NOTE: Today we continue an occasional series of exchanges between Catholic theologian Dr. Michael Augros, author of Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015), and various email interlocutors. Enjoy!
 

 
Dr. Augros,

Your response to Mark's question of why the First Cause still has to be with us today was much anticipated, but unfortunately, left some of us disappointed (e.g., the will causes the body to act by moving the paint brush). You simply made the assertion that God is causing my will to exist in the here-and-now and to have its causal power, etc.

I desperately have been trying to understand the metaphysical/philosophical argument that God is sustaining and continuously causing *in the present* in order to overcome the argument that The First Cause/Mover is like a clockmaker who created everything and let it run.

Thank you,
Joe

Greetings Joseph,

Before trying to address your question, permit me to make a few preliminary remarks that might help avoid or remove certain confusions.

1. The business about painting is only meant to serve as an illustration of a few points, not to be a free-standing argument for the existence of a first being that is the cause of the being of all things. It is intended to illustrate that when causes operate together, not one after another in time (e.g. this generation has kids, then that generation has kids, etc.), then such a series has the following properties: the prior cause is more a cause of the final effect than the subsequent causes are, there must be a first in the series, and if the first cause stops acting then everything stops, including the final effect (there is no longer anything “being painted,” even if the painted canvas continues to exist).

2. The illustration is an example of a cause of something coming to be, not of its being, if we are thinking of the painting as the ultimate effect and the painter as the “first cause.” I cause it to come to be, not simply to be, which is why it can continue to be without my continued action. But if we consider its coming to be, of which I am a cause, that cannot continue without my continued action. And that is a general rule. To whatever extent one thing is the cause of another, the other cannot be without the one. So if I cause the painting’s coming into existence, then its coming into existence cannot continue without me. Similarly, if one thing causes another thing’s existence, then that other thing’s existence cannot continue without the action of the cause.

3. In point of fact, God is causing my will to exist and to have its causal power for so long as it exists, and so my will, while it is a first cause of my painting among created things, is not a first cause absolutely speaking. This is far from obvious just from the illustration, but then the illustration was not meant to prove any of that. The same goes for other kinds of causes that might be first in this or that category of things, but that are not first simply and absolutely. There might be first causes in the natural world, for example, with no prior natural cause—perhaps a star is the first cause of its own light, and there is no prior cause in nature that is making the star exist and enabling it to produce light. If there is a cause prior to such a natural thing at all, then it must be the cause of the existence of the natural thing, since the natural thing already exists and is not coming into existence. But one needs a reason to suppose that there is such a cause.

So now let’s think about your question. How does one see that there is a cause of the very existence of my will, or of material things, even after they have come into existence? One way to go about it is in these steps:

[a] Show that there must be at least one “first being,” a thing that can exist and act all by itself, without help from any other thing.

[b] Show that there can be at most one first being—from which it follows (together with [a]), that there is exactly one such thing. And from this it follows that anything other than that one unique thing must derive its existence (and not just its coming into existence) from something else.

[c] Show that nothing with parts and nothing changeable can be the first being.

Step [a] is the conclusion of chapter 1 of Who Designed the Designer?.

Step [b] is the conclusion of chapter 2 of Who Designed the Designer?.

Step [c] is the conclusion of chapter 3 of Who Designed the Designer?.

From these things it follows that no familiar thing—not you or me, or anything in the whole world of nature, or the universe itself—can have its existence (and power of acting) just by itself. There is only one thing like that, if steps [a] and [b] are correct, and that thing cannot be anything having shape and size, nor can it be anything susceptible to change if step [c] is correct.

I myself, for example, am a thing with parts and susceptible to change. So I cannot exist and act entirely by myself, and consequently I must have my being and action with dependence on another thing. That other thing either is the one and only first cause, or else it is something else which (consequently) also is not an independently existing thing, which therefore relies on a prior cause of its existence. By the argument behind Step [1] this must terminate in the first cause anyway, and it follows that I derive my existence from the first cause, whether mediately or immediately.

(Now an aside: I do not derive my existence from the first cause through a bunch of intermediate causes, but immediately. There is not some created thing that is giving me my existence as long as I exist. Without going into all the reasons for that, I will say this: When a creature like me acts, it presupposes a thing to act on. I cannot paint a picture, for example, without paint and canvas. In my case, that is because I act by a kind of physical contact with things, and so unless there is something already there for me to contact, I cannot act and cannot produce any effect. And this means I will not be the cause of the sheer existence of things, but only of a new thing coming into existence in a pre-existing material—and this is also true even of other non-corporeal causes besides the first cause, but for reasons I will not get into here. I can also cause the existence or continued being of things that are mere properties or movements, of course. For example, I can cause the motion of the brush not just to begin, but to continue. And I can cause the glass in my hand not only to come to be in a certain place, but to remain there, if I am holding it up. But I cannot be the cause of the existence of a more substantial thing, like a painting, or a house—I can only cause such things to come into existence. In short, if the effect we are talking about is motion or change or quality, there might be a series of causes acting in concert, but if the effect we are talking about is the very existence of a substance, the “series” is very short, since it goes right from the effect to the first cause.)

