One objection to First Cause arguments is that they make superfluous attributions: surely in any steady hand Occam’s razor would deliver a much more modest looking First Cause than God. In my last post, I argued that this objection is fallacious in as much as it begs the question against Classical Theism, for which the First Cause and its attributions are indivisible (and thus hardly capable of being whittled by Occam).

But, this doesn’t show that there is a First Cause, or that Classical Theism is right about its simplicity. Still less does it show that its attributes include “intellect”, “will”, or “goodness”. I’m going to try and make up for much of this deficit in this post, hoping my point about the fallacious nature of these Occam-style objections has in some measure cleared the runway.

I believe it can be demonstrated that there is a First Cause and that Classical Theism is right about its simplicity in one fell swoop. While this argument will not in and of itself show that the First Cause’s attributes include “intellect”, “will”, or “goodness”, and thus that it is God, it will show that the First Cause is supernatural, or non-natural at least.

Allow me to begin by asking you to consider an average human being. I think we will all agree that it has body parts. But, this is just a realization of its potential to have body parts. If it did not have this potential, if it were literally incapable of having body parts, then it simply would not exist (lacking all the essential organs and such).

Let’s now abstract from this or that human being’s potential to have body parts, and consider the potential by itself. Obviously, the potential to have body parts is general enough that non-human animals have it as well.

This process of abstracting the particulars away could continue on until we arrive at the most general potential included in a human’s potential to have body parts. Thus, we might say the next particular to be abstracted is the having of any specific kinds of parts. In turn, the potential to have parts is just the potential to be composed, from which we may abstract the potential for there to be composition. What saves this from being an exercise in the mundane is that last item. What a peculiar thing, this potential for there to be composition.

Potentials don’t just float around: things have potentials. But, in what sense could something have the potential for there to be composition?

We can divide all potentials into two mutually exclusive categories: active and passive. Active potentials are powers to cause whereas passive potentials are just capacities to undergo change. Thus, my potential to eat lunch is active, while my potential to become older is passive.

If the potential for there to be composition were passive, there would need to be something that could undergo a change that would result in there being composition. But, if there were something capable of undergoing this change, something that genuinely had this potential, then there would already be composition! As such, the potential for there to be composition cannot be passive.

But, if it were active, then something would have the power to cause there to be composition. Since cause logically precedes effect and composition would be one of its effects, this cause could not be composed in anyway whatsoever. Given that this potential has to either be active or passive, and that it cannot be passive, we are forced to deduce that it is active, and therefore that there is a perfectly simple cause of composition.

We may formalize the foregoing reasoning as follows:

1. Every potential is either active or passive.
2. If the potential for there to be composition is active, then there is a perfectly simple cause of composition.
3. The potential for there to be composition is not passive.
4. Therefore, the potential for there to be composition is active. [(1), (3) Disj.]
5. Therefore, there is a perfectly simple cause of composition. [(2), (4) M.P.]

This is a pretty straightforward argument for a First Cause. There could not be more than one perfectly simple being since they would lack any distinguishing features by which to be differentiated.¹ And since everything other than this perfectly simple cause is composed of parts, and it causes there to be composition, it sustains all things in existence by holding them together. It doesn’t matter whether the chain of composed beings regresses infinitely into the past, or loops back in on itself: the causation of this perfectly simple being is not ‘first’ in a temporal sense. Rather, its primacy lies within its fundamentality, its causation serving as the pulse of life underlying the existence of everything.

Still, why think it’s super or non-natural? The answer to this lies in the apophatic method: considering what forms of composition there are so as to deny them of the First Cause.

Fortunately, one sort of composition will suffice: that of matter and form. In every change something becomes otherwise than it was before. That is, something persists through the loss and gain of characteristics. Call these characteristics (such as redness, squareness, hunger, or location, etc. etc.) 'forms'. If forms are what are gained and lost through change, what is it that gains or loses them? Call the substratum in which forms are gained or lost ‘matter’. We can distinguish between different kinds of matter based on the forms that it 'substrates'. For example, we might designate the substratum of sensible form as 'physical' matter.

By virtue of its simplicity, the First Cause could not have matter, physical, quantum or any other partition thereof. It occupies no space, persists through no time, and lacks any and all pictorially identifiable features. No laws of nature govern its behavior; it is quite literally unlike anything in nature.

Granted, this does not spell ‘theism’. But, it’s eerily close and at complete odds with Naturalism in any case. The missing ingredients here have in no short supply been given elsewhere; however, perhaps that is a matter best left for another time.
 
 
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All my atheist friends and family members believe in “love.” But what is love? Here’s a question:

If humans have no soul, and are merely evolutionary advanced animals, is ‘love’ anything more than instinct or hormones?

In a letter to his ten-year-old daughter, atheist Richard Dawkins explained the importance of evidence in science and in life:

"People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence."

What he is saying sure does sound like what “priests” talk about. But if love is not exclusively religious, then what is it? Let's explore the two most basic forms of love: love of a parent for a child and the nuptial love between husband and wife.

