A clue for Jerry Coyne

A reader alerts me that Jerry Coyne, whose philosophical efforts we had occasion recently to evaluate, has been reading some theology – “under the tutelage of the estimable Eric MacDonald,” Coyne tells us.  And who is Eric MacDonald?  A neutral party to the debate between theologians and New Atheist types like Coyne, right?  Well, not exactly.  Turns out MacDonald is “an ex-Anglican priest” who has been “wean[ed]… from his faith,” and who claims that “religious beliefs and doctrines not only have no rational basis, but are, in fact, a danger to rational, evidence-based thinking.”

Give Coyne’s post a read, then come back.  Now, you might recall my fanciful dialogue from a few months back between a scientist and a bigoted science-bashing skeptic.  The point was to try, through analogy, to help New Atheist types see how they appear to others, and how irrational and ill-informed they really are.  (If you haven’t seen the dialogue, go read that too, then come back.)  To see what is wrong with Coyne’s latest remarks, we can imagine that that dialogue might continue as follows:

Skeptic: I’m trying to learn science so I can meet head-on the argument that we science critics are ignorant of the subject.  So, under the tutelage of the estimable Bruno Latour, I have spent several weeks reading this stuff.  And so far, I’ve learned only three things.  First of all, I’m wasting my time reading drivel about beliefs that have no basis in fact when I could be learning about real things instead.  Second, scientists can’t write.  A lot of what they have to say is obscure bafflegab, and I’m starting to believe that this obscurantism is deliberate because of reason three (which I’ll get to in a minute).  I have for example, just opened Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam by John Wheeler to a random chapter.  And there I find this: 

“On the other hand, when we see time symmetry marred in an elementary process, when we contemplate the writhings of spacetime in wormholes and quantum foam, when we see tiny deviations from Dirac’s predictions for the electron produced by quantum fluctuations, we realize that the “floor” of simplicity as we move to smaller and smaller domains is illusory.  Beneath that floor, in still smaller domains, chaos and complexity reign again.”

Believe me, the book contains paragraphs far more obscure and pretentious than this one.  Can you imagine reading this stuff night after night?  Do you see why my head feels about to explode?  Bruno, why are you doing this to me?

Scientist: Well, it’s easy to make fun of serious ideas by ripping them out of context.  Actually understanding them is a different story.  Wheeler is an important thinker, and you quite obviously haven’t the faintest understanding of what he’s saying.

Skeptic: Oh brother, here we go again.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”  You always say that.  Then comes the Courtier’s reply: “Learn the science before commenting on it!”  But now that I have learned it, even that’s not enough for you.  Why don’t you just finally admit that science is like believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster?  I mean, “geons” and “quantum foam” are only the beginning.  This Wheeler guy goes on about tons of other crackpot stuff, like “black holes,” “muons,” “cosmic rays,””wave-particle duality,” and “It from Bit,” whatever the hell that means.  

Scientist: But my point is that you haven’t “learned the science.”  Just reading a book doesn’t mean anything if you’re not even trying to understand it.  And you’ve more or less admitted that you’re not – you’re only interested in scoring a debating point against those who’ve exposed your lack of knowledge of science.  There’s nothing obscure or crackpot about anything Wheeler said.  He’s just using technical terminology.  But the ideas are complicated and are the result of decades or even centuries of scientific developments.  You can’t seriously expect to understand it all just by mining a couple of books over the weekend for passages you can make smart-ass remarks about.

Skeptic: But why waste time trying to understand it when these scientists never show how what they’re saying tells us anything about reality in the first place?  Because that’s the third thing I’ve learned.  There seems to be no “knowledge” behind science.  One gets the strong sense when reading science that everyone is just making stuff up.  There are few arguments for relativity, quantum mechanics, evolution, etc. at all in what I read.  People just assume these things are real and go from there.

Scientist: What are you talking about?  Lots of scientists have argued for those things, at length!

Skeptic: Not in what I’ve read these last few weeks.  For example, read a book like Gregory’s Eye and Brain and you’ll find he talks about how evolution did this or how photons do that.  But he never gives us any argument for the existence of these “photon” thingies, and he never answers all the objections people have made to evolution.  It’s all based on faith.

