This is an argument I just can’t make work, but I can’t shake the idea there is something to it.
If the principle of causality is that all potencies are brought to act by something else, AND act and potency are understood as reducing existence and essence, then the possibility of causality will rest on the possibility of an essence identical with existence.
Take the 24 Thomistic theses. It seems like they want to base the whole system on the division of pure existence from composites of essence and existence. If even causality is to be understood in light of this distinction, it seems to me what we are saying is that the recognition of (at least the possibility of) an essence that is the same as its existence is analytically prior to our notion of causality. The recognition of the possibility of pure existence is thus presupposed to the account we give of causality.
The upshot of this is that causal axioms ultimately reduce to the recognition of the possibility of necessary existence i.e. essence identified with its existence. A theistic proof thus amounts to this: causes are actual, so the basis of causality is actual; but the basis of causality is necessary existence.
I find this interesting because if theistic proof really rests on the possibility of existence/essence identity, then it seems we should be able to make a contemporary ontological argument work if a cosmological one does; or perhaps, a la Kant, we could deny essence/existence identity and take it as denying the basis of cosmological arguments.
Kevin Gallagher said,
January 8, 2013 at 5:37 pm
This is a real head-scratcher! But since it’s always amateur hour on the Internet, I guess I may as well leave a comment.
I am convinced — and surprised — by the argument that notions of causality entail the existence of pure act. But this still seems like an a posteriori argument, maybe one that could be reconstructed like this:
“If there were no cause that were also pure act, there could be no actual effects. But there are actual effects. Therefore etc.”
Now I agree that the major premise is correct — but is it analytic of the notion of cause? I think not, since the idea of a cause is compatible with having act from another. (If an infinite causal regress offends us, it is not because any one of the causes in the chain is impossible.) Even if we think the premise is analytic, however, this argument for pure act still requires that there be actual effects.
I suppose I’m trying to shoehorn your argument into that of Ia q2 a1; I have in mind St Thomas’s explanation of the ways God’s existence both is and is not self-evident.
James Chastek said,
January 8, 2013 at 6:25 pm
Does part II change anything?
Kevin Gallagher said,
January 8, 2013 at 8:31 pm
Indeed it does.
By careful consideration of the ways we’ve abstracted it from sense we can try to make metaphysics manageable — but it remains a divine science.
Brandon Watson said,
January 8, 2013 at 6:44 pm
At least roughly related to Kevin’s question, would another way of putting your suggestion here be that the argument about God in De ente et essentia serves as the universal template for all cosmological arguments?
James Chastek said,
January 8, 2013 at 9:57 pm
Brandon,
Yes: the argument I kept trying to make work is that a cosmological argument is not possible unless we assume that it is at least possible for there to be an identity of essence and esse; but I could never make the logic quite work out. I kept thinking that one simply proved such a being was possible by proving it was actual through the definition of “first efficient cause”, as STA does in ST 1.3.4.
Kevin,
Maybe. At the moment I’m leaning towards thinking that abstraction is properly a mode of knowing things beneath the human mind, and so it is not an adequate epistemological theory to explain how we get an idea of being. There even seems to be a neo-thomist consensus about this so far as they all say being is abstracted by “an imperfect abstraction” (since every abstraction is from something that exists) Again, there are texts where STA distinguishes abstraction from other modes of knowing on the basis of whether the object is beneath man or not. Don’t ask me for citations…. but their there. Promise.
Michael W. Hannon said,
January 8, 2013 at 11:32 pm
Might I suggest Etienne Gilson’s The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, particularly the early section on God’s existence? In it, Gilson unpacks a similar line of thinking, but ultimately concludes it is not an argument for God’s existence so much as the necessary underpinnings of all such arguments, and a predictable rational addendum to them.
I think Kevin is right in his initial post that this probably isn’t an “ontological” argument in the a prioristic sense, because even though the identity of God’s existence and essence (or, better put, the actuality of the pure existent not constrained by any limiting essence at all) is self-evident in itself, still we can come to know this truth only through sensory abstractions and rational deductions that put us squarely in a posterioristic grounds, and can do so only after garnering knowledge sufficient to advance a cosmological argument as well, making this trajectory supplemental at best, superfluous at worst.
Pax et bonum.