Perhaps a quick explanation of step [c] is in order here. In the book, I try to explain mainly why a changeable, movable thing cannot be the first cause. Here I will try to sketch out a reason why nothing with parts can be the first being. Whatever has parts cannot be unless its parts exist. A whole sphere cannot exist unless its hemispheres exist, for example. And it is possible at least in some cases for the parts of a whole to exist without the whole existing, as the parts of a car can exist before the car exists, and while the car exists, and after the car exists. But in no case can a whole exist without its parts existing. So the existence of the parts always has a certain priority to the existence of the whole. No whole, then, can be the first being, a thing to which existence belongs of itself and independently of existence belonging to anything else, since existence belongs to it only because existence belongs with a certain priority to its parts. And the same goes for them, if they have parts. If we come to the points in a body that are in no way distinguishable into different parts, and which therefore have no size, these things do not exist of themselves and independently either, since they are more like properties of a thing than things in their own right. The tip of a pencil is (roughly) a point, but it cannot exist without the pencil, even if the pencil can exist without it. So nowhere in a whole can we find independent existence, and consequently we must look outside the whole for the source of its existence (and not just its coming into existence).

One could also say that a whole cannot exist unless its parts are together. But why are the parts together? Not just because they are distinct things outside each other, since not all things of that description are joined into a whole. Then for some other reason. And whatever that is, it will be a cause (of some kind) of the existence of the whole. So the existence of the whole is caused, and does not belong to it simply of itself. If we now turn our attention to the parts themselves, we can repeat the argument in their case. Therefore nothing that is composed of parts (whether they are physically separable or not makes no difference to the reasoning) can have its existence of itself. Therefore it has it from another. And this whole reasoning is about existence, not merely coming into existence. In fact, if we suppose that there is a whole which has always existed (as Aristotle thought was true about the “sphere of the fixed stars,” for example), this reasoning shows that such a thing would have always derived its existence from an outside cause, and continues to do so, even though it never came into existence at all. In a similar way, the Fifth Postulate causes the Pythagorean Theorem to be true even though the Pythagorean Theorem never began to be true at some point. Or the number 2 causes all other even numbers to be even, although they never began to be even.

Sometimes people imagine that once a thing exists, it should need no cause of its staying in existence, as if there could be a kind of “ontological inertia”—as though the easiest thing to do is to stay in existence, so no cause is needed to sustain that. I will mention two reasons why that thinking is defective.

First, it simply ignores the arguments showing that there is a cause of the existence of something (such as the argument outlined above showing that anything with parts or anything changeable needs a cause of its existence). Suppose I show that I depend on Euclid’s Fifth Postulate (his so-called “parallel postulate”) not just to come to know the Pythagorean Theorem, but also to know it (which is the case, by the way). Then as long as I know the Pythagorean Theorem, my knowledge of the Fifth Postulate must be at work, too, and cannot have just disappeared. If someone imagined that there might be such a thing as “intellectual inertia,” so that I could just continue to know something after coming to know it, without relying on any prior knowledge anymore, this is simply denying (contrary to fact and without evidence) that there is a cause of my knowing the Pythagorean Theorem. That is ignoring the real relationship between the Theorem and the Postulate—the Postulate does not just cause me to come to know the Theorem, but to know it. So as long as I know the Theorem, my knowledge of the Postulate also exists and operates. Similarly, my desire for health causes my desire for surgery—and it does not merely cause my desire for surgery to begin to be, but simply to be. If my desire for health and life go away before I have surgery, then my desire for surgery will go away, too. To suppose I might have some kind of “appetitive inertia” by which I simply continue to desire things after I have begun to desire them, independently of any influence from any other desire, is simply to ignore the way in which my desire for something like surgery depends on my desire for something like health. The one depends on the other for its being, not just for its coming into being. The same goes for the first cause. The argument outlined above establishes that there is only one thing that has existence of itself, and therefore everything else has existence (and not just coming into existence) from another thing. As long as anything besides the first cause exists, then, the existence that it has is an effect coming forth from the first cause.

Second, this way of thinking overlooks the radical nature of causing the very existence of a substance. If something is causing my very being, and causing the being of everything that is in my substance, then what is there in me that is not being caused by such a thing? What is there in me that is not from this cause? Nothing, of course. So what is there in me that might receive and retain the donation of that cause once that cause has stopped acting? Again, nothing. But nothingness has no power of retaining anything, or any power of any kind. All there is in me is what is from the first cause, so if the first cause stops causing, stops giving, there is nothing left of me. So as long as there is something left of me, the first cause must also be in existence and acting.

I hope that this has been of some use to you, Joseph. Your question is one that I know many people have, and it is a deep and difficult one to which it is impossible, really, to do perfect justice in an online exchange. Nonetheless, I thought it would be better to say something rather than nothing. On the other hand, I judged it wiser to stick to more basic points in the book, since a shorter book that provokes important questions and outlines some answers is probably better than an insufferably long one that no one will read!

Yours,
Michael

NOTE: Today we continue an occasional series of exchanges between Catholic theologian Dr. Michael Augros, author of Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015), and various email interlocutors. Today we share Dr. Augros' response to the question we posted earlier this week. Enjoy!
 

