The Faded Mirror

Something that my amazing wife directed me to really struck me as I read it.  It comes from a post written by Fr. Stephen Freeman, whom I will admit not reading that often because his thoughts are so much loftier than my own.  Anyway, here is the quote:

I oftentimes suspect that the language of causation, rooted as it is in physics and the like, is probably a misleading term when applied to a universe whose true existence is rooted in Personhood. In such a universe, love is a far more important category than causation, if causation has any place at all.

Whoa.

If you’ve ever sat through a Philosophy class, you must have heard about the “First Cause” argument for the existence of God, especially if you went to Catholic school.  In a nutshell, the idea is that for any event, there must be a corresponding event that caused it to happen.  Nathan falls on the floor because David knocked him over.  David knocked Nathan over because John tripped David.  Any parent with more than one child has experience with unravelling these causal chains.  I guess parents of a only child must have trouble doing philosophy….

Anyway, to follow the line of Aristotle’s thinking on the subject, having an infinitely long causal chain is just silly.  After all, somebody has to sit on the Naughty Step.  And, if you extend the whole chain all the way back through history trying to find a cause for the universe, you arrive at The First Cause — The Unmoved Mover.  Theologians of a scholastic bent quickly picked up on Aristotle’s definition of The First Cause as being God Himself, and this identification has been a key foundation of many systematic theologies, including that of Thomas Aquinas, the father of modern theology and thus the grandfather of modern philosophy.

So with all that in mind, please reread the Good Father’s quote above.

Can you feel the tremors in the foundation?

Now, I am sure that neither I nor Fr. Stephen are the first ever to point this problem out.  In fact, Matthew Gallatin has a highly regarded series of podcasts on a very similar subject which explains the subject much better than I ever could.  I guess I was just struck with the implications of his statement that the underpinnings of just about, well, everything that I had studied in school were founded on a mistaken premise.

But, I can easily trade that for a universe founded not on First Cause but on First Love.