Scientist: He doesn’t address those things at length because the book is about vision, and not photons or evolution per se.  He can take that stuff for granted because other people have argued for it elsewhere.  He isn’t even trying to answer skeptics about evolution or modern physics in a book like that.  Really, do you expect every science book to start from square one and recapitulate what others have already said about every issue that might be relevant to a subject, just to satisfy skeptics like you?  

Skeptic: But their belief in these things is not based on argument.  It’s based on peer pressure, groupthink, the fear of being ostracized.  The so-called “arguments” you refer to are just rationalizations for what scientists were indoctrinated into believing while in school and what all their colleagues expect them to believe when they go to conferences, try to get tenure or funding or to get their papers accepted for publication, etc.  It reflects the worship of science that dominates our society – its pop culture, its educational institutions, commerce and industry, you name it.  It’s all socially constructed, not based in reality.  As Latour says in Laboratory Life…

Scientist: That’s another thing.  When the hell did Bruno Latour, of all people, become a neutral source in this debate?!

Skeptic: What do you mean?  Latour is himself a scientist!  In fact, he’s a recognized expert in no less than two sciences, anthropology and sociology.  He also wrote a very influential study of Einstein’s theory of relativity.  

Scientist: This is surreal.  I don’t think you’ll find a lot of physicists or biologists who would agree that what Latour does is “science.”  I’ll bet even many anthropologists wouldn’t.  And as to his article on relativity…

Skeptic: Ah, I see, so the scientists don’t even agree among themselves about what “science” is.  It’s just a bunch of warring, faith-based sects that…

Scientist: No, there is certainly consensus among serious scientists about…

Skeptic: Oh, so when you cite some scientist, he’s a “serious” scientist or a “real” scientist, but when I cite some scientist in my favor, suddenly he’s not a “real” scientist or a “serious” one.  How convenient!  Do you have any idea how you sound?

Scientist: It only “sounds” suspicious if you’re hell-bent on finding something suspicious about it instead of trying to understand the reasons why I say what I do.  Look, you’re so off-base about so many things that I’ve got to start from first principles even to make a dent, and it’s complicated further by…

Skeptic: Yeah, yeah, it’s “complicated,” I don’t understand the issues, Courtier’s reply, blah blah blah.  Whatever.  You tell me I need to learn about science before criticizing it, so – just to humor you, because I already know it’s a waste of time – I do.  Then, because you don’t like what the evidence I’ve uncovered shows, you suddenly shift your ground and say that reading science books isn’t good enough after all, and that the scientists I cite are not “real” scientists.  I don’t think there’s any point in continuing this conversation any further.  And I don’t think there’s any point in reading any more science.  I don’t want to waste months of my life reading this stuff if there’s nothing to be gained from it except the ability to say to my opponents, “Yes, I do know about scientific schools of thought X, Y, and Z.”  Why bother to torture our brains if we can simply ask scientists to prove, using evidence and reason, that their viewpoint is correct, and better than that of either science critics like me, or other scientists?  But they never do that – it’s all just making stuff up or at best rationalizing preconceived ideas.

Now, Coyne would be outraged by our Skeptic, and rightly so.  But replace “Skeptic” with “Coyne,” “Scientist” with “Theologian,” and so forth, and I submit that you’ve got a dead-on summary of Coyne’s attitude toward theology.  Of course, Coyne and his ilk will insist that the cases are different.  But what you will never get from them is an actual argument for this claim, or at least not an argument that doesn’t beg the question.

If there were any doubt that Coyne’s reading project is unserious, it is dispelled by his jaw-dropping remark that he hasn’t come across any arguments for God’s existence “that aren’t taken up and refuted in The God Delusion.”  If Coyne were to imagine his own reaction to a creationist who said he hadn’t seen any arguments for evolution “that aren’t taken up and refuted in Duane Gish’s Evolution: The Fossils Say No!,” he would have some idea of what a fool he is making of himself.  Reasonable and well-informed people can disagree about whether a thinker like Aquinas (say) has proved the existence of God.  Reasonable and well-informed people cannot disagree about whether Richard Dawkins knows what the hell he is talking about when he criticizes thinkers like Aquinas in The God Delusion.  He does not, and to every Aquinas scholar it is cringe-makingly obvious that he does not.  If Coyne does not know this – and his own clueless past remarks about Aquinas show that he doesn’t – then it is hard to believe that he has even tried to look for serious defenses of the arguments for God’s existence, and thus hard to see how he has any business complaining that he hasn’t found them.

