First Mover Argument: How to Prove It?

[ApostolicClementines]

Hi Guys,

Simple question: How do we prove the First Mover argument? In other words, if someone counters that causes could just go back ad infinitum, how do we rebut that?

Thanks in advance!

Clem

 

[Rhubarb]

You need an argument for why an infinite regress is impossible. Classically, it was taken as fact without needing argument. Research infinite regress and you’ll get more resources on the subject.

 

[Kei]

Many reasons that this is not possible. For instance, time. Without a beginning, it makes no sense to get to me and you with infinite time.

 

[rossum]

Taking a different approach, there can be no Mover without a Moved. In the absence of something that was moved then, obviously, there cannot be a mover.

Many paired concepts are similar: mover/moved; creator/created; cause/effect; parent/child.

These paired concepts cannot exist singly, they must exist together: you cannot be a parent if you have no children.

A dialogue:

“What do you do?”

“I create universes.”

“Wow! How many universes have you created?”

“None so far.”

Is the claimed creator truly a creator?

So, the First Mover cannot exist alone, a First Moved is also required to have existed for the same time.

rossum

 

[cstheriot]

I like the boxcar analogy. You can have boxcars on the railroad that go back longer than you can see. But somewhere there has to be an engine pulling or pushing them. The boxcars can’t move on there own, no matter how far into the distance they go.

 

[MikeInVA]

Clem -
Have you read what St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Summa Theologica (or a summarized version)? I doubt that there are many on CAF who could lay it out in a more logical, defensible manner.

 

[Edward_H]

nothing can be the effect of an infinite causal chain…because we never would have arrived at this moment if it’s infinite “to the left on the timeline” of this moment.

 

[ApostolicClementines]

Hey, I have not. Would you mind referring me to the specific section, please?

 

[ApostolicClementines]

Would you mind elaborating on this point, please? Why isn’t it possible for there to be an infinite past leading up to this present moment?

 

[Edward_H]

Because imagine an infinitely long escalator or airport “people mover” or conveyor of causes not forward in time, but to the “left” (backward in time).

Most people think of infinity going forward in time.

Reverse it, and think backward…would you ever have arrived at Jesus’s time if the conveyor of events stretched backward to infinity? Answer no. There had to have been a first beginning in time.

 

[Gorgias]

So, the First Mover cannot exist alone, a First Moved is also required to have existed for the same time.

This is an interesting claim, but it leads to paradox if you push it in the wrong direction.

You’re leading us to say “ok, then: God becomes the First Mover after He creates the universe (the ‘First Moved’)!” But, there be dragons there: that would mean that God changes in the act of creating the universe, and that’s a position that a Christian will not accept as true. Rather, we would say that God is eternally the First Mover, and attempting to make the case that you do (which is bound up in chronological temporality) is invalid, precisely because it attempts to make God subject to time.

 

[TheOldColonel]

If causation requires an infinite regress of completed causes, then essentially what is being described is a state of perpetual potentiality in which nothing is able to really happen as the prerequisites for effect are never fulfilled. It’s rather like falling backward into oblivion, into an abyss of nothingness. Observation of realty, itself, counters this.

 

[Gorgias]

If causation requires an infinite regress of completed causes, then essentially what is being described is a state of perpetual potentiality in which nothing is able to really happen as the prerequisites for effect are never fulfilled.

Very nice take on it!

To put it another way: I’ll agree that you exist, if you can demonstrate that there is an ultimate cause for your existence. If you cannot demonstrate that cause, then I must conclude that you (by way of Kalam, right?) do not exist!

So:
… point to your parents, and I ask who are their parents.

… point to the first humans, and I ask who gave birth to them.

… point to the first living creatures, and I ask what give rise to them.

… point to the Big Bang, and I ask what caused it.

Ultimately, if there is not a ‘first cause’, then there cannot be subsequent effects. Posit your existence (or even, ask me to pinch you and thereby accept that you exist), and I respond “that merely proves that there was a First Mover who made your existence possible.”

QED, n’est-ce pas?

 

[HarryStotle]

So, the First Mover cannot exist alone, a First Moved is also required to have existed for the same time.

Several points:

First from Edward Feser:

Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Thomistic, and Leibnizian cosmological arguments are all concerned to show that there must be an uncaused cause even if the universe has always existed. Of course, Aquinas did believe that the world had a beginning, but (as all Aquinas scholars know) that is not a claim that plays any role in his versions of the cosmological argument. When he argues there that there must be a First Cause, he doesn’t mean “first” in the order of events extending backwards into the past. What he means is that there must be a most fundamental cause of things which keeps them in existence at every moment, whether or not the series of moments extends backwards into the past without a beginning.
Source: Edward Feser: So you think you understand the cosmological argument?

So, if the universe has always existed, it still requires the explanatory First Cause to exist independently of the universe and to keep the universe in existence because the universe is contingent – it doesn’t exist a se or of its own accord, nor can it explain or cause its own existence. So, First Mover still required even if First Moved always existed.

Second, yours is an objection that is entirely lexical or definitional, so it proves exactly nothing.

