Posted: Jan 05, 2015 10:09 pm
THWOTH wrote:John Platko wrote:
Yes, I'm easily confused by atemporal causation.
Okay.
The beginning of the universe - if it ever happened - was also, by definition, the beginning of time. Any cause this event would have - assuming that it had a cause - would necessarily be atemporal. That is, if we are tracing the chain of causation back to the beginning of time the chain ends there. There is no "before" the beginning of time for a cause of the beginning of time to occupy.
Either we are dealing with some as-yet-to-be-explained kind of atemporal "cause" that somehow sidesteps this problem, or the beginning of time was a causeless event, or time has no beginning.
Not that I want to defend WLC's argument, but when I hear it, I imagine a framework of time that is at a higher level than the time in our current universe. Taking God out of the picture for a moment. Imagine if our universe was cyclical, expanding from a point to an apex and then collapsing (this is just a thought experiment to explain the concept of hierarchal time) back to a point, over and over again forever. Then, each expansion would have a reference time, but in the bigger picture each expansion and collapse could be plotted on a higher time scale. I imagine WLC's argument of causation to be temporal with this big picture view of time in mind. In WLC's case, God's frame of reference for time.
And this is in contrast with St. Thomas Aquinas's view of causation which is simultaneous in time. That is, the cause and effect that many claim St. Thomas was referring to traces back to the prime mover in the same instant of time- which feels like a kind of atemporal cause and effect to me because there is no delta t in the before and after.
Given that no one has managed to put forth an idea of what the fuck an atemporal cause even is, the two latter options sound more plausible.
I think St. Thomas's (this too was probably one of Aristotle's ideas) notion of an effect that is simultaneous with cause is a pretty good stab at a concept of atemporal cause and effect.
Like Kant's cannonball on the cushion, each acting simulteneously, aa a cause and effect, on the other?
Not exactly. As I understand it, Kant didn't give temporal priority to either the cannonball or the cushion, that is, in Kant's case there is no cause and effect that can be determined.
In the case of the Aquinas apologists, there is a cause and effect priority. Furthermore, this simultaneous cause and effect trace back to God. It goes something like: A ball is held up by the cushion it rests on, which is held up by the chair it rest on, which is held up by the floor it rests on, which is held up by the earth, which is ... God. When push comes to shove, this is the corner Aquinas apologists back into. Apparently, Aquinas didn't think one could use metaphysics to prove the universe had a beginning. He didn't believe that metaphysics could prove that a sequence like grandfather, father, son, etc. (what he and his bud Aristotle called an accidental series of causes) had to be finite. Which is odd because Aristotle made a fairly clever argument why it's impossible to traverse an infinite discrete series in finite time.
Which is bollocks of course.