Friday, November 27, 2009

Review of TLS -- the unmoving First Cause argument

Welcome to the fifth installment of my review of Dr. Edward Feser's The Last Superstition. You can find parts one, two, three, and four at those links. I have reached Chapter 3 in TLS, which starts start discussing some of Dr. Feser's argument for the existence and nature of God, along with a few other things. In this post I'll focus in the existence arguments, of which three are offered, namely that of the Unmoved Mover (better understood, perhaps as the Unchanged Changer), the First Cause, and the Supreme Intelligence.

First, a few brief paragraphs about Dr. Feser's comments on the reliability of these proofs. He sees them as being a mixture of formal and empirical reasoning, because they use premises that are empirical as well as conceptual. and that this make the proofs more certain to be true than either method can produce on its own. Personally, I see the methodology as being purely formal. Taking a few empirical notions as being starting points (Edit: does) does not alter what is basically a formal exercise in TLS. To be sure, there are ways of trying to mix empirical and formal (as well as revelatory) reasoning, much like mixing oil, vinegar, and parsley to make a salad dressing. I just don't see that being done in his arguments.

Second, Dr. Feser does sneak in a fourth attempt at proof prior to the listed three. The claim is basically that since universals exist, they have some sort of reality even when there is no matter to take their form and no mind to appreciate their essence, but they are not real in the Platonic sense. So there must be a mind that instantiates them even when there is no mind instantiating them. He does not even present this as a reducito ad absurdum argument, just as ~A => A.

Finally, I think I have come to understand some of the motives behind the constant stream of invective being launched at Dawkins, Hume, and various others. Dr. Feser's stated goal may be to convince atheists of some of these claims, but the more likely result of these continual insults is to get people who like what Dennett, et. al., have to say so upset that they don't read the logic itself objectively or clearly, and so miss the important points that are understated and focus on the repeated, emphasized, not-exactly-correct shortcuts (there's also a little playing to the crowd in that, too, since the best market for his books is almost certainly not atheists). Then, when the upset reader treats those shortcuts as the real argument, they can be dismissed as missing the point of the argument. I have seen one example of this directly, and I'll expand on it in the discussion of the Unmoved Mover below the fold.

The argument for the Unmoved Mover is based upon several ideas: change is movement from a potential state to an actual state, no object can activate it's own potential, and every activation has an immediate efficient cause. He takes the time to distinguish between accidentally ordered causes and essentially ordered causes. One example he gives equates to saying that one cause of your father having you is your grandfather having your father. Even your grandfather died when your father was young, that did not prevent your father from having you. This is an accidentlly ordered causal series, in that the separation of time means that the earlier cause doesn't need to be present to have the causal chain continue, that the causal chain is transmitted independently of the continued existence of your grandfather. Another example would be that you don't have be smoking while you actually develop lung cancer in order to have the smoking be a cause of the cancer. This is contrasted with an essentially ordered causal series, which is basically that the cause's presence is required while the potential is activated. The offered example is that of a hand shaping a clay pot. Whatever the past reasons that motivate the potter, without the hand directly present, the clay is not shaped. The clay does not continue shaping itself when the hand is withdrawn, all the change is completely dependent on the hand.

Taking a break from the argument to comment on style, Dr. Feser presents this dependence-oriented description of an essentially ordered causal series precisely once. He then says the actions appear to simultaneous in the essential series due to the dependence. In fact, over the next 5 pages, he uses various derivatives of simultaneous 9 times, twice in italics, to describe essentially ordered causes. Naturally, when the occasional reader sees this repetition, they take away the notion that simultaneity is essential to the argument, and see that fact that elements of an essentially ordered series are not truly simultaneous as a disproof of the line of reasoning. This allows Dr. Feser to dismiss the reader based on a lack of understanding, and I have seen him do this in the comments on his blog. Of course, I don't really know if this is a deliberate deception on Dr. Feser's part, if he is too incompetent as a writer to understand the effects of repetition, or if he just let some other hack write or edit his book that way (no doubt other possible explanations exist). I can only comment on the effect, not being able to fathom the purpose (or final cause, if you like).

Going back to the argument, Dr. Feser presents that these essentially ordered series of causes have terminating points, so they have starting points as well. Further, since each event in the series does not have the potential to activate itself, it cannot be considered the initiating force of the series, but only a participant therein. He likens the series to a train have a caboose and several railroad cars: at some point, there must be an engine that sets the essentially ordered series in motion. Since nothing activates its own potential, this origin does not change, it only activates changes. This origin is God, continuously activating all the events in the world, such as a rock rolling down a hill, a spider spinning a web, one man feeding the hungry, and another (or the same) man molesting a child.

