Theism is true

So, change occurs, and any change requires a cause; or to put it less colloquially but more precisely, some potentials are actualized, and when they are, there must be something already actual which actualizes them.

Notice that often what is true of the thing being changed is also true of the thing changing it. The coolness of the air in the room makes the coffee cold. But the coolness of the air was itself merely potential until the air conditioner actualized it. The flick of your wrist causes the flyswatter to come down hard, and its impact in turn kills the fly. But the flick of your wrist was itself merely potential until the firing of certain motor neurons actualized it. So, when something causes a change, that is sometimes because it is undergoing a change itself; and when that is the case, that change too requires a changer. Or, once again to put things less colloquially but more precisely, sometimes when a potential is being actualized, what actualizes it [the potential] is itself something which has gone from potential to actual; and when that is the case, there must have been some further thing which made that happen.

So, we sometimes have a series of changers and things changed. The coldness of the coffee was caused by the coolness in the surrounding air, which was caused by the air conditioner, which was caused to switch on when you pressed the appropriate button. The fly was killed by the impact of the flyswatter, which was caused by the flick of your wrist, which was caused by the firing of certain motor neurons, which was caused by your annoyance at the fly’s buzzing around the room. One potential was actualized by another, which was in turn actualized by another, which was actualized by yet another.

Consider next that series of changes of the sort we’ve described typically extend backward in time, in what we might think of as a linear fashion. The coffee is cold because the air in the room cooled it, the air was cold because of the air conditioner, the air conditioner went on because you pressed a certain button, and so forth. Now let’s suppose for the sake of argument that this series extends backward into the past to infinity, without a beginning. This linear type of series, in theory, could go back in time ad infinitum, but what about a different kind of series?

Even if such linear series of changes and changers might in theory extend backward to infinity, with no first member, there is another kind of series—let us call it the hierarchical kind—which must have a first member. Remember that we were thinking of a linear series as extending backward in time— the coffee got cold because the room was cool, the room was cool because the air conditioner had made it so, you had switched on the air conditioner because you didn’t like the heat, the heat had been generated by the sun, and so forth. To understand what a hierarchical series is, it will be useful, by contrast, to think instead of what might exist at a single moment of time. This is not in fact essential to a hierarchical series, but it is a useful way to introduce the idea. So, consider, once again, the coffee cup as it sits on your desk. It is, we may suppose, three feet above the floor. Why? Because the desk is holding it up, naturally. But what holds the desk up? The floor, of course. The floor, in turn, is held up by the foundation of the house, and the foundation of the house by the earth. Now, unlike the coffee being cooled by the surrounding air, which is in turn cooled by the air conditioner, and so forth, this is not a series which need be thought of as extending backward in time. O f course, the cup may in fact have been sitting there on the desk for hours. But the point is that even if we consider the cup as it sits there at some particular moment, it is sitting there at that moment only because the desk is holding it up at that moment, and the desk is holding it up at that moment only because it is in turn being held up, at that same moment, by the floor. Or consider the lamp above your head, which is held up by a chain, which is in turn held up by the fixture screwed into the ceiling, all at the same moment. In both cases we have what I have called a hierarchical series of causes, in the first case tracing downward to the ground and in the other case upward to the ceiling.

What makes a hierarchical series of causes hierarchical is this instrumental or derivative character of the later members of the series. The desk will hold the cup aloft only so long as it is itself being held up by the floor. If the floor collapses, the desk will go with it and the cup will fall as a result. The members of a linear series are not like that. The air conditioner is on because you turned it on. Still, once you’ve done so, the air conditioner will keep cooling the room even if you left the house or dropped dead.

The idea is rather this. Since the desk, the floor, and the foundation have no power of their own to hold the cup aloft, the series could not exist in the first place unless there were something that did have the power to hold up these intermediaries, and the cup through them, without having to be held up itself. 

To take an example sometimes used to illustrate the point, a paintbrush has no power to move itself, and it would remain powerless to move itself even if its handle were infinitely long. Hence, even if there could be an infinitely long brush handle, if it is actually going to move, there will still have to be something outside it which does have the “built-in” power to cause it to move. Or to return to our own example, a desk has no power all on its own to hold up the cup, and thus an infinite series of desks, if there could be such a thing, would be as powerless to hold it up as a single desk would be. Hence, even if such a series existed, there would have to be something outside it which could impart to it the power to hold up the cup. When we say that a hierarchical series of causes has to have a first member, then, we don’t mean “first” in the sense of being the one that comes before the second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. We mean it is the first cause in the sense that it has inherent or built-in causal power while the others have only derived causal power. It is their having only derivative causal power that makes the other members secondary rather than first or primary.

Now since what is being explained in this case is the actualization of a thing’s potential for existence, the sort of “first” cause we are talking about is one which can actualize the potential for other things to exist without having to have its own existence actualized by anything.

What this entails is that this cause doesn’t have any potential for existence that needs to be actualized in the first place.  It just is pure actuality itself. It doesn’t merely happen not to have a cause of its own, but could not in principle have had or needed one.

Now whilst I am running out of a character count, I will introduce it in the next post but this gets us to the following. An immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, fully good, omnipotent, intelligent, and omniscient being. But for there to be such a cause of things is just what it is for God to exist. So, God exists.

Thanks for your time!