Correcting the BBC’s Misrepresentation of Aquinas’s First Cause Argument
The BBC has an article on Aquinas’s first cause argument that displays several notable deficiencies. Let us briefly examine and correct them—not to defend the first cause argument (I have done that at length elsewhere, including in my book The Best Argument for God), but simply to dispel some persistent misconceptions.
I’ll quote the relevant section, then offer a brief response.
The BBC
Aquinas was a monk who used reason and logic to point to the existence of God.
Cause and effectKey fact
The first cause argument is based around cause and effect. The idea is that everything that exists has something that caused it; there is nothing in our world that came from nothing.As human beings we are used to seeing cause and effect in our everyday lives, so this argument is easy to relate to. For example, if you push someone (cause) they fall over (effect).
Aquinas argued that our world works in the same way. Someone or something must have caused the world to exist. The cause is God, the effect is the world.
Comments
The “key fact” is, in fact, a key error. Aquinas never argued—nor does any proponent of the so-called first cause argument—that everything that exists has something that caused it.1 That is, to be sure, the exact opposite of what is actually argued and is, moreover, absurd. Just think: could something have caused everything—collectively speaking—to exist? Surely not, since outside of “everything” there is nothing; thus, nothing available to act as a cause.
To be sure, the actual claim is far more restricted—namely, that things of a certain type (for example, contingent things or composite things) have causes, and that, ultimately, there must be something uncaused to account for all the caused things.
Not a great start.
Let’s continue.
The BBC Again
Key fact
Aquinas stated that this cause (which is outside our world) is the first cause—that is, the one that started everything.Aquinas argued that this first cause must have no beginning—that is, nothing caused it to exist because the first cause is eternal.
He argued that this first cause is God. God is eternal (has no beginning, was never started) and God caused the world and everything else to exist.
Comments
This isn’t entirely incorrect, but it’s so vague that it’s almost guaranteed to leave people confused about what Aquinas is actually up to. I mean, Aquinas doesn’t just have one first cause argument; he has many. So it’s hard to even evaluate this article because it never specifies which argument they supposedly have in mind—his De Ente argument? One of the Five Ways? Something else? These arguments are developed in quite different ways and rely on different assumptions.
Either way, when Aquinas talks about God being eternal, he does not mean that God is simply everlasting. Aquinas maintains that lots of things could be everlasting (including, believe it or not, the universe!2)—always were and always will be, just plodding along through time—but are not eternal in the strict sense. For Aquinas, eternality means being entirely outside of time, and this follows from divine simplicity combined with his theory of time, which piggybacks on change. Since God is absolutely ontologically simple, God does not change (for Aquinas, change requires ontological composition: some underlying substrate remaining the same while some attribute differs); God is immutable. And because change is what marks something as temporal, God—being changeless—is not in time at all but stands wholly outside of it; indeed, God is (for Aquinas, anyway) the primary reason for the forward movement of time altogether (hence the “unchanged changer” or “unmoved mover” terminology).
So yes, God has no beginning or end, but Aquinas’s claim of eternality is far more metaphysically substantive than that.
Moving on.
The BBC Again
Not everyone accepts the first cause theory.
The first major problem is that we have no answer to the question ‘Who caused (created) God?’. If everything requires a cause (something to start it) surely this has to apply to God as well.
If some people can believe that God is eternal and requires no cause, then surely you could argue that the universe is eternal, and so doesn’t require God for it to exist.
If you can apply the principle that one thing is eternal (God) then surely that can be applied to other things (the world).
Comments
“Who caused God?” Well, we all knew this one was coming—which is only to be expected, of course, when one proceeds from a gross mischaracterization of the first cause argument. Naturally, if you think the proponent of the argument is committed to the idea that everything that exists has a cause, then you will inevitably ask who caused God. However, if one instead presents the argument accurately and focuses on the actual claimnamely, that there must be at least one uncaused thing—then it becomes entirely silly to ask what caused that which is, by nature, uncausable.
Naturally, this doesn’t by itself prove such an entity exists (though, of course, this is precisely the real argumentative “meat and potatoes” of first cause arguments—and a position I believe can be effectively established). But it should make obvious that the objection “Who caused God?” rests entirely on a massive, though exceedingly common, misunderstanding of what first cause arguments—also known as cosmological arguments—are actually up to.