Dr. Feser recommends that the best way to show his arguments are invalid is to demonstrate errors in the reasoning and the starting premises, so naturally I will take him up on this offer and select both a premise and a bit of reasoning. From the starting premises I will pick one that stands out (besides the notion no act can be its own cause which I discussed in an earlier post): in the material world, essentially ordered series do not terminate. His example is that of a hand pushing a stick, which stick pushes a rock, and he treats the rock as the final object in the sequence. However, the rock pushes the ground and the air, each of which engage in their own set of reactions with other air and ground molecules, in a never-ending series. So, while the ideas that a last member implies a first member is also highly debatable, this debate is not relevant because there is no last member. From his reasoning, let's choose the notion that each member of the series is a passive link to the next. In fact, the ability of one event to activate the potential in the next event is a motive force. In the train analogy, it's much more like each railroad car has an oxygen tank inn the front, a hydrogen tank in the rear, and in between each car is a little motor that burns the fuels to power the following car. The engine is not only quite possibly infinitely far away, it is not needed at all.

Dr. Feser decreases the number of word he devotes to each of the causes as he progresses, and I shall do likewise. The First Cause argument is based on the notion that forms are real, and they include the essence, a definitive form, of things. Since the forms can exist without being instantiated in any particular material object, merely having an essence does not guarantee existence, such as the essence of unicorns exists, but this does not mean unicorns exist. Since they are initially separate, something must combine an essence to an existence, and this is the cause of that object. Since this combination of existence and essence must be performed for every object in the universe, it must be performed for the universe as a whole.

There is brief break in the argument, where Dr. Feser discusses the fallacy of composition. One example of this fallacy: I can step over each cinder block from a group of 20, so if you stack all 20 vertically, I can step over the whole stack, as well. Dr. Feser says that since the fallacy of composition is sometimes true (the individual cinder blocks are gray, so the stack will be gray), he can use it here to say if every object in the universe has a cause (an event that joined essence to existence), so does the universe as a whole. No, I'm not kidding, he really claims that since a fallacy sometimes works, he can use it in this argument. He offers no other justification for applying it.

Anyway, these joining of existence to essences wind up being the essentially ordered causal series, and in a similar argument against infinity, the series must have a first element, the being whose essence includes existence without a cause, that set every existence in motion directly or indirectly, a First Cause, aka God. Further, since God initiates all these objects, he is constantly maintaining them. This is offered with no justification at all, he just slides from creating to maintaining as if they are the same thing.

This is basically the Unmoved Mover argument, expect the supposed terminus is the change of beginning an existence, as opposed to a different type of change. It offers no corrections or improvements to the defects of the previous argument. It is not any more rational as a position, and actually less so, since it depends on the fallacy of composition, where as the Unmoved Mover did not.

Finally, we get to the argument from the Supreme Intelligence. Since final causes are presumed to exist, the future oak exists as the eventual form of the acorn. Since the oak itself doesn't exist yet, its form must be in the thought of some intelligence that allows the form to direct the acorn in becoming an oak. This Supreme Intelligence Is ... (wait for it) ... God! Yes, the suspense was killing me, too.

This argument certainly clarifies why Dr. Feser likes formal causes so much, even though it makes no sense to claim that the form of the oak is not already in the acorn, within the DNA that will direct its development. Not too mention, in examples like this, how come we never hear the form of the oak is in the soil, or the rainwater? Certainly the oak is much more soil and rainwater than it is the original acorn. Maybe that's too complicated for our discussion, though. Needless to say, as I have outlined above, I found the argument for God as outlined in TLS to be completely lacking in accurate empirical starting points and also to have a couple of steps of poor reasoning. I was not convinced, at all. Despite that, for the purpose of part 6, I'm going to grant Dr. Feser has proven his case for existence, and then respond to the attributes he attributes to God based on these arguments.

9 comments:

Thomas said...

On the "essentially ordered" series of causes:

It's really important not to think of motion primarily as an object moving in abstract space. Motion encompasses movement from place to place, but it also includes such things as change in color, etc. In the strictest sense, motion is just the way in which when one possibility is brought into actuality, another possibility moves from actuality to potentiality. When one's skin turns dark in the sun, the potential to be darker is actualized, while the actual being-white slides into a potency to be white.

"Essentially ordered" causal series are distinguished from incidental causal series by being different sorts of causes. Essentially ordered causal series are "per se" causes, while accidentally ordered series are more like what is often (incorrectly) mean as efficient causes (e.g., atoms bumping into one another). Every event can be looked at both in terms of per se causes or efficient causes; the difference being that per se causes are necessarily finite, while "effecient" can regress infinitely (Aristotle believes they do).

