Can God Be Its Own Cause?
First cause arguments and human conceiving
In a blog post from April 2015, I stated that knowing anything about
humans and their religions immediately raises two questions: (1) Why are
there so many religions? and (2) Why are religious
people so immune to data contravening their religion? The preceding
blog addressed the first question. In this blog, we address the second
question.
The answer to question two isn’t just “DNA.” Yes, we are programmed via our evolutionary history to be religious – religion is an adaptation. But how exactly does that work? We humans have mighty brains capable of great feats of insight, creativity, reasoning, cleverness . . . and denying. How do we do these? Concepts. Since concepts are involved, there is plenty of work here for psychologists. Let’s consider a specific question in a specific argument for God: Aquinas’s First Cause Argument for God, often called the Cosmological Argument.
In his last decade, the Catholic priest St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) labored steadily on his Summa Theologica (Summary of Theology). He never finished it. Yet it is his most famous and important work; it summarizes a sizable portion of Christian theology at the time. A significant part of its fame rests on its five arguments for the existence of the central Christian deity we’ll just call God. (Quick side bar: It has always puzzled me that one would have to argue for the existence of God (or any other deity). A being of the magnificence of God would be obvious to the most casual observer. The standard Christian reply is that this puzzle ignores the Fall—the original sin of Adam and Eve. Except there never was any Adam or Eve (humans evolved) and therefore there was no one to do the original sinning and hence no original sin. And I’m ignoring here the large moral argument against any notion of original sin.) Here now is the Cosmological Argument.
It is obvious to us that everything that exists was caused to exist by something else. From rocks to plants to frogs to people, everything was caused to exist. The universe exists. Therefore, the universe must have been caused to exist by something else. But this causal chain cannot extend backwards in time infinitely, therefore there had to be a first cause. This cause must be God.
Another version concerns not causation in general, but caused motion. It is obvious to us that many things in our world are in motion. We also know that whatever moves is moved by something else. But this chain of movers cannot extend backwards in time infinitely, therefore there had to be a first mover, a prime mover (to use Aristotle’s term). This first mover must be God.
So God is both an uncaused causer and an unmoved mover.
It is widely known and well accepted that logically, these arguments do not succeed. Both commit the fallacy of begging the question (assuming what they want to prove) when they say “this chain cannot extend backwards to infinity” and the fallacy of non sequitur when they conclude that the uncaused (unmoved) causer (mover) must be God -- couldn’t it be a computer or some demigod like Thor? Nevertheless the Cosmological Argument continues to hold sway over human thinking. Why?
The perennial appeal of the Cosmological Argument results from a perfect storm of human conceptual ability: we have trouble correctly conceiving of infinity, especially, negative temporal infinity, infinity extending backwards in time, and we can easily conceive of a being who was the author of all movement but who itself was never caused to move nor to exist.
First, infinity. The problems humans have conceiving infinity would fill a (presumably finite) book. Perhaps the most striking truth about infinity is that it comes in sizes. That’s right: some infinities are bigger than others. Also, other infinite collections which seem intuitively larger than one another are provably the same size. When restricted to numbers, most of these facts were first proved by the great mathematician, Georg Canto.
The answer to question two isn’t just “DNA.” Yes, we are programmed via our evolutionary history to be religious – religion is an adaptation. But how exactly does that work? We humans have mighty brains capable of great feats of insight, creativity, reasoning, cleverness . . . and denying. How do we do these? Concepts. Since concepts are involved, there is plenty of work here for psychologists. Let’s consider a specific question in a specific argument for God: Aquinas’s First Cause Argument for God, often called the Cosmological Argument.
In his last decade, the Catholic priest St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) labored steadily on his Summa Theologica (Summary of Theology). He never finished it. Yet it is his most famous and important work; it summarizes a sizable portion of Christian theology at the time. A significant part of its fame rests on its five arguments for the existence of the central Christian deity we’ll just call God. (Quick side bar: It has always puzzled me that one would have to argue for the existence of God (or any other deity). A being of the magnificence of God would be obvious to the most casual observer. The standard Christian reply is that this puzzle ignores the Fall—the original sin of Adam and Eve. Except there never was any Adam or Eve (humans evolved) and therefore there was no one to do the original sinning and hence no original sin. And I’m ignoring here the large moral argument against any notion of original sin.) Here now is the Cosmological Argument.
It is obvious to us that everything that exists was caused to exist by something else. From rocks to plants to frogs to people, everything was caused to exist. The universe exists. Therefore, the universe must have been caused to exist by something else. But this causal chain cannot extend backwards in time infinitely, therefore there had to be a first cause. This cause must be God.
Another version concerns not causation in general, but caused motion. It is obvious to us that many things in our world are in motion. We also know that whatever moves is moved by something else. But this chain of movers cannot extend backwards in time infinitely, therefore there had to be a first mover, a prime mover (to use Aristotle’s term). This first mover must be God.
So God is both an uncaused causer and an unmoved mover.
It is widely known and well accepted that logically, these arguments do not succeed. Both commit the fallacy of begging the question (assuming what they want to prove) when they say “this chain cannot extend backwards to infinity” and the fallacy of non sequitur when they conclude that the uncaused (unmoved) causer (mover) must be God -- couldn’t it be a computer or some demigod like Thor? Nevertheless the Cosmological Argument continues to hold sway over human thinking. Why?
