Clumping Together the Contingency Argument

I got a note the other day from a friend letting me know he’d recently referenced my work on the contingency argument and the composition fallacy.¹ I replied briefly, simply noting that this concern—whatever one thinks of it—is only relevant to contingency arguments that rely on a clumping-together strategy.²

So what is that, exactly? Roughly put, it’s the move where someone grabs all the facts of a certain kind, clumps them together, and then argues that something outside that clump has to ultimately explain it. Most commonly, this means clumping together all the contingent facts and claiming that at least one necessary fact is needed to explain the whole lot.

There are other examples, too—including some questionable interpretations of Aquinas’s ways to God. For instance, in a recent article, John Lamont notes that Peter Geach reads Aquinas’s First and Second Ways (from change and becoming) as relying on a clumping-together strategy. In short, Geach holds that if some change in A is caused by a further change in B, which is caused by a change in C, and so on, then one might clump all those changing changers together and legitimately move from the particular to the whole. That is, what’s predicated of each member of the chain (B, C, D, etc.) can be predicated of the entire clump: namely, that it causes the change in A in virtue of itself undergoing change.

From there, the question naturally arises of what sustains this entire process of change in the whole system? Plausibly—very plausibly, I should say—it can’t be something that is itself changing, since that would just make it another member of the changing set—just one more participant in the causal sequence leading to A—and therefore not the cause of the changing system as such.

Geach then argues that the number of entities in the system doesn’t matter, since the unchanged changer—the uncaused cause—is not posited as the last domino in a sequence, but as the ultimate cause of change for the system as a whole, the clumped-together totality—residing entirely beyond it.

Now, as Lamont rightly points out, this is not a correct reading of Aquinas. But it does, at the very least, illustrate what the clumping-together strategy looks like.

So, is that strategy legitimate?

While it’s not my preferred form of cosmological reasoning, I do think it’s legitimate—though it requires some careful qualification to avoid otherwise strong objections.