Per se causes are necessary for any kind of knowledge, since knowledge must grasp an explanation (which is what Aristotle means by cause) which explains an event. The series runs from event to explanation, beginning and ending with the two points. This just follows upon the way we think about things. If I ask "Why does my fender have a dent in it" and my neighbor answers "because a towing truck ran into it last night", I now understand the question why. That the tower's grandfather once met the governor of Kentucky may have something to do with the series of "efficient" causes that lead eventually to my truck being struck is a bit beside the point of my question, even if that's the reason the tower's grandfather met his grandmother.

But it's not just any kind of question that leads to the cosmological argument. It's the question "why does something exist"? In terms of incidental causes, a thing may exist as the result of causal series that stretches back infinitely in time. Aristotle's cosmological argument actually presupposes such an infinite regress. The problem with it is that it's not really an explanation: each efficient cause is explained by the efficient cause before, back to infinity. The causal sequence is at every stage of the investigation incomplete, awaiting another incomplete explanation, then another.

But that's not the only way to approach the question. When we ask "why does this thing exist" we probably (especially if we are philosophers) are looking for a per se explanation. That is, what sort of existence does this thing have, and what explains this sort of existence.

A quick rundown of the way the inquiry proceeds (I might write a little more in detail later) is that natural things have a composite existence (i.e., they necessarily have both potency and actuality), and composite existence depends for its existence on actuality as such, since even potentiality depends on actuality for its being. However, we don't find actuality as such in natural beings, for it is always adulterated with potency. Through this dialectical process, we see that actuality is ontologically prior to natural things, so that, without actuality as such, there can be no natural things, no cosmos, no infinite chain of efficient causes.

One Brow said...

Thomas,

Thank you for filling in many of the gaps in my explanations. My own writing was no doubt so poor that, even while I saw much of what I intended to convey in what you wrote, the need for it to be better stated was likely evident to you.

One item in your explanation that is very different from Dr. Feser's book is the notion of essentially ordered causes because causes of purpose (as you seem to describe it) as opposed to causes of immediate motive force (which is a better term for Dr. Feser's description).

Also, in the final paragraph you describe composite existence as being actuality as such, as opposed to any prior composite existence. I don't see the metaphysical nor physical need for this, since we see merging of actuality and potentiality every day, but so far I have not knowingly witnessed actuality as such act. Did you notice your change from "a composite existence" to just "composite existence" in the first sentence? I find myself comforatble with saying any composite being depends upon other composite beings, and feel no need to generalize them to composite existence as a whole, which to me is more a description of beings than a formal cause of beings.

J said...

Aquinas's Second way concerns efficient causes; really the Second Way might be read as the primary cosmological argument (with first and third ways as directly related; ie, motion as itself as caused, and the world/reality as contingent, really, in the first three 'ways"--which is to say dependent on G*d , at least according to thomistic dogma).

The cosmo-arg.s are empirical and not analytical, however, and thus not strictly necessary; I'm not saying they are meaningless, but more akin to analogies. Were you to walk into a pool hall and saw balls rolling on a table, but no shooter, you would infer someone broke the table. Not real deep, but the First Cause does not seem so different. But it could be otherwise--say some one just tossed balls on the table for fun, etc.

And let's not forget that the scholastics also wanted to uphold scripture, which says God created the universe. Time has a beginning, according to religious tradition. Aquinas sort of adapts Aristotle to that (my understanding of Ari. is that he suggests the Primum Mobile may have existed eternally, but PM sort of decides to create the physical world, ie break the table, at some point, maybe because He was bored...). Infinity was just too overwhelming--and really, that is somewhat understandable.

The cosmological argument does not lack a certain plausibility, even if read without the judeo-christian gloss; most people do agree, implicitly or not to "every event has a cause". But the believers' monotheistic views have little to do with the science of the big bang. It's more like a comforting myth.

And one cannot PROVE (as WL Craig insists), even when quoting big bang specialists ad nauseum, that reality had a definite beginning; Kant says something like that in the First Antinomy. We weren't there, at the very least.

Anonymous said...

You have sort of missed a step in omitting the Heraclitus/Paramenides interaction. The universe is observably dynamic and not just in the "oscillating" manner your self powered train car metaphor suggests. There are "novel" changes in the form of novel forms coming into minds, or new forms being instantiated (iPADs, tables, cars etc).

One Brow said...