Still, Coyne insists that he really wants to know what the best arguments are, that he is “dead serious here, and not looking for sarcastic answers,” and even that he is “hoping that some real theologians will read this and provide some answers.”  Well, here is an answer.  If Coyne really wants to know what the rational foundations of theology are, he should read works that aim to lay down those foundations, instead of works that presuppose them – just like someone skeptical about evolution should read a book like Coyne’s Why Evolution is True instead of complaining that books like Richard Gregory’s Eye and Brain do not argue for evolution.

Traditionally, the central argument for God’s existence is the cosmological argument, and (also traditionally) the most important versions of that argument are the ones summed up in the first three of Aquinas’s Five Ways.  But the typical modern reader is simply not going to understand the Five Ways just by reading the usual two-page excerpt one finds in anthologies.  For one thing, the arguments were never intended to be stand-alone, one-stop proofs that would convince even the most hardened skeptic.  They are only meant to be brief sketches of arguments the more detailed versions of which the intended readers of Aquinas’s day would have found elsewhere.  For another thing, the terminology and argumentative moves presuppose a number of metaphysical theses that Aquinas also develops and defends elsewhere.

So, to understand the Five Ways, the modern reader needs to read something that makes all this background clear, that explains how modern Thomists would reply to the stock objections to the arguments, and so forth.  Naturally, I would recommend my own book Aquinas, since it was intended in part precisely as an up-to-date explanation and defense of these arguments, and will provide the reader with a useful survey of what not only Aquinas, but the Thomistic tradition more generally, has said about them.  (I do some of this in The Last Superstition too, of course.  But that book does not deal with the Third Way, as the Aquinas book does.  Moreover, New Atheists – who have a sense of humor about everything but themselves – are likely to make the polemical tone of TLS an excuse for dismissing its arguments.  This is unreasonable, of course, especially given their own excessive polemics – I’m only fighting fire with fire – but there it is.)

Another relatively recent book to look at on the Five Ways is Christopher F. J. Martin’s Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations.  Unfortunately, this is an expensive book, but it looks like the University of Chicago library has a copy, so Coyne should have no trouble getting hold of it.  If Coyne wants to dig even deeper into a broadly Thomistic approach informed by hard core analytic philosophy, I would recommend that he look at Barry Miller’s trilogy: From Existence to God, A Most Unlikely God, and The Fullness of Being.  These are also expensive, but I see that Coyne is again in luck, since the University of Chicago library has all three.  There are also some articles on Aquinas’s arguments worth checking out, such as David Oderberg’s recent piece on the first premise of the First Way.  And then there is the question of how Aquinas would deal with the atheistic objection from evil, the best recent book on which is Brian Davies’ The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil.

After Aquinas’s versions of the cosmological argument, the next most important argument for God’s existence is the kalām cosmological argument.  Here the things to read are William Lane Craig’s books The Kalām Cosmological Argument and Atheism, Theism, and Big Bang Cosmology (co-written with atheist Quentin Smith), and David Oderberg’s articles on the subject (available here, here, here, here, and here).

So, there’s your answer, Prof. Coyne.  No need to thank me!

On some alleged quantifier shift fallacies, Part II

Continuing our look at alleged cases of the quantifier shift fallacy committed by prominent philosophers, let’s turn to an example from John Locke.  As we’ve seen, Harry Gensler accuses Locke of reasoning as follows: “Everything is caused by something, so there must be some (one) thing that caused everything.”  What does Locke actually say?  The relevant passage is from Book IV, Chapter 10 of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

[Man] knows also that nothing cannot produce a being; therefore something must have existed from eternity.  In the next place, man knows, by an intuitive certainty, that bare nothing can no more produce any real being, than it can be equal to two right angles.  If a man knows not that nonentity, or the absence of all being, cannot be equal to two right angles, it is impossible he should know any demonstration in Euclid.  If, therefore, we know there is some real being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something; since what was not from eternity had a beginning; and what had a beginning must be produced by something else.