Moreoever, it’s important to emphasize that Aquinas does not think God is the first cause simply because God is eternal. Rather, Aquinas thinks that for something to count as the uncaused cause of all causable things, it must lack certain features that are contingency-indicating—features that basically scream, “This thing needs a cause.” Changing, composite, contingent, becoming, and qualitatively (including materially) finite things are, for Aquinas, causable by nature.
So whatever the uncaused cause is, it must lack all those features. It must be a simple being; its essence must just be its existence; it must be purely actual, immutable, and yes, eternal. And within Aquinas’s metaphysics, there is simply no natural or physical being that could possibly fit this description, since all such beings are inherently composite, mutable, contingent—mixtures of act and potency, essence and existence, and so on.
So there is excellent reason—if one understands the system Aquinas is working within—why one could not simply argue that “the universe” is eternal or uncaused. The universe (which, for what it’s worth, Aquinas would not regard as a single unified “thing” at all, but rather as the collection of all concrete contingent things) is strictly disqualified.
Again, one might reject parts of Aquinas’s metaphysics, fine. There is always plenty one could quibble with in any major philosophical system, especially one as richly developed as Aquinas’s. But it is deeply misleading to suggest that Aquinas doesn’t offer reasons—that is, within his own broadly Aristotelain worldview—against the idea that one could just as easily say the same sorts of things about the universe that he says about God. No, no. Aquinas thinks only a very special sort of entity—one that is metaphysically simple and purely actual, with no real distinct between its essence and existence—could serve as the fundamental uncaused cause. And once you conceptually analyze such an entity, you get the traditional divine attributes. I won’t repeat the full derivation here; I give a contemporary one in The Best Argument for God, but one can also just look at Aquinas’s Summa: ST I, q.2–11.
The BBC Again
How do religious people view first cause?
For religious people, the first cause makes God into some kind of distant being who simply made the world. This does not fit with the God of most religions who seems to be involved in caring for the world, not just the being who started it.
Comments
This is an odd statement.
I mean, for one thing, Aquinas thinks his arguments for God give us not just a creator but a providential sustainer—a being who is here and now causing everything to actually exist. In other words, Aquinas’s philosophy of God has God as always present and profoundly intimate to us, a necessary condition for every aspect and ounce of our being. Of course, this does not deliver much by way of religious doctrine, but nor was it ever intended to; this is why Aquinas’s philosophical establishment of the existence of God is considered a preamble to faith—a way of providing a rational basis for faith as an independent but extended commitment.
Not only that, but Aquinas goes to great lengths to show the compatibility between the God of the philosopher, as it were, and the God of Scripture. (Contemporary Thomist Eleonore Stump has a slim but especially helpful volume on this very subject, for those interested.) So again, while some (certainly not all!) religious people may think there is some inherent tension between the two, it is unhelpful to just assert that the God arrived at through philosophical investigation automatically fails to fit the God believed in by people of faith.3
Conclusion
In its current form, the BBC’s treatment of Aquinas’s first-cause argument earns an impressive F-minus, insofar as the elementariness of the errors is matched only by the assumed authority with which they are delivered. With any luck, future revisions will reflect something closer to what Aquinas actually argued.
Little point: I actually don’t like calling it the “first” cause argument, since that label tends to suggest the argument is concerned with some sort of temporal sequencing, which is rarely the case. Rather, the argument—especially as Aquinas develops it—is concerned with ontological “deep dependence”. It is ultimately fishing for a primary cause that is here and now the originator and sustainer of every contingent entity.
To clarify, Aquinas did not think one could establish—by philosophical considerations alone—that the universe had an absolute temporal beginning; however, he did think one could establish that it had an absolute causal beginning. These are quite different claims. But they allow Aquinas to maintain, quite coherently, that one may entertain—for the sake of argument—the idea that the universe has always existed and yet is still caused in its very act of existing, here and now, by the primary uncaused cause.
Aquinas aside, many of the earliest and most significant Christian theologians—Augustine, Justin Martyr, Origen, and others—explicitly sought to show that the God discovered through philosophical reflection is not a rival to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but one and the same.