Parable of the Circular Train
A reader asks:
“What, then, is the distinction between ‘universe’ as used by radical materialists and God understood in the sense of Unmoved Mover, Being Itself, etc?”
A fascinating question, and an easy one to answer, but the answer requires some explanation.
Materialism is the proposition that all things have no properties aside from material properties.
If this it true, then everything which might seem to be a non-material property is actually a side effect of a material property and ultimately can be reduced to it. For example, ‘red’ seems to be a quality rather than a material property, but modern science shows redness is a wavelength of light, which has wavelike properties akin to soundwaves, and these wavelengths have pure material properties such as mass, length, duration and temperature.
But if materialism is true, then not just ‘red’ but all things, such as a pure Platonic ideal, human free will, truth or love or justice or any quality involving a valuation or purpose, an abstract law of logic, and on and on, can be ultimate reduced to waves and particles or some other physical property.
This leads to an immediate and obvious difficulty: physical things have no known final causes, that is, they react to outside pressure, they do not act because of a desire to achieve an envisioned goal or escape a feared outcome.
If materialism is true, all final causes can be reduced to mechanical causes.
Now, even an amoeba, the simplest form of life we know, has behaviors that cannot be described nor understood unless one understands that the amoeba has a purpose: it moves toward food and away from danger. It divides in order to reproduce. Unlike the most complex computer, this simple form of life is incomprehensible without an understanding of the REASON for its behavior.
I am not saying it has a mind, or even that it suffers pain and pleasure, but it does have internally directed and purposeful behavior, it undergoes motions which cannot be fully described nor fully understood without reference to its purpose.
On the other hand, even the most complex machine cannot be described nor understood in this way, or, to be specific, it is misleading to speak of rocks ‘wanting’ to fall to earth or liquid water ‘craving’ to expand when it crystallizedinto ice. This is at best crude animism, attributing living properties to inanimate things.
Materialism is simply a crude error like animism. It is antanimism, attributing nonliving properties to living things.
A materialist who asserts that logic ‘is’ nothing more nor less than motions in my brain, and that I only believed in this logic because of those brain motions is making an uneducated error, a very simple one. He is confusing the different types of causation.
When a child asks you why it must go to bed ‘because I said so’ is one type of answer, and ‘because it is bedtime’ is another and ‘because you have a big day tomorrow’ is a third. The first is a formal answer: ‘you should obey lawful orders because they are lawful, that is, issued by a proper parental authority’ that says nothing about the content of the orders, merely about the issuing authority.
The second says: ‘you should go to bed now because now is the assigned time’ is a true answer, but it does not say why now is the assigned time. This says the particular order happens to fit the pattern of the general order, but again does not explain the purpose of the order, which is what the child is actually asking.
The third says: ‘you are an organism needed a certain amount of sleep to function happily; if you stay awake you will not be happy; happiness is the final cause of all good things sought.’ This is an answer in terms of final cause.
In this case, we must not confuse the form of brain actions which accompany thought with the logic and persuasive power of thought which causes one thought to be lead or lured from premise to conclusion, or from particular to general. It is like saying ‘Why did Hamlet stab Claudio?’ the real answer must be in terms of Hamlet’s purpose, the good he hoped to achieve (as, for example, to avenge his father). A answer which is true, but is comically inadequate, is to say ‘Shakespeare’s pen moved across the page and wrote the scene so.’ That tells us nothing. With another twitch of the pen, Shakespeare could have spared Ophelia and had her and Hamlet live happily ever after. It answer the ‘why’ in terms of the mechanics of pen motions, but not the ‘why’ in terms of the final cause, that is, the purpose or reason or good sought.
The material universe, either any part or as a whole can have no final cause. The universe cannot will or attempt or desire or command or seek any good. Material things have only physical causes, and a pure description of a physical cause is nothing more than a measure, in foot-pounds or temperature or amperage or mass moving per meter per second or some other purely physical measure of a purely physical event — and this is the complete, full and entire description of the cause. The mechanical cause, the physical cause. There is nothing more to say, because that is the whole story.
The Unmoved Mover, on the other hand, is pure final cause. It is the love and the beauty that all living things seek, and the final act of which all lesser actions are the potential. It cannot be described or defined in physical terms.
The God of the Deists or the God of the Christians is all this and moreso. It is a being with purposes and will. His actions are directed toward an end.
The universe of the materialist cannot be alive, cannot act on its own. Inanimate objects, even clockworks with internal springs, do not ever act properly so called, if by act we mean seek a desired goal or flee a feared outcome. The clock does not want to strike twelve, and does not get upset if it runs fast or slow; but a mouse gets very upset indeed if it runs slow and cat strikes it.
The universe of the materialists cannot want something. It cannot move other things into action the way love or love of life moves mice or men in to acting, or the way sunlight moves plants into growth. Hence it is meaningless to talk of an inanimate universe of being an unmoved mover.
An inanimate universe cannot lure a universe from potential into actual, it cannot grow a universe from nothingness into life and being. Inanimate object are all like the cue ball, which only strikes the eight ball with the force imparted to it by the cue stick. It makes no decisions and has no desires. It is like a train car pulled the car ahead of it in the train.
But the engine of the train, or the hand on the cue stick, of necessity cannot be merely one more car on the train of cause and effect. Logically, no chain of cause an effect can lack an origin, because each car’s motion is defined by the motion of the first car, and if there is no first car, there is no definition.
Suppose you saw the absurdity of a train track running around the equator of the world, and each train car hooked to the one before it. Suppose it moved. Where did the first impulse of motion come from? One cannot simply say each car is pulled by the one before it and so on in a circle, because that would be a perpetual motion machine. Why the velocity not half what you see, or twice, or a billion times faster? What defined the speed?
Likewise for an eternal universe. Why are physical conditions are they are now? The answer is because these are the inevitable outcome a prior set of physical conditions. Indeed? And why were they are they were? Because of conditions prior again. Why the velocity (or any other property, such as the total mass) of the whole universe not half what you see, or twice, or a billion times faster? What defined the speed (or any other properties)?
To say that it happened for no reason is the same as to say all science is vain, and there is no reason to inquire into the causes of things.
So the concept of an engine pulling the train, even a concept of a motionless engine (like the unmoved mover of Aristole) which lures the eager train toward it because of its surpassing loveliness, but is not itself pulled toward the train — this concept avoids the paradox of a perpetual motion machine always running in a circle.
You yourself can set a child’s train cars on a circular track and satisfy yourself that nothing can define itself nor pull itself nor put itself in motion without a prior cause. This does not change if you are talking about a lifesize train, or a train of cause and effect, or a train the size of a universe.
God is alive, and has final cause. Hence, he can set the universe in motion and define its properties. The Unmoved Mover allured living things and establishes a final cause. Again, it can set a universe into motion. But the universe of the materialists cannot set itself into motion because it has no purpose, no final cause, and nothing to define its mass, velocity, or motion.
Is that clear? A nonphysical thing can be an uncaused first cause, because nonphysical things do not have to have an ulterior cause. They are alive and can move of their own nature. A physical thing on the other hand, even a large physical thing like the material universe, cannot have a first cause, because physical things all must have a prior physical thing to define them and to make them move.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