 
Mark,

I think I can address this one with just an email, no attachment. My will is the first cause (of my painting right now) in a qualified way, but not absolutely. Among created causes, it is the first, there is no creature prior to my will that is causing me to will to paint.

But God is causing my will to exist and to have its causal power, for so long as it exists. My will has no other cause than God, no created cause, and in that way it is first among created causes—but all its existence and causal power are continuously coming from God.

Something similar can be said in other cases—there might be a first cause (or many first causes) in nature, with no prior natural cause, but which does depend on some further cause outside nature. A first created cause, or a first natural cause, is not the same as a first cause simply speaking. A first created cause is one with no created cause before it—but one that still has a cause of some kind before it (if indeed it is created!).

How does one see that my will needs a cause of its being, even right now, and hence of its causal power? That flows out of the argument of Chapter 2 in my book, Who Designed the Designer?. (That chapter is also a bit tough.)

As far as Chapter 1 is concerned, it might well be that there are many “first causes” out there, things that depend in no way on any prior cause, but simply exist and act all by themselves. In Chapter 2, I present an argument against that, showing there can really be only a single thing that exists all by itself.

Warm regards,
Michael Augros
 
 
(Image credit: Pexels)

NOTE: Today we continue an occasional series of exchanges between Catholic theologian Dr. Michael Augros, author of Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015), and various email interlocutors. We shared the first question on Wednesday and today we offer Dr. Augros' response. Enjoy!

Hello Mark,

First of all, thank you very much for your interest in my book and for your thought-provoking questions!

Perhaps a good way to approach your questions would be to start with a fresh example or two, and then come back to your specific concerns.

Knowledge and opinion are among the things in our experience that require some kind of cause, so let’s consider these as an illustration of the rule that a series of simultaneously acting causes cannot be without a first cause. Sometimes one thing you know can cause you to know another. That’s what happens when you reason from premises you know to be true. Note, too, that the premises cause you to know the conclusion, and not just to come to know it. If you show me a reason to doubt one of the premises I always relied upon for concluding to the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem, I would realize that I do not really know the Pythagorean Theorem—so my knowing it depends on my knowing that the premises behind it are true, for so long as I know it.

But how do we know the premises prior to any conclusion? Must there always be other premises before them, causing us to know them? If that were so, we could know nothing at all, or not by reasoning. Take our present question, for example. I say that there must be a God:

God exists.

Someone else says “I don’t see that.” So I supply some kind of argument:

God is X.

X exists.

So , God exists.

But now my interlocutor calls my first premise into question. How do I know God is X? In reply to this challenge, I supply another argument of some sort:

God is Z.

Z is X.

So, God is X.

If my challenger now calls one of these new premises into question, I will have to supply still more premises. Suppose I have in stock a whole infinity of premises none of which is convincing to anyone (not even me) by itself. They are all unknown, iffy, questionable, and each one will become known only if something prior to it makes it known. That description applies to every single one of these premises I have in store. If each one of these in-itself-unknown statements follows from prior ones in this infinite list, can the infinity of such premises cause anyone to know their ultimate conclusion? Can we know that “God exists” (or any other true statement) if our knowledge of it depends on an infinity of prior premises, with nothing that is self-evidently true and principle of the whole series of premises?

I say no. And that is not just because we don’t have enough time to go through the whole infinity of premises. Even if you knew what they all said, you still wouldn’t know the truth of the conclusion, so long as no premise in the whole lot had any convincing power of its own. The whole infinity of premises (each one of which follows from certain ones before it in the list) is like one giant thing you don’t know. Introducing more things you do not know to be true, even an infinity of them in a logical chain, cannot cause you to know anything at all.

In this example, as in the others in the book, it is possible to discern the reason why there must be a first cause. Remember, “first cause” here does not mean what is “first in time” (although a first cause might also be first in time, or even causally prior to time itself), but means instead something that is prior to other things in causation, and does not in turn depend on any other cause at all.

The principle or axiom at work here is this: Before anything that is “by another” there must be something “not by another.” To illustrate this axiom:

If a towel is wet, but not simply because it is a towel (and so it is not wet just “by itself,” that is, by being itself), then it is wet “by another,” that is, due to something else, such as the water in it. And that cannot be the whole story—there must be something prior to the towel being wet by another, such as the water in it that is wet by itself, not by something else.

If the coffee is sweet, but not simply because it is coffee (and so it is not sweet just “by itself,” that is, by being coffee), then it is sweet “by another,” that is, due to something else, such as the sugar in it. And prior to the coffee being sweet by another, the sugar is sweet just by itself—it is not sweetened by something else.

If some type of invasive surgery is good for you, but not simply by itself (as though such surgery could be a good option for you regardless of what further results it might or might not bring), then it is good “by another,” that is, due to something else, such as the health that it can restore. And your health is good of itself, not just because of something else it might bring (i.e., it is good by itself, not “by another”). Or if your health is not good of itself, but is good only because of its connection to something else, there still has to be something that is good or desired by you just on its own account, and not purely because of something else, or else nothing will be good for you or desired by you at all.

