If nothing once existed, nothing could begin to exist, so nothing would exist now.
C2. So, there must be something that is not contingent, “having of itself its own necessity … That thing we call God.”
-contingent in two ways – to be bought into existence and to sustain life
Empirically verifiable – look to eco systems – if everything was contingent then before this series would be nothing
Hume
1)Infinite regression is possible
Aquinas assumes one singular cause – weak as we can logically conceive something existing without a cause
Hume illustrates with 20 particles, a finite collection of contingent beings. Each part has an explanation, but the collection is not itself a thing which needs an explanation. Hume argues the same is true of an infinite series of contingent beings.
Mackie – if we can explain individual links in a chain (cause/effect) it is incoherent to look to cause of the chain as an whole – develops fallacy of composition making illoigcal jump from specific to the general
2)Universe can be its own necessary being
Krauss - theological physician –universe has 0 total energy, not change required for it to be created, can come from nothing
Russel – atoms appear in the world with no clear cause
Sartre – dismiss need for a first cause egg) big bang
Defense – ontological basis, must be a first cause in the world as gods definition is perfection, he cannot not exist
Defense – Craig, infinite regress is not possible
Craig – infinity is incoherent in reality
Craig rejects the possibility of an ‘actual infinite’, the idea that infinity could exist in reality. The issue is that sets with infinite members can paradoxically be equal in size to their subsets.
He illustrates with an infinite library that has an infinite number of books, half of which are green. The green books are half of the total, so they are less than the total. But in mathematics, half infinity is still infinity. So, the green books are both less than and the same size as the total number of books. That is absurd, so infinity cannot exist in reality.
Hume - Brute fact argument
he issue is, we know very little about what time actually is scientifically. So, Aquinas, Leibniz and Craig’s philosophical reasoning about time and infinity is limited.
One is that the universe eternally cycles between expansion and collapse, where a new timeline begins each cycle. In that case, an infinite amount of time never passes and in fact a timeline containing an actual infinite never existed. Yet, an infinite series of cycles existed, just not on any one timeline.
Alan Guth’s inflation theory, which proposes that there is eternally existing quantum energy that can sometimes create a universe like ours.
Humes sees how definition of god doesn’t deduvticley entail existence
Russel ‘i simply say it exists that’s all’
Hume -Necessary existence is absurd/meaningless
whatever we imagine existing we can imagine not existing
On Hume’s empiricism, we gain our ideas from experience. It is then only through imagination that we can apply modal concepts like possibility and necessity to those ideas.
Anything we can project onto our conception of reality, we can also take away or simply not project. Therefore, we cannot coherently understand any being to be logically necessary.
“All existential propositions are synthetic” – Hume