When mommy says to her one year old, “I love you,” the atheist says she is not expressing anything metaphysical or spiritual. In fact, says the atheist, the mother is verbalizing the instinct to preserve her species, just as a mommy zebra protects and fosters the growth of the baby zebra. That’s it. Nothing more. It is instinct combined with verbal tags. When a parent “loves” her child, she is just adding a verbal cue to an advanced evolutionary instinct to carry on the species.

The same empirical reality is true between two lovers. For the atheist, nothing sacramental, metaphysical, or spiritual is happening in a loving relationship. The two don’t “become one flesh” as we say in Biblical and matrimonial language any more than a rooster and a hen “become one flesh.”

When a man says, “I love you,” to his wife, he is simply expressing something about his hormonal levels toward her as a mate. What he is really saying is, “My hormones surge for you,” not “You are my soul mate,” because the atheist doesn’t believe in souls or metaphysical connections between humans.

Incidentally, a man’s hormones might start surging for another woman (or several women) at some point. The same man might also be ready to say, “I love you,” to these new women, too.

This position, if true, would produce the most dreadful Valentines cards, such as:

“Would you be my Valentine? I want to buy you dinner. My evolved breeding instincts respond well to you.”

“Your physical appearance sets off a hormonal response in me to mate with you.”

If there is no soul, then there is only the bubbling of the brain. There is only the response to stimuli and hormones. Yet Catholics root love in the soul. The problem for atheists, of course, is that the soul is a metaphysical reality that assumes the existence of God, or at least the supernatural.

When I love a friend, as a Christian, I mean, “I love you, body and soul.” But for an atheist, friendship is an evolved behavior related to living in a pack or herd or tribe. At root it has to do with self-protection and food acquisition.

I'd be interested in hearing how other atheists, besides Dawkins, would describe “love” to their daughters. I'd also like someone to help clarify Dawkins' claim that, “There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.”

What is this “inside/outside” dichotomy? It sure sounds like what we Christians have called “soul/body” for over 2,000 years.

How can an atheist say he loves someone and not mean anything more than instinct and hormones? I would especially like to hear from female atheists. Is love only a physical response?
 
 
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Today's post is in response to yesterday's article by atheist blogger Qu Quine, titled "Straw Man Scientism". Be sure to read Qu's article first.

Qu Quine has written a brief but clear description of methodological naturalism (MN), explaining the difference between this scientific approach to knowing and the blind “faith” of Scientism, the idea that only science is capable of putting us in touch with reality.  The difference between the two is simple enough: the latter is an ideological stance, the former is a method, a way of knowing.  Quine asserts that embracing the former does not require embracing the latter, and celebrates the power of MN to demonstrate falsehoods and to create a dependable path for attaining new and more certain knowledge.

To which I say, with profound conviction and no irony, “Vere!” and “Amen!”  In knowing the material world as such, including the living things within it, methodological naturalism is the only useful method of which I am aware. And any attempt to restrain its practitioners on religious grounds or to discard it as scientism would be intellectual violence.  As a theologian I do not want to quell Quine’s celebration of MN, but offer it an appreciative biography.

MN was born when the idea of Nature was born, when Greek philosophers began to discover “the regularity of phenomena as inhering in the natures of things and in the nature of the whole.”  At the very same time was born the pagan critique of religion, best summarized by Cicero’s Cotta in his dialogue “On the Nature of the Gods”: “...the system's coherence and persistence is due to nature's forces and not to divine power.”  This critique had developed over 800 years by the time of St. Augustine of Hippo, who adopted it entirely, as we can see in Book V of the Confessions, where we learn that it was the bad astronomy that the Manichees taught “as spiritual doctrine” that ended his long adherence to their sect.  His words ring with MN as he notes the achievements of the (non-Manichee) astronomers, who
 

“With the mind and intellect...investigate these matters. They have found out much. Many years beforehand they have predicted eclipses of sun and moon, foretelling the day, the hour, and whether total or partial. And their calculation has not been wrong. It has turned out just as they predicted… On this basis prediction can be made of the year, the month of the year, the day of the month, the hour of the day, and what proportion of light will be eclipsed in the case of either sun or moon; and it happens exactly as predicted.”