We can grant you that it would be an infringement of definitional terms to refer to a “Creator” absent a creative act or a creation, but that doesn’t demonstrate that the Self-Existent Being (whose Essence is Existence) that we also refer to as Creator did not, does not, or could not exist independently of the creation or “First Moved.”

Third, Gorgias’ point about God as eternal Being would imply that the universe exists as a whole, perhaps even eternally, complete with a beginning → end time signature much as the world in a novel with its own internal time structure exists vis a vis the author of the novel and separate from the world the author lives within. The author doesn’t inhabit the novel, nor is his/her existence at all dependent upon the existence of the novel.

So while you technically might be correct that a novel writer (or creator) cannot properly be referred to as a “novel writer” until the novel is completed, the existence of the novel isn’t what actually makes the author a writer, since the literary talents, writing skills, creativity, etc., that the writer possesses are what make the author a “writer,” in the non-trivial and meaningful sense. It isn’t merely the existence of a novel that makes the person a writer, because even if all copies of any or all of his/her works were to suddenly go out of existence, it wouldn’t make any sense to say the novel writer, too, suddenly went out of existence with them. No, s/he still exists with all the skills required to pen another work – so still “a writer.”

 

[TheOldColonel]

At my age, I do have days where I feel I’m phasing in and out of existence.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

As HarryStotle has suggested (or at least his quotation about Aquinas has), the solution to the issue you have is simply not to make a First Cause argument, at least not if you’re thinking in terms of time. There simply is no convincing argument that the past is not infinite – at least none that I know of. The best you can do is argue this:

If there is no first member of a set, then there can be no subsequent member.

But that premise is only plausible if other people agree to it, and I’m not sure why a skeptic would agree to it. The argument from contingency is much better, in my estimation. But if you prefer the First Cause argument, I would recommend looking at the work of William Lane Craig on what’s called the Kalam Argument.

 

[rossum]

You’re leading us to say “ok, then: God becomes the First Mover after He creates the universe (the ‘First Moved’)!” But, there be dragons there: that would mean that God changes in the act of creating the universe,

There is a change somewhere from “not causing” to “causing”, but that change does not necessarily require a change in God. Let God be an unchanging necessary, but not sufficient, cause. Then an additional non-God changing part-cause can also arise to complete the sufficiency of causation. With both part-causes present, the action can complete. This additional cause might be God’s Will perhaps. Is God’s Will allowed to change?

Rather, we would say that God is eternally the First Mover, and attempting to make the case that you do (which is bound up in chronological temporality) is invalid, precisely because it attempts to make God subject to time.

God can be eternally First Mover, provided He is not a sufficient cause on His own. Some other changing entity can provide the rest of the sufficient cause. If God alone is a sufficient cause of the universe, then the universe would have existed for as long as God, and that is not what we observe.

An unchanging God also has a big problem with actions in time, such as parting the Red Sea for Moses. The sea was not parted in Abraham’s time; is was parted in Moses’ time. Therefore there was a cause-of-parting that was inactive and later became active. That is a change from inactive to active. If God cannot change, and the cause-of-parting did change, then God did not part the sea; something else did.

An unchanging entity cannot do different things at different times, for example:

On the first day God said “Let there be light,” and on the second day God said “Let there be light,” and on the third day God said “Let there be light,” and on the fourth day …

That is an unchanging God. That is not the God of Genesis, who changes and does different things on different days.

rossum

 

[rossum]

First from Edward Feser:

Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Thomistic, and Leibnizian cosmological arguments are all concerned to show that there must be an uncaused cause even if the universe has always existed.

My argument comes from Buddhist philosophy, and is due to Nagarjuna. None of those philosophers were aware of Nargajuna’s arguments. His analysis of causation is very different from the philosophers you mention.

We can grant you that it would be an infringement of definitional terms to refer to a “Creator” absent a creative act or a creation, but that doesn’t demonstrate that the Self-Existent Being (whose Essence is Existence) that we also refer to as Creator did not, does not, or could not exist independently of the creation or “First Moved.”

The entity can exist, but would be misnamed. A newborn baby might become a mother in future, but it is an obvious error to call her “mother” in her first few years of life.

So while you technically might be correct that a novel writer (or creator) cannot properly be referred to as a “novel writer” until the novel is completed

Language can already cope with this problem. Terms like “mother-to-be” or “expectant mother” adequately describe the situation. “Fiancée” similarly contains the future expectation of being married, but is different from the status of “married”.

I see it as an error to elide “potential X” and “actual X” into the same meaning. They have different meanings.

rossum

 

[Prodigal_Son]

An unchanging God also has a big problem with actions in time, such as parting the Red Sea for Moses.

Why couldn’t an action taken outside of time manifest itself in time – and indeed at different moments in time – a little bit like the light from Alpha Centauri strikes Earth and Pluto at different moments?

 

[IWantGod]

You need an argument for why an infinite regress is impossible.

Actually you don’t. All you have to do is explain why things that change cannot be that which "“necessarily-exists”. Once you have done that, all that is required is to argue the existence of that which is necessary and explain why that explanation is required in order to explain the existence of that which is not necessary.

The fact that something infinitely regresses is irrelevant to the qeustion of what it means for something to exist necessarily from an ontological perspective. An infinite regress doesn’t in and of itself imply necessary existence.