Now, one has to be careful about how one understands and applies this axiom. It is not always the case that “What is X by another” leads back to “What is X by itself.” For example, “What is held up by another” (e.g. a hat is held up by a nail) does not ultimately lead us back to “What is held up by itself,” but instead leads us back, ultimately, to “What is not held up” at all, such as the earth. The series still terminates in something distinct from all the other members of the series, but not in “What is X by itself,” but simply in “What is not X” and is something else altogether. So we must be aware that this can happen sometimes.

Another example of this: “What is proved by another” does not lead back to “What is proved by itself.” Nothing proves itself. That would involve a contradiction, since in that case the same statement would both need to be proved and would also supply the proof for itself at the same time. Instead, “What is proved by another” goes back ultimately to other statements that simply are not proved—but statements that are still known, because although they are not proved they are self-evidently true.

So in this way “What is by another” must always lead back to “What is by itself”—sometimes “What is X by another” leads back to “What is X by itself” (as “What is sweet by another” goes back to “What is sweet by itself”), and other times “What is X by another” leads back to “What is not X at all, but is Y, by itself” (as “What is proved by another” goes back to “What is not proved, and needs no proof, but is evident by itself”).

(Another example of the latter is the case of things in motion—everything in motion is in motion by another, but this does not go back to what is in motion by itself, or not ultimately, but instead goes back ultimately to what is not in motion at all. But that goes a little deeper than we need to go right now.)

Whew! If you’ve digested that, then let’s apply this now to your first concern in your email. You ask about this argument:

"If there were caused causes, with no first cause, they would constitute a middle with nothing before it.

But it is impossible for there to be a middle with nothing before it.

Therefore, there cannot be caused causes with no first cause."

You ask (in effect) why we cannot deny the first premise. Why not say that we have a series of causes, and each one has a cause before it, so that we have an infinity of causes and no first one at all?

The answer is: because on that supposition, every cause would be a cause “by another,” due to something else, and not just by itself or of itself. Now the axiom illustrated above demands that where there is something “by another” there must also be something that is “not by another,” or something that is “by itself.” Since there are caused causes, that is, things that are causes not just of themselves but only by another, therefore (by the axiom) there must also be, prior to them all, a cause that is a cause “not by another.”

Since this thing is the cause of other things, but it is not made a cause “by another,” its being and causation must either be “caused by itself” or else “not caused at all.” But what is “caused by itself” involves a contradiction, if we take the phrase strictly (supposing the thing does not exist and then causes itself to exist, or somehow continually gives itself its existence). Instead, then, we must say that it is not caused at all—and so it is a cause of other things, but nothing is a cause of it. And that is what a first cause is.

The first premise above is just another way of saying all of this. If there were things that were causes by another (that is, each one is a cause only because something else is making each one to be a cause), but there were nothing that was a cause by itself, then this group of causes would require something before all of them (by the axiom above, and by the supposition that they are all “by another”), and yet there would be nothing before them all (by the supposition that there is no first cause).

I hope that helps with regard to your first concern.

Your second concern is about the entirely separate argument about the maximum in the series, which I stated only very briefly in the book. How can there be a maximum if we assume there is an infinity of causes?

To be clear, I am not making a claim that every infinite set must have a maximum. If we were to speak of the set of all possible instances of the number 3, then that set is infinite in some way, but all the members are all equal. There is no maximum in such a case.

Nor do I think that a set that is unfinished, but which might be added to, has to have a maximum possible member. For example, the set of positive integers. In reality, we can only have a finite number of integers written down or instantiated in things, or so it seems to me. But we can always add the next integer, and there is no “greatest possible integer.”

But if we are talking about a set of things no two of which are equal, and that are (or can be) set out in order, and they all exist simultaneously and in complete reality (they are not mere possibilities, but really existing and acting entities), then the very nature of this completeness demands some sort of maximum. And this is part of what I mean when I speak of a set of things being definite in the way I used that expression in the book.

Let’s look at an example other than the causal series we are particularly concerned about. Suppose I add up the inverse powers of two. As I’m sure you know, this sum can never get as large as 2, no matter how many terms we add, although it can get as close to 2 as we please. One might think that if we only had them all somehow, then we would have exactly 2. But I do not see how this can be so (and neither did Zeno, or Aristotle, or Thomas Aquinas). If we suppose we had them all, then by the very nature of the completeness we are supposing, there must have been a last term added. Now what was this last term? It is either zero, or a finite quantity, or an infinite one. If the last thing added is infinite, then the sum is infinite in magnitude, not 2. If it is some finite quantity, then since an infinity of terms precede it that are all greater than it (since each prior term is double the next), we again have an infinite magnitude. If the last thing added is zero, then since all the terms prior to it are multiples of it, they are all zero as well, and the sum is zero. And no matter what one thinks of this dilemma, one cannot get around this: if we have all of the terms of this series, then thanks to their order and completeness there must be a last term, even if we still try to insist that the members of the series are infinite in multitude.

Much the same thing is true in the case of a series of causes each one of which is caused by the one before it. If we are only talking about a possible series of causes in our heads or imaginations, then indeed there is no limit to the multitude of prior causes we can add. For example, suppose that

A is being caused by B, B by C, C by D, D by E

Can we add another, so that E is being caused by F? Sure. And there is no limit to this, so long as we are talking only about a possible series that might be realized. Consequently, there might also be no maximum, so long as we are talking about certain kinds of causes. For example, if the terms are boxcars, each one being moved by another, there is no general principle of causation that says you can have only 5 of them in a train. Why not 25? Or 9,867? There might be special reasons of physics that limit the number, but that is another matter.