 
In fact the Confessions breathes naturalism. Even while Augustine recounts his life to God and questions or thanks him for nearly every life-event he remembers, not once does Augustine invoke a miraculous intervention or direct divine activity.  At one point he tells us that he moved to Rome for a career advantage; at another that he went there because God wanted him to meet Ambrose who leads him toward Christian baptism.  Augustine narrates his life “in such a way that the sequence of events related is adequately accounted for, and yet...in such a way that those events are not adequately accounted for.”  God is the reason for everything, but the direct cause of no specific thing.  The message is clear:
 

“The divine action is not an action by a worldly agent, it does not insert itself into the sequence of motives and causes, it does not fill a gap in the account of Augustine's life.  No event related in the Confessions is brought about by a situation inexplicable in terms of natural causes.  Nature is a self-enclosed whole, not independent in its being from God, but a whole whose course is adequately explainable in terms of immanent natural causes.”¹

 
Yet Augustine the naturalist becomes a member of the Catholic Church.  Why did he find no obstacle there like the one he confronted in Manicheanism?  Because the integrity of the natural world is a doctrine of the Catholic Church.  This is why Augustine, as genius theologian and bishop, refuses to accept a literalist account of creation, why he posits a rudimentary version of evolution for the emergence of life forms from “the texture of the elements, com[ing] forth when they get the opportunity” (De Trinitate 3.9.16), and why his medieval disciple Thomas Aquinas will teach, paradoxically enough, the “hiddenness of divinity” as one of the two objects of God’s self-revelation (Summa Theologiae II-II.1.8).

God is not one among the things that exists.  Rather, he gives the universe its free existence, and so MN must be the method of observing and knowing the world.  Christian faith need not be invoked to use it, as Quine rightly notes.  But neither is it an impediment to it; indeed, historically it has always been a progenitor of it.

As a final note, the “hiddenness of divinity” is only one of two things God has revealed to us.  The other is the mystery of the humanity of Christ, in which God reveals himself as a human being to recreate the world, “not a mere appearance of a god in the likeness of men but fully present in history as a man, not a divine being peering out through a cloak of flesh, but a man.”² Here, in the fulfillment of all things, resides the Resurrection, an event not historical in the same way as Augustine’s fateful decision to go to Rome, and the miracles of Christ and the saints, all of which foreshadow and prepare a new creation rather than replacing MN as an approach to this universe.  Quine is right to reject a six-day formation of the earth, but putting the Resurrection in the same category is like putting the chicken back in the egg.
 
 
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Today's guest post is from atheist blogger Qu Quine who writes at Quine's Queue. Qu is also a frequent commenter here at Strange Notions. After reading this post, be sure to read the reply by Catholic contributor Dr. Chris Baglow: "Scientism vs. Methodological Naturalism: Responding to Qu Quine".

As an atheist, I've had to get used to being accused of "Scientism" in my online discussions with religious people. It also came up very early on while walking with my missionary neighbor. It is human nature to want certainty over uncertainty, and this gets projected from people of faith onto us, non-believers. It is a false dichotomy to take our position of wanting to have evidence to support positions accepted as true, as meaning that positions without such must, therefore, be false. No, it is not like that. Ideas without evidence may be true. There is no part of the Scientific Method that says it will eventually result in working out the truth of every idea that is true, and every scientist starts with things that he or she suspects are true in hopes of getting the evidence to back that up.

This misunderstanding leads to the red herring that faith need be invoked to depend on the Scientific Method, but that such depending is ruled out by the Scientific Method. Daniel Dennett ran into that in this discussion and dealt with it there. The Scientific Method is not a property of Nature that we analyze as true or false using the Scientific Method. We use methodological naturalism because we have found it to be useful. We have no proof that there is no better way, we just have not found a better way. The importance of the Scientific Method is that it gives us a way to find out new things about the world that we can depend upon with a bounded uncertainty. That uncertainty gets smaller over time as the self-correcting property of the Method keeps testing what we think we know. This produces knowledge that we can turn over to the developers of technology with reasonable expectations of results that work (such as the screen that you are reading).

The other thing I have had to work on my neighbor about is understanding that most of the power in methodological naturalism is to show what is demonstrably not true. Things that are shown by clear evidence to not be true almost never come back, later, to be shown to have been true all along. Thus when the data from scientific measurements tell us that the Earth is not flat, or that the Sun does not revolve around it, is likely not going to be found mistaken, ever. This tends to give scientists more authority when debunking the untrue with clear counter examples than when they show what they think is true because the search for counter examples has found none (yet).

Sometimes I am pressed by the extreme examples. For example, Science cannot disprove Solipsism or even Last Thursdayism. But if you take these positions you can't go any further. I can't prove that philosophical dead ends are necessarily false; I can't justify the assumption of the existence of the external world, but I live with it because it allows me to get access to thoughts and experiences beyond just myself.

I let my neighbor know that I do expect there are truths that are not yet known to science (that is why there are still jobs for scientists). But we do know many things with near certainty and know a great more about what is not true, with clear certainty. We know the Earth did not form in six days. We know there was no "Adam and Eve" as first humans because the human population (and that of our common ancestors with other apes) was never below a few thousand. We don't know by scientific evidence that Jesus did not rise from the dead, but the need for extraordinary evidence for that level of extraordinary event (against the very definition of "death" itself), together with the problem of false stories coming from the same scriptural sources, causes me to put that in the most probably fictional category until positive evidence can be produced.

These days "Scientism" is used as a pejorative that may be deserved by some who improperly make claims of the Scientific Method beyond its true scope. I am not one of those.
 
 
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