Notice first that, like other defenders of the cosmological argument, Locke does not actually say “Everything is caused by something” – the atheist’s favorite straw man, which would, of course, invite the atheist’s favorite retort “So what caused God?”  What Locke actually says is that “Nothing cannot produce a being,” that “Nonentity cannot produce any real being,” and so forth.  This entails only that if something has come into being, then it must have had a cause.  It does not entail that everything has a cause.  But this premise isn’t the focus of Gensler’s criticism, and he may not have been trying to paraphrase Locke accurately since this particular misreading does not affect the point he is trying to make. 

But notice also that Locke does not say anything as blatantly fallacious as the argument Gensler attributes to him.  That is, he doesn’t say “Everything that comes into being has a cause, so there must be some (one) thing that caused everything that comes into being.”  To be sure, it is not at all difficult to see why Gensler and others would attribute this fallacy to Locke.  If the fact that “nonentity cannot produce any real being” is somehow supposed to show that “from eternity there has been something,” and if (as is evident from the rest of chapter 10) “something” is supposed to refer to some one particular thing, then it is not unreasonable at least to wonder whether the fallacious argument in question is how Locke gets from his premise to his conclusion.  Still, it would be unreasonable to assume that Locke must have been reasoning that way, if there is some plausible alternative way of reading him.  So is there?

There is.  As commentators on Locke know, his argument for God’s existence was influenced by a more detailed argument developed by the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth.  You can find a useful discussion of Locke’s argument and of Cudworth’s influence on it in Volume II, Chapter 14 of Michael Ayers’ magisterial Locke: Epistemology and Ontology.  Ayers begins his discussion of Cudworth’s version thus:

The relevant part of Cudworth’s long argument is briefly as follows.  First, since nothing can come from nothing, and something exists, then something must exist from eternity which is causa sui, existing necessarily or essentially (the standard ‘cosmological’ proof).  So far, Cudworth thought, theists and atheistic materialists are undivided.  But the atheists identify the eternal being with matter, arguing that the Lucretian principle that nothing can come from nothing rules out the creation of matter by something else... (p. 171)

As Ayers goes on to note, Cudworth then argues that the problem with taking matter to be the ultimate reality is that matter cannot produce thought, so that the ultimate cause of the thought that exists in the universe must be immaterial.  (As I have noted before, Cudworth was an early and important proponent of the argument that the modern mechanical conception of matter itself, to which the materialist no less than modern dualists like Cudworth is committed, rules out the possibility that mind can be material.)

Now Locke’s argument for God’s existence proceeds in a similar manner, and in general it is evident that Locke intended to reason along lines related to Cudworth’s.  (As Ayers notes, Locke does alter Cudworth’s argument somewhat so as to bring it into line with his own metaphysical commitments, but these alterations are irrelevant to our present concerns.)  But then it is clear how Locke can be interpreted in a way that does not attribute to him any quantifier shift fallacy.  Like Cudworth, what he is saying is that even the atheist (or at least the typical atheist of the day) acknowledges that something must have existed from eternity, even if the atheist takes this “something” to be the substrate of matter that underlies the particular material things that come into being and pass out of being.  The question is whether even matter considered as an eternal being could be the ultimate cause of things.  

In other words, Cudworth and Locke both seem to be arguing along lines similar to those which, as we have seen, Aquinas develops in the first part of the Third Way, in which he shows that something must have always existed, even if only what J. L. Mackie calls the “permanent stock of matter” that persists through the processes of generation and corruption.  As I noted in my book Locke (at pp. 85-86):

A standard criticism of the first stage of [Locke’s] argument is that it seems to commit a rather blatant fallacy, in that from the claim that there must always have been something in existence, it does not follow that there is some one thing that has always existed – it could be that there has instead always been something or other in existence, one thing preceded by another, which was preceded by another, and so on ad infinitum for all of past time, but without any individual one of them having always existed.  Now this objection is not by itself as telling as is often supposed.  Locke could reply that if we think of the series in question as a series of material things, it is highly unlikely that such a series could have kept going for an infinite number of years; eventually, through sheer chance, there would surely have come a point already at which all material things then in existence went out of existence together.  If the only things that exist or ever did exist are such material objects, then, the world would not exist now, for there would, after the point in past time just described, have been nothing left to bring the world back into being once every material thing died out.  So there must in fact be an eternal being which has kept the world in existence continuously.