But once we suppose we are talking about a real causal series (outside our heads) that is finished, complete, and functioning, we have committed ourselves. Even if we suppose there is an infinity of boxcars moving on the tracks (again, there might be physical impossibilities besides the metaphysical ones, but let’s not worry about that for the moment), there must be a complete causation, since the effect is being produced. That means all the causes of this effect, the ones presently producing it and necessary in order to produce it right now, are presently existing. So it is not a matter of some abstract series we might add to in our heads. It is all here. And even if we suppose it includes an infinity of boxcars, each pulling the one after it and being pulled by the one before it, we must admit that something makes the causal series complete and functional (this will be the reason, for example, that the whole series of cars is moving one way rather than the other way). But no single boxcar does that. So something else does. Whatever this is, it is the cause of the whole shebang, and so it is most of all a cause (a maximum in causation). And since it is more a cause than anything else, and is a cause of all the causation of all the other causes, there can be nothing that is a cause of it. So it is uncaused.

You voice a third difficulty:

"I am also having problems understanding how the first cause necessarily needs to still exist with us today. To tweak your train analogy, if the engine, which you designate the first cause, spontaneously exploded and the explosion pushed all the connected boxcars on a frictionless railroad track indefinitely, we would still have the same chain of causes and effects but with an initial mover that no longer exists."

Let’s consider a simpler case similar to your exploding engine—a thrown baseball. While a baseball is being thrown by me, its motion is caused by me. As soon as I release it, its motion is no longer being caused by me. I could die of a stroke, and the ball will keep going, especially if I throw it out in space where there is nothing to slow it down, or not much. So you could find my baseball, or Voyager II, still moving out in space long after the causes that got these things going have vanished out of existence.

As soon as we are thinking along those lines, we have stopped thinking about a series of essentially ordered and presently acting causes. We are thinking about things that used to be acting causes, and are no longer. The question about a “first cause” (where this is defined as first in causation, not in time), however, is precisely about causes acting now, in the present, not about series of things going back into the past. If I am painting somebody’s portrait, we find a series of causes like this:

My Brush : My Hand : My Brain : My will ...

These causes are working together in the present, not one after another in time. This is the kind of series that cannot go on through an infinity of causes without a first cause. It might also be true that we have a kind of series of causes like this:

Me painting right now : My parents conceiving me : Their parents conceiving them ...

If my parents had never conceived me, I would not be here and I would not be painting this portrait. And if their parents had never conceived them, they would never have been, and I would never have come to be, and I would not be painting this portrait right now.

But this is a very different kind of series! In the first series, all the causes are working together at the same time. In the second series, the causes work successively, and not at the same time. In the first series, each cause is being given its causal power by the prior cause (the one named next in the series). My brush is producing the painting only because my hand is causing it to do so. But that is not what is happening with the second series. I am not painting this portrait because my parents are conceiving me right now. Although I must have been conceived in the past if I am to be painting now in the present, the act of conceiving me does not cause my act of painting. That is why I get more credit (or blame) for the painting than my parents do.

The arguments of Thomas Aquinas (and others) for the existence of a divine being are about causal series like the first one, not like the second one. It is in a series of that kind that God is called a “first cause.” And that is why he is more a cause of the world than are any of the secondary causes in between, just as I am more a cause of the portrait than is the brush I am using. (If you are interested in the terminology, the first kind of causal series is said to be ordered per se, the second per accidens, since in the first type each member is a cause of the next thing being a cause, not just a cause of a thing that later happens to be a cause.)

Coming back, now, to your tweaked version of the story of the train. Let us suppose that an engine (or whatever cause) has gotten a train going by pushing it, and then it is decoupled from the train of boxcars and they keep going along the tracks for some time. Certainly that can happen. I talk about similar cases in the book. A carpenter can build a house and then die on the way home, yet the house continues to exist without the carpenter. But that is because the carpenter is only a cause of the house coming into existence, not a cause of its continuing in existence. The carpenter causes the house to come to be, not simply to be. The engine is the cause of the train accelerating, or of its terminal velocity coming to be, not of its maintaining that terminal velocity.

So we must now ask: what is the cause of the train’s continuing in motion, now that the engine is no longer causing its motion?

One answer we might give (and this answer is often given) is “There is no cause of its motion—the motion needed a cause to bring it into existence, but once it exists, it continues on its own with no need of any cause whatsoever.” I try to show that this is false in chapters 2 and 3 of the book. But I can say something briefly here that might be helpful. If I pour milk into a glass, it takes on the shape of the glass—I caused the milk to take on that new shape. If I die right afterward, the milk continues to have that same shape, but this is no longer due to me. Does it follow that the milk now continues in that shape just of itself, due to no cause whatsoever? Not at all. There is still a cause. It continuously depends on the glass in order to continue to have the shape of the glass. So just because one cause is responsible only for the coming-to-be of something, and no more, does not mean there is no other cause at work that might be responsible for its continuing to be. The same goes for the motion of the train. The engine is not needed in order for the train to continue to move. That does not prove that there is no cause of its continuing to move.

