I think if one knew what necessary means in philosophy, one would have a hard time thinking a quark or electron was a necessary being. More importantly, what you describe doesn't follow from the physics in the slightest. It is, in fact, an imaginative picture created by popular scientism, that melds the scientific with the metaphysical. It's not science and it's bad philosophy.

But the lens is fallacious and ignorant. You ignored what I said and showed about SP, and clearly haven't read the thread in any depth. The misunderstandings are all SP's. He is an ignoramus. He certainly doesn't have a tertiary background in physics. His current argument is grossly fallacious and relies on an illicit move from allegedly ruling out one kind of change to ruling out all change. There's no excuse for that. It isn't a misunderstanding, except perhaps misunderstanding logic. 

​Leaving SP aside, if misunderstanding is being created by scientistic naturalists being unable to understand what is science and what isn't, and being unable to see what science does and can show, and what it doesn't and can't, then that is their fault, not Thomists (and I'm not a Thomist).

Nojoum, you keep ignoring arguments as to why material beings cannot be self-sufficient. If it were as simple as that, contemporary philosophers who wish to avoid cosmological arguments (and many of them are very well acquainted with physics) would not have such a hard time maintaining their own positions. Take Adolf Grünbaum, for example; he'