A rejoinder to such a reply, though, would be to say that this “eternal being” might, for all that has been said, be nothing more than the collection of basic material elements out of which all individual material things are composed.  Even if every particular material object comes into and goes out of existence at some point, the set of fundamental corpuscles (or some suitable candidate from modern physics) as a whole remains in existence throughout.  Of course, Locke would say that this collection of material elements could never by itself generate perception, knowledge, and other mental properties, and I have suggested [earlier in the book] that he has good reason for saying this.

Like Aquinas, Cudworth and Locke can thus be interpreted as allowing for the sake of argument that matter might always have existed, and as then proceeding to argue (also like Aquinas, though working from different metaphysical assumptions) that even if this were the case, matter could not even in principle be the most fundamental everlasting being.  And if someone asks “Why doesn’t Locke make it more explicit that this is what he is doing?” the answer is arguably that establishing that something has always existed was not the step that needed defense in his day.  He could state that part of the argument more loosely because even the atheist of the day would have granted it.  What needed defense was rather the claim that the eternal being could not have been matter – and sure enough, that is precisely the claim that Locke devotes the bulk of the chapter to defending.

That does not mean that Locke’s argument is otherwise unproblematic.  As I go on to say on pp. 86-87 of Locke:

[That matter could never by itself generate mental properties] is consistent with the claim that, wherever the material world got the mental properties that are conjoined with (parts of) it, it has nevertheless existed eternally.  This would be consistent with the idea of a “demiurge,” a god who merely orders preexisting materials into a cosmos, but it would not be consistent with the traditional monotheistic conception of God as a creator who brings the world into existence out of nothing – a conception that is not only the one that Locke happens to want to defend in the Essay, but which is, as we shall see in the next chapter, absolutely crucial to the political philosophy he wants to defend in the Second Treatise of Government.

For Locke to get to the God of traditional monotheism, then, he will have to argue that even an infinitely old collection of basic material components must itself be explained in terms of God’s creative action.  And to do this would seem to require appealing to the idea that matter, being contingent, can only be explained by reference to something that exists necessarily or non-contingently.  But this would in turn require the endorsement of some explanatory principle that could license the inference in question – a principle like the per se causal series of the Scholastics, or the Principle of Sufficient Reason associated with Leibniz and other rationalist philosophers.  As an empiricist, though, Locke would seem to be in no position to advance such a principle.  As noted earlier, Hume and other later empiricists have argued compellingly that if we take seriously the thesis that we can have no idea that is not derived from experience [in the modern empiricist sense of “derived from experience,” I should have added], it seems that we can have no idea of a “necessary connection” between causes and effects, and thus no grounds for any inference to the effect that the material world simply must have its source in some immaterial necessary being, à la Scholasticism and rationalism.  Something similar could be said of the principle Locke appeals to in defense of the claim that the cause of a thing must be the source of its powers – a principle that Locke borrows from his Scholastic predecessors, but which does not sit well with his empiricist scruples.  

If something like Locke’s argument for God’s existence can be defended, then (and there are several contemporary philosophers who would defend an argument for an eternal First Cause of the world), it seems that it will have to be done on the basis of a general metaphysical picture other than the sort allowed for by his empiricism.  Once again, we see that Locke’s attempt to preserve some elements of the Scholastic inheritance while jettisoning others may threaten to force him into a dilemma: in this case, he can either give up a thoroughgoing empiricism and salvage his argument for God’s existence, or follow out the implications of his empiricism and give up the argument. It is not clear that he can have both the empiricism and the argument, though. (Whether some other argument for God’s existence can be defended on empiricist but non-Lockean lines – Berkeley’s argument, for example – is another question.)