Your question about the train brings out that the train of boxcars owes its motion to something other than just the engine. I must agree, of course, since I think that God is the cause of all things whatsoever other than himself, including the motion of the train and the existence of the engine (and the laws of physics inherent in its materials and in the surrounding space, etc.). But the train illustration, like the one with the chain and the lamp, is not supposed to get us back to the absolutely first cause of all things. It is only meant to illustrate the point that what is “by another” must take us back to what is “not by another,” just as the boxcars that are “moved by another car in the train” must take us back to what is “not moved by another car in the train,” namely the engine. So too what is “caused by another cause” must take us back to what is “not caused by another cause.”

Even if we supposed that the train is no longer being moved by anything, but just is in motion by itself without any cause whatsoever, we would be admitting that we have found a being and a cause which has no presently existing cause of any kind—the motion of the train, which we are supposing just exists by itself (and causes any number of effects), without being caused by anything. This is not true, but it concedes the main point of Ch.1, namely that there has to be at least one cause in existence that is not presently being caused by anything at all.

If the foregoing remarks seem too indigestible at points, you can simplify the question by asking yourself whether you think you can know anything through proof from an infinity of premises. If you see the impossibility of that, and see that the impossibility is not merely a matter of time constraints, then you are well on your way.

Thank you again, Mark, for your interest in the book, and for your intelligent questions. I do not always answer email inquiries about it, but I do my best to respond to thoughtful and honest concerns such as yours.

Warm regards,
Michael Augros
 
 
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On Monday, I put forward five common objections regarding attempts to prove God's existence. Today, I'll respond to each of them.

Objection 1: “Proof in general is impossible, since we must trust our brains.”

Like A.J. Ayer’s principle of verification, this idea self-destructs. Can we trust this reasoning, which leads the objector to think that we must first run our brains through a thorough certification process before we can trust our own reasoning? If so, we can reason in a trustworthy manner before any such process after all. If not, then we needn’t bother about the objector’s conclusion.

This objection is also similar to one posed by Immanuel Kant. Whether on the grounds that he cannot give a reason to believe he is awake rather than dreaming or on the grounds that he has seen The Matrix or seen Star Trek or read about phantom limbs, or read Descartes, anyone who seriously thinks that our brains and senses and reason might not be in any way trustworthy until we find a way to establish their trustworthiness independently of trusting them is beyond the help this post aims to provide. I openly and unapologetically presume an audience of readers who think they know they exist, that the world exists, and that many other specific things in it exist.

Objection 2: “Proof of god’s existence is either useless or impossible.”

I admit it is impossible to prove that there is in reality a being to whom all the divine predicates found in the Bible belong. I also concede that proving the existence of a divine being in a general sort of way, such as I have done in my book, Who Designed the Designer?, is, at least by itself, grossly inadequate for winning anyone a place among the saints. But that is a far cry from saying it is altogether useless. Such arguments could help prepare the way for faith in someone who has been hitherto struggling intellectually with the idea of god. They can help believers answer much of the ridicule of atheists. And aside from any apologetic purposes to which they might be put, they are incredibly interesting things in themselves. Were they ever so useless for compelling other people to admit their conclusions, I would still want to understand them for myself.

Objection 3: “Proof is useless in general, being incapable of moving the heart.”

See the reply to objection 2 above. Otherwise, I will add only this: A pastrami sandwich is generally useless for banging in a nail. That doesn’t mean a pastrami sandwich is generally useless.

Objection 4: “Proof is unnecessary, since god’s existence is accessible by the much surer means of religious experience.”

Anyone who truly enjoys an experiential and personal connection with god possesses a certainty about god’s existence that is superior to and independent of the kind afforded by any philosophical arguments. Possibly, to such a person, such arguments will appear dry, cold, and abstract. But in my work and through my book, I am not in the business of offering people a personal connection with god. Without denying or disdaining such a thing, I am up to something else. And the something else (up to which I am) is of more use to those who have intellectual struggles with the idea of god, or who simply wonder about the rational path to god, than any religious experience of mine could ever be.

Objection 5: “Proof is unnecessary, since god’s existence is self-evident.”

The thought presented in the objection is that of Anselm of Canterbury, or very like it. While Anselm was not exactly trying to prove god’s existence to himself, this particular thought sequence of his is one of the many (and quite different!) arguments brought under the confusing and showy label “Ontological Proof of God’s Existence”. Ever since the time of Anselm, there have been people who believed in the soundness of this thinking precisely as a proof of god’s existence or of the self-evidence of his existence. Even today there are plenty of logicians who find the argument compelling. (Would that they were right! It certainly is short and sweet.) A surprising amount of literature exists on the argument, and probably there will always be erudite people who are convinced by it. There are several important insights connected to it. Nonetheless, insofar as it is supposed to be a proof for god’s existence, or for the self-evidence of his existence, I side with those who consider it a failure.