Anonymous,

I am still trying to figure out what forms are supposed to be. However, with what I know of them being the essences of things, I don't see how the "oscillating manner" would be incapable of producing them. The true shape for a set of essentially ordered causes would be a lattice, not a chain or loop. All it would take is a few out-of-phase oscillations from diferent linkages to produce new forms in such a lattice. The lattice structure is highly dymanic and not as easily intuited as a chain, which is one reason it is not favored as a description. However, when you have multiple essentially order causes striking in multipole directions, sometimes at the same time on the same substance, you can certainly generate novel forms.

R.C. said...

Just read this post, all these years later, and I'm surprised nobody mentioned the following:

"...in the material world, essentially ordered series do not terminate. His example is that of a hand pushing a stick, which stick pushes a rock, and he treats the rock as the final object in the sequence. However, the rock pushes the ground and the air, each of which engage in their own set of reactions with other air and ground molecules, in a never-ending series. So, while the ideas that a last member implies a first member is also highly debatable, this debate is not relevant because there is no last member."

One Brow, you seem to be saying that Dr. Feser argued as follows:

"P1. In essentially-ordered series (e.g. hand-stick-rock), there is a final member (the rock); P2. In any series with a last member, there must be a first member; THEREFORE, in any essentially-ordered series, there must be a first member."

But I'm looking at the relevant pages in The Last Superstition, and he never even mentions the idea of a series having a last member.

So far as I can tell, the series could go on forever once started, and that wouldn't faze him in the slightest, because he's not asserting that there is a final member. So far as I can tell, he is only asserting that, for causality to ever reach whichever member we happen to be thinking about now, it has to have started somewhere. We can pick the second, or the seventh, or the seven-hundredth member in a however-long chain of efficient causality. But however many additional members there may be after the member we're thinking of, there can't have been an infinite number of passive members prior to the one we're thinking of. If you don't eventually reach one that starts the changes without having been itself manipulated to change, then everything prior would be passive and nothing would ever have happened.

Also, your image of train-cars capable of independent motion does not, so far as I can tell, respond to Feser's argument. To make the image work, you would have to ask yourself, "Given that the train-cars weren't moving at such-and-such a time, why did they start moving at 3pm?" The change from not-moving to moving, at a certain point in time, requires some explanation as to why it happened then, and not earlier or later. This, in Feser's view, can't be done without Thing One (which exists) acting upon Thing Two (which also exists, and which has a potential to change) to cause it to Do The Change, to actualize its already-extant potential.

But I grant that by introducing that kind of change, we're getting into the realm of sequentially ordered series, which is a bit off-topic from what Feser's describing. Also, I get the idea that in an essentially-ordered series, a "law of physics" or the existence of "twoness" might count as a "Thing" in the sense of it being something that exists, but needn't have existed (isn't necessary) and which therefore needs explanation and can be caused. So I need to read further before I can be sure of my own adjustment to your (already adjusted) train analogy.

R.C. said...

Re: Fallacy of Composition:

One Brow, you say, "Dr. Feser says that since the fallacy of composition is sometimes true (the individual cinder blocks are gray, so the stack will be gray), he can use it here to say if every object in the universe has a cause (an event that joined essence to existence), so does the universe as a whole. No, I'm not kidding, he really claims that since a fallacy sometimes works, he can use it in this argument. He offers no other justification for applying it."

That's not quite right.

I think he is saying, "We're already showing (elsewhere in the book) that each thing in the universe needs to have a cause, which is always either some Other Caused Thing or else the First Cause; and also, that the chain of causation backward from any Individual Caused Thing can't go back infinitely or circularly amongst Other Caused Things but must ultimately, after however many steps, terminated in the Uncaused First Cause.

"Now, because all this other arguing is arduous, some folks will want to dismiss it out of hand by shouting, 'Fallacy of Composition! Just because all things individually need causes, doesn't mean all things collectively need a cause!' They say this, to save themselves the trouble of interacting with the rest of the argument: It's a shortcut.

"Now, if the Fallacy of Composition was a true observation for all instances of composition (if it were always true that when EACH member of a set had a property, the SET as a whole CANNOT HAVE the same property), this shortcut would be valid.

"But, that's not true. The Fallacy of Composition does not say that EVERY TIME that each member of a set had a property, the set as a whole cannot have that same property. It merely says that it MAY not have that same property...or, then again, it MAY have it....but you can't automatically assume that it has it.

"Therefore it is not valid for people to shout 'Fallacy of Composition!' and think that they have therefore saved themselves the trouble of interacting with the rest of the argument. The rest of the argument SHOWS that this IS one of the occasions when the whole set shares a property that each member of the set has."

That, I believe, is what Feser intends to convey.

And, having just tried to convey it in such a way as to avoid the misunderstanding, I can well see why he risked misunderstanding by saying it in rather fewer words. (It was, after all, something of an aside.)