The perennial appeal of the Cosmological Argument results from a perfect storm of human conceptual ability: we have trouble correctly conceiving of infinity, especially, negative temporal infinity, infinity extending backwards in time, and we can easily conceive of a being who was the author of all movement but who itself was never caused to move nor to exist.
First, infinity. The problems humans have conceiving infinity would fill a (presumably finite) book. Perhaps the most striking truth about infinity is that it comes in sizes. That’s right: some infinities are bigger than others. Also, other infinite collections which seem intuitively larger than one another are provably the same size. When restricted to numbers, most of these facts were first proved by the great mathematician, Georg Canto.
The troubles with negative temporal infinity are easily seen. The
central problem is that now is a definite moment in time. Could it be
that this now was preceded by an infinite number earlier nows? Suppose
you are standing on a large flat plain. In front of you is the end of a
chain of dominoes going off to your left. As you stand there, you hear
far off to the left the sound of dominoes falling. Finally the
cascading domino chain comes to the domino right in front of you,
whereupon the penultimate domino knocks over the domino right in front
of you. Call that falling domino now. Can you imagine that
the domino chain is infinitely long to your left? This is probably
rather difficult. Call this the one-sided-domino-infinity. It is
somewhat easier to imagine that you are standing in front of an infinite
domino chain, which is infinite both to your left and to your right,
and that the falling of the dominoes, one falling against the next,
comes up from the left to where you are standing and then carries on to
your right. Again, call the domino that fell right in front of you now.
Call this the two-sided-domino-infinity. It is strange that the
one-sided domino infinity is much harder to imagine that the two-sided
version, especially since Cantor proved that these two chains of
dominoes are exactly the same size; they have the exact same number of
dominoes (check out the proof that the set of counting numbers, {1, 2,
3, . . . }, is the same size as the set of integers {. . . -3, -2, -1,
0, 1, 2, 3 . . . }). Psychologists, especially cognitive
psychologists, have not weighed in much on precisely why humans have so
much trouble correctly conceiving of infinity. For most of us, our
concepts of infinity are quite confused. Consequently, the notion of an
infinite chain of causes extending backwards forever but ending at here
and now eludes us.
Now for the unmoved mover. Here the situation is reversed, oddly. We can easily imagine a being who has existed forever but which, some finite amount of time ago, authored all of other things that exist, or a being which was never caused to move, but was the author of all other movement in this universe. Again, this sort of imagining or conceiving would benefit greatly from the scrutiny of cognitive psychologists. How is it that we can in the same breath say “all motion was caused by something else” and also “except for the first mover, which just caused itself to move”? We are not flatly contradicting ourselves: we are not saying both that all things were caused and something (God) was not caused (although, some versions of the Cosmological Argument do seem to make this error). Rather, we are saying that God is self-caused and is itself a self-mover. And we do this even though self-causation and self-moving are very strange notions that do not appear coherent upon close scrutiny. How is it that we can easily imagine a self-causing deity but have trouble seeing that the set of integers and the set of counting numbers are the same size?
Now for the unmoved mover. Here the situation is reversed, oddly. We can easily imagine a being who has existed forever but which, some finite amount of time ago, authored all of other things that exist, or a being which was never caused to move, but was the author of all other movement in this universe. Again, this sort of imagining or conceiving would benefit greatly from the scrutiny of cognitive psychologists. How is it that we can in the same breath say “all motion was caused by something else” and also “except for the first mover, which just caused itself to move”? We are not flatly contradicting ourselves: we are not saying both that all things were caused and something (God) was not caused (although, some versions of the Cosmological Argument do seem to make this error). Rather, we are saying that God is self-caused and is itself a self-mover. And we do this even though self-causation and self-moving are very strange notions that do not appear coherent upon close scrutiny. How is it that we can easily imagine a self-causing deity but have trouble seeing that the set of integers and the set of counting numbers are the same size?
Perhaps part of the answer is due to our childhood development (guided by our genetic endowment). Perhaps as infants our parents
seemed uncaused, while we seemed clearly caused or at least causally
dependent. Furthermore, most of us naturally believe in freewill in some
form. All these forms entail that we ourselves are causal initiators.
So, to conceive of God, all we have to do is to conceive of ourselves
as initiators, then abstract and generalize (which we humans are
excellent at) – we abstract and generalize first to our parents (they
are uncaused causers), and then go a bit beyond them. Voila!, God.
Given our troubles with infinity and our lack of trouble with the bizarre notion of self-causation, conceiving of God as some sort of first causer is nearly inevitable. Adding in our adaptive predilection for magical thinking, especially in finding intentional causal agents for everything from diseases to solar eclipses, and you have a species of African ape that is as naturally religious as it is a language user. Such a species will find any evidence against the existence of deities completely unpersuasive.
Given our troubles with infinity and our lack of trouble with the bizarre notion of self-causation, conceiving of God as some sort of first causer is nearly inevitable. Adding in our adaptive predilection for magical thinking, especially in finding intentional causal agents for everything from diseases to solar eclipses, and you have a species of African ape that is as naturally religious as it is a language user. Such a species will find any evidence against the existence of deities completely unpersuasive.