One reason for its failure is that “the being to which no superior can be conceived” might simply be the universe, for all the argument shows. If someone says, “Ah, but an intelligent creator would be even better than that!”, we have to wonder how we know that an intelligent creator is better and also how it is even possible. Perhaps a creator is impossible; perhaps the universe is self-existent and is the supreme sum of all things, and hence, nothing truly possible and truly conceivable could be better. Or, if an intelligent creator would be superior to the universe, why not ten or fifty intelligent creators? Wouldn’t that be ten or fifty times better still? If that is not possible, or not better, the Anselmian argument does not tell us why.

And then there is that premise: if a being whose superior cannot be conceived does not exist in reality, then we can think of a superior—namely, a being whose superior cannot be conceived existing in reality. Ah, but would this really be superior, if it is in fact an impossibility? How do we know that this weird formula does not contain a hidden self-contradiction, as “greatest prime number” and “thirty-sided perfect solid” do? It seems we need to supplement the argument with quite a bit of information about what makes something better than another, and what makes a thing of some given description truly possible and conceivable rather than a mere agglomeration of words.

There are other shortcomings in the argument, but it is not worth getting into them here. Were the Anselmian argument quite sound, after all, it would just mean that my main theses in my book are entirely correct; I just took a lot more trouble than was strictly necessary to establish them. I took the long way around. The scenic route. I could live with that, were it so.
 
 
Adapted from Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015) by Dr. Michael Augros. Copyright 2014, Ignatius Press. Reprinted with permission.
 
 
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Today, I put forward five common objections regarding attempts to prove God's existence. The first three typically come from skeptics and the last two from believers.

Though I don't agree with these objections, I've tried to articulate them fairly and as strongly as possible. On Wednesday, I will share a follow-up article responding to each of them.

Objection 1: “Proof in general is impossible, since we must trust our brains.”

All our knowledge depends on trusting our senses and our brains. For all we know, each of us is just a program in a computer, or a brain in a vat with evil scientists subjecting us to a virtual reality of their own creation, or we might in some other way be victims of a Matrix-like prank. To have perfect certainty about anything (which is what proof implies), we would first have to be sure that our senses and brains are trustworthy organs of knowledge bringing us real information about real things, and we would have to come to this knowledge without relying on our senses and our brains, which is impossible.

Objection 2: “Proof of god’s existence is either useless or impossible.”

It is useless if it proves only that there is some sort of divine being without identifying it with any particular god known to us through some religious tradition; impossible if it means proving that the god of some particular religion really exists as described by that religion. For example, if someone proves that there is an intelligent first cause of all things but does not prove furthermore that this being had special dealings with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and sent his only Son to redeem mankind from their sins et cetera, that is useless knowledge, since it does not tell us how we might be saved or gain eternal life or become in any way better off. On the other hand, it would be impossible to prove that such a being had special dealings with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—it is not even possible to prove, in any strong sense, that Abraham existed. Such statements are bound up with the inaccessible past, which we can know, if at all, only by very tenuous inferences and with a good deal of trust in certain authorities.

Objection 3: “Proof is useless in general, being incapable of moving the heart.”

Even if someone became convinced of the truth of the Jewish faith, or the Christian, or the Islamic, or some other, it remains that the manner in which he becomes convinced by “proof ” leaves him cold and indifferent—merely assenting to statements and not yet willing to devote his life to the things assented to. And that will not do him any good. A living and ardent faith is what is needed to please god. And where there is faith, there is no need for proof.

Objection 4: “Proof is unnecessary, since god’s existence is accessible by the much surer means of religious experience.”

Anyone who comes to love god and to converse with him regularly in prayer receives in return over the course of a lifetime some degree of experience of the presence of god and becomes as sure of god’s existence as he is of the existence of his other friends. This experiential knowledge is surer and more intimate and better than any cold, logical “proof ” that reasons from effects to causes.

Objection 5: “Proof is unnecessary, since god’s existence is self-evident.”

It is impossible to think god does not exist, given what the word god means: a being whose superior cannot be conceived. If such a being existed only in our minds, then we could easily think of a superior—namely, such a being existing outside our minds as well. Consequently, having thought of a superior, we would have to say that “a being whose superior cannot be conceived” turned out to be also “a being whose superior can be conceived”. But that is a contradiction and is plainly absurd. Hence, it is entirely unthinkable that god does not exist. Accordingly, no argument from effects to causes is needed.
 
 
Adapted from Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015) by Dr. Michael Augros. Copyright 2014, Ignatius Press. Reprinted with permission.
 
 
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Some atheists will object to arguments for God by observing, "If a particular proof for God is so strong, why doesn't it convince everyone?"

This objection is perhaps the most prevalent, and the cheapest one to make, yet a complete answer to it involves several components and is also interesting in its own right.

This objector presents the theist with a dilemma: either I must pretend to be a supergenius like none the world has ever seen, presenting new and amazing arguments for God’s existence that will, for the first time ever, convince everyone and bring hordes of atheists to their knees, or, less flatteringly, I must countenance the possibility that I am a hack with prodigious ignorance of the failures of past thinkers and arguments concerning this matter.

Well, I freely confess I am no supergenius. The arguments in my recent book, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015), convincing as I take them to be, are not my own inventions. Practically all of them come from a great tradition of thinkers that began with the pre-Socratic philosophers and acquired fresh vigor with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, then continued through Boethius, the great Arab Aristotelians, and Aquinas, and lives on today in various universities around the world.