R.C. said...

One final comment on this post before I move to your next post on TLS:

You say, "Finally, I think I have come to understand some of the motives behind the constant stream of invective being launched at Dawkins, Hume, and various others. Dr. Feser's stated goal may be to convince atheists of some of these claims, but the more likely result of these continual insults is to get people who like what Dennett, et. al., have to say so upset that they don't read the logic itself objectively or clearly, and so miss the important points that are understated and focus on the repeated, emphasized, not-exactly-correct shortcuts (there's also a little playing to the crowd in that, too, since the best market for his books is almost certainly not atheists). Then, when the upset reader treats those shortcuts as the real argument, they can be dismissed as missing the point of the argument."

One can always speculate on motives, but Feser states openly his motive for the stream of invective, in chapter 1, near the bottom of page 25 in the paperback edition: "I believe this tone is appropriate, even necessary, for the New Atheism derives whatever influence it has far more from its rhetorical force and 'sex appeal' (as I have called it) than from its very thin intellectual content. It is essential, then, not only that its intellectual pretensions are exposed, but that its rhetoric is met with equal and opposite force."

From that statement, what I gather is that Feser has kept a tally of every time an atheist said that religiosity is anti-intellectual and that religious people can't rub two brain cells together; et cetera, and plans to say exactly the same things of materialism/atheism, and of materialists/atheist, the same number of times, with the same degree of derision and dismissiveness, in his book. And that the goal is to thereby give the book the same "sex appeal" that Dennet, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris achieved by following the same tactic.

Feser does, elsewhere, freely admit that most examples he gives are merely examples, and that he is not here giving any exhaustive argument, but more of a quick survey of the arguments. In this he seems to be following his beloved Aquinas' own habit in the Summa Theologica, wherein Aquinas states the "five ways" in a hasty little list, assuming that if a student wants to know the strong-and-exhaustive form of any argument, the student is always free either to ask further or go look it up in the Summa Contra Gentiles or any of a dozen or so other works where the relevant arguments are more fully exposed over hundreds of pages.

I grant that this quick-and-dirty listing, in combination with the polemical tone, is apt to do what you describe: Goad an unfriendly reader into not interacting with the arguments carefully (and not looking up their fuller expositions elsewhere), and thus into opening themselves up for the accusation that they "just don't get it." Or it might make them misunderstand them outright -- I myself think you misunderstood his aside about the Fallacy of Composition, and perhaps the broader Aristotelian idea of motion as being change, generally -- which would open them up to the same accusation.

It's apt to do that, but since Feser offers something else as his conscious motive, that outcome is, I suspect, unintended or at least unconscious on his part, however tactically helpful it might be.

One Brow said...

R.C.,

Thank you for taking the time to respond. It's been 7 years since I posted this, and I have long since returned this book to the library. So, I make no pretense that anything below is anything other than my fallible reconstruction that comprises memory.

But I'm looking at the relevant pages in The Last Superstition, and he never even mentions the idea of a series having a last member.

My recollection is that Feser was discussing per se series as being finite, in part, because any series that stretches over time can be interrupted by something, and is therefore per accidens. My point was that there was no termination of per se interactions.

So far as I can tell, the series could go on forever once started, and that wouldn't faze him in the slightest, because he's not asserting that there is a final member. So far as I can tell, he is only asserting that, for causality to ever reach whichever member we happen to be thinking about now, it has to have started somewhere. We can pick the second, or the seventh, or the seven-hundredth member in a however-long chain of efficient causality. But however many additional members there may be after the member we're thinking of, there can't have been an infinite number of passive members prior to the one we're thinking of. If you don't eventually reach one that starts the changes without having been itself manipulated to change, then everything prior would be passive and nothing would ever have happened.

If you postulate an infinite series of per se interactions, then what does passivity matter?

To make the image work, you would have to ask yourself, "Given that the train-cars weren't moving at such-and-such a time, why did they start moving at 3pm?"

The infinitely long series of cars would have had no initial start time.

The rest of the argument SHOWS that this IS one of the occasions when the whole set shares a property that each member of the set has."

I missed the part where you offered an argument that justified this. The hylomorphic universe is not a thing, and even if the argument about things were successful, it can't be directly applied to a concept that is not a single thing.

For the sake of the argument, lets say we have a reality were every thing is has an Uncaused Cause. What is the proof the reality itself has an Uncaused Cause?

It's apt to do that, but since Feser offers something else as his conscious motive, that outcome is, I suspect, unintended or at least unconscious on his part, however tactically helpful it might be.

This is entirely possible, I grant.