However we ultimately judge Locke’s argument, though, the claim that it commits a quantifier shift fallacy does not constitute a fatal objection.

In our final post in this series, we’ll examine the claim that Aristotle commits a quantifier shift fallacy in the Nicomachean Ethics.

A first without a second

For the Thomist, to say that God is the First Cause of things is, first and foremost, to say that He is the cause of their existence at every moment at which they do exist.  God creates things out of nothing precisely in the act of conserving them in being, and apart from His continual causal action they would instantly be annihilated.  You, the computer you are using right now, the floor under your feet, the coffee cup in your hand – for each and every one of these things, God is, you might say, “keeping it real” at every instant.  Nor is this causal activity something anything else could either carry out or even play a role in.  Creation – which for Aquinas means creation out of nothing – can be the act of God alone.

Where creation is concerned, then, God is “first” cause not in the sense of coming before the second, third, and fourth causes, but rather in the sense of being absolutely fundamental, that apart from which nothing could cause (because nothing could exist) at all.  As serious students of the Five Ways know, the sorts of causal series Aquinas traces to God as First Cause are causal series ordered per se, not causal series ordered per accidens.  In the former sort of series, every cause other than the first is instrumental, its causal power derived from the first.  (See this post for more on the subject.)  But where creation is concerned, Aquinas’s talk of intermediate or instrumental causes is only “for the sake of argument”; his point is that even if there were intermediate causes of the being of things, the series would have to terminate in a First Cause.  In fact there is and can be only one Creator and He cannot in principle create through intermediaries.  (That is not to say that God does not work through intermediaries in other respects.  We’re only talking here about His act of causing the sheer existence of a thing or creating it out of nothing.) 

Why not?  Aquinas addresses the question at some length in the Summa Theologiae, the Summa Contra Gentiles, and De Potentia Dei.  The arguments are difficult for someone not versed in the metaphysical presuppositions of Aquinas’s philosophical theology – indeed, some of them are difficult even for someone who is versed in the relevant metaphysics.  But what follows will, I hope, suffice to convey some of the main ideas.  (It will help considerably if the reader has at least some knowledge of such fundamental Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical notions as actuality and potentiality, form and matter, and the principle of proportionate causality; of the Thomistic arguments for the existence of God as pure actuality and as being itself rather than merely a being among others; and of the arguments for the uniqueness of anything that is pure actuality and being itself.  This is all spelled out at length in chapters 2 and 3 of Aquinas.)  

First, then, why does Aquinas hold that only God can possibly create out of nothing?

Here’s one way to understand it.  Any of us can easily actualize the potential of the oxygen in the air around us to move, simply by waving our arms.  Only someone with the relevant expert knowledge could take oxygen and hydrogen and synthesize water out of them.  It would take greater power still to cause the prime matter underlying oxygen, hydrogen, or water to take on the substantial form of a tree.  But creation out of nothing requires more power even than that, in fact unlimited power.  For it is not a case of drawing out the potentialities that are already there in a thing, but rather causing a thing to exist entirely, together with its potentialities, where nothing at all had existed before.  It isn’t a case merely of modifying what already exists, but rather of causing to exist in the first place that which all mere modification presupposes.  

Limited causes are limited precisely by potentialities which are not actualized.  Hence a sculptor is limited by the degree of skill he has so far acquired, by the limits on his dexterity given the structure of his hands, etc.  He is limited also by the potentialities of his materials – their capacity to be molded using some tools but not others, their capacity to maintain whatever shape the sculptor puts into them, and so forth.  Now that which creates out of nothing is not limited by any such external factors, precisely because it is not modifying anything that already exists outside of it.  But neither can it be limited by any internal potentialities analogous to the limits on a sculptor’s skill.  For it is not merely causing a being of this or that sort to exist (though it is doing that too) – modifying preexisting materials would suffice to cause that – but also making it the case that any being at all exists.  And only that which is not a being among others but rather unlimited being – that which is pure actuality – can do that.  