But if any of these arguments is truly a proof, then why has none been universally accepted? Why do so many smart people continue to reject them all?

Before I answer that question, it is only fair to note that since the time of Aquinas, if not since the time of Aristotle, there has always been a significant number of philosophers in the world who have accepted arguments like those in my book as successful proofs. That is roughly twenty-three centuries of measurable success. Somehow such reasonings persist down through the ages, convincing thousands of great minds in every generation along the way, some of whom were originally atheists. It is simply a matter of fact, in other words, that the arguments do convince many smart people and have done so since they first saw the light of day. That still leaves us with the unconvinced philosophers to account for, of course.

Some who go by the name philosophers are quacks, and we need not concern ourselves with what they think. Many others struggle with a willful attachment to atheism. Unlike any mathematical truth, the truth about God’s existence or nonexistence is profoundly relevant to everyone’s conception of goodness and happiness and purpose. Not only God but many other things considered by philosophers and not mathematicians possess this potentially life-altering character—a fact perceived most keenly by the philosophers themselves. Hence, there is a possibility of desire influencing thought in philosophical questions where there is no correspondingly strong element of desire in mathematical investigations. We should not expect, in other words, that even the most solid and genuine proofs of philosophy will enjoy the same universal convincing power as those in mathematics. In philosophical matters, even genuine proofs can be surrounded by obstacles nowhere to be found in the world of mathematics.

But if we continue scanning the people who have been called philosophers, after leaving aside quacks and those whose thinking is unduly shaped or inhibited by desire or prejudice one way or the other, we will still find a number of them left to be explained. There are many philosophers in the world who do not go about promoting arguments like those in my book and are nevertheless neither quacks nor particularly attached to atheism. What can be said about those?

It seems to me that most of them simply have never heard the arguments. This might at first sound incredible. Practically everyone who can read has heard of Aristotle, and most people have heard of Aquinas. Then how can there be nonquack philosophers who have not studied Aristotle’s or Aquinas’ arguments for God’s existence? The answer is not far to seek. We must remember that philosophy is an enormous enterprise with a history spanning well over two thousand years and that modern education encourages specialization. That is a recipe guaranteeing significant lacunae in every philosopher’s intellectual formation. I believe it was Konrad Lorenz who said, “Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.” Not every philosopher winds up as bad as all that, but some degree of specialization is necessary, and consequently a generous dose of ignorance of one’s own general field is inevitable. Much the same is true in science. A particle physicist might be as ignorant as I am about the Krebs cycle of respiration or of the chemical formula for caffeine. A Kant expert might hardly have read two words of Aristotle. Even an expert in Aristotle’s logical works might know next to nothing about his ethical and political writings.

There are also powerful academic disincentives for anyone who might be tempted to study Aristotle or Aquinas at all with a view to finding out the truth. One of these is that Aristotle and Aquinas are both thinkers from the distant past. That is sufficient evidence for most people, even most of those who go into philosophy these days, that their thinking is in all ways outmoded. It doesn’t help matters that they were geocentrists. The result is that the study of them is widely regarded as an exercise in the history of thought, not so much a properly philosophical enterprise. But if we do bother to read them, we find in their writings more than geocentrism and similarly outdated ideas (which, by the way, they themselves regarded as hypotheses and distinguished sharply from philosophical truths that they considered absolutely certain and timeless). In Aquinas we find that the statements emphasized and insisted upon are not those like “Earth is at the center of the universe” but those of another type. I mean self-evident statements, such as “Nothing gives what it does not have” and “Among things actually existing but unequal, one must be the maximum” and also the necessary consequences of these. Such statements remain as true as ever. They are not time sensitive. And they have nothing to do with geocentrism.

Nonetheless, a thoughtlessly inherited prejudice against reading “ancient” and “medieval” thinkers for genuine insights into reality persists in modern universities, as it has now for at least a century or two. And so indeed the God-philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas is read by a bare minimum of today’s philosophers and read with any degree of care and open-mindedness by far fewer still. That is why Christopher Hitchens (who was not a philosopher) could mention the word geocentrist and consider Aristotle and Aquinas quite dispatched by it. It is also why Richard Dawkins (also not a philosopher) can grossly misrepresent Aquinas’ five ways while provoking hardly a squawk from any but a handful of philosophers. And it is also why Bertrand Russell (who was a philosopher) could set up a mere straw man and call it the “argument of the First Cause”.

Now let’s sum that all up. Unlike most mathematical questions, the God question is among those that affect human desires, and so it inevitably becomes the object of prejudices, intellectual fashions, educational policies, social trends, laws, obnoxious religiosity, and other cultural phenomena that can skew our thinking about it in either direction, for or against God. That philosophers do not all agree about it is therefore no proof that it lies beyond the sphere of inherently decidable (and decided) questions. The disagreement is instead largely due to other causes, such as those I have been describing. To suppose that the failure of an argument for God to convince some thinkers is necessarily the fault of the argument, before even identifying such a fault, is therefore a lazy assumption valued only by those who would avoid having to understand the argument itself.
 
 
Adapted from Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015) by Dr. Michael Augros. Copyright 2014, Ignatius Press. Reprinted with permission.
 
 
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