The idea is perhaps best stated in Platonic terms of the sort Aquinas uses (in an Aristotelianized form) in the Fourth Way.  To be a tree or to be a stone is merely to participate in “treeness” or “stoneness.”  But to be at all – which is the characteristic effect of an act of creation out of nothing – is to participate in Being Itself.  Now the principle of proportionate causality tells us that whatever is in an effect must be in some way in its cause.  And only that which just is Being Itself can, in this case, be a cause proportionate to the effect, since the effect is not merely to be a tree or to be a stone, but to be at all.  

So only God – who just is pure actuality or Being Itself rather than a being among others – can cause a thing to exist ex nihilo.  But why could He not work through instrumental causes in doing so?  For all the preceding argument would seem to show is that Being Itself is the ultimate cause of any thing’s existing at all.  That is, it suggests that any cause of a thing’s sheer existence that was less than Being Itself would, either directly or indirectly, owe its own existence to that which is Being Itself.  But why couldn’t that which is Being Itself impart to other things their sheer existence through such an intermediary – through an instrumental cause which, like the effect, is merely a being among others rather than Being Itself?

Here’s one way to think about the problem with this idea.  An instrumental cause causes by virtue of being used to alter what already exists, as a chisel is used by a sculptor to alter marble.  But to cause the sheer existence of a thing ex nihilo is not to alter what already exists.  In the case of a material thing, it does not involve causing already existing matter to take on a new form (as a sculptor does), but rather causing the matter and form together to exist.  Hence while it makes sense to speak of using a chisel in the act of sculpting a statue out of marble, it makes no sense to speak of using a chisel in the act of causing a statue to exist ex nihilo.  For before the statue was caused to exist ex nihilo, there was no marble on which the chisel could be brought to bear; and after the statue is caused to exist ex nihilo, there is nothing for the chisel to do, since the marble already is (by hypothesis) a statue.  Now any purported instrumental cause involved in any act of creation ex nihilo would be like the chisel.  It would be a fifth wheel – it wouldn’t be doing anything, and thus would not be causing anything, and thus would not really be an instrumental cause (because not a cause at all).  Hence the very idea of God creating out of nothing through instrumental causes falls apart on analysis.

So, while popular images of God as First Cause have Him knocking down the first domino billions of years ago, and while even Aquinas might seem to make of Him the distant terminus of a regress of simultaneous currently operating causes, nothing could be further from the truth.  God’s relationship to the world is in Aquinas’s view much more intimate than that, indeed, as intimate as possible.  At least where the sheer existence of things is concerned, He and He alone is directly causing them at every instant.  He is, as the Muslims say, “closer than the vein in your neck.” 

Of note…

For your consideration on this fine Fourth of July:

Tuomas Tahko posts video of Kit Fine’s talk at a recent conference on Aristotelian Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics. 

From David Oderberg, two recent articles: “Morality, Religion, and Cosmic Justice” and “The World is Not an Asymmetric Graph.” 

In The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Mark Anderson discusses Julian Young’s Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography and its sources.  Young replies and Daniel Blue comments.

Christopher Kaczor has edited a volume of essays written in tribute to the late Ralph McInerny. 

The Catholic University of Paris is hosting a conference on Hume’s Legacy in Contemporary Philosophy this September.  Speakers include Helen Beebee, Paul Clavier, Peter Kail, Catherine Larrère, Eléonore Le Jallé, Michel Malherbe, Frédéric Nef, David Oderberg, Thomas Pink, Yann Schmitt, Ronan Sharkey, and Anna Zielinska. 

New books:  Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil; Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson, Idealism: The History of a Philosophy; Crawford Elder, Familiar Objects and Their Shadows; Paul Feyerabend, The Tyranny of Science; Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby, and Frederick Stoutland, eds., Essays on Anscombe’s Intention; William Jaworski, Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction; Rex Welshon, Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Consciousness; and W. Jay Wood, God.

Editiones scholasticae

Editiones scholasticae is a new German publishing venture devoted to publishing works in Scholastic philosophy, including reprints of works which have long been out of print.  Among the first titles announced are reprints of Bernard Wuellner’s two invaluable reference works Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy and Summary of Scholastic Principles, used copies of which can be expensive and hard to find.  A very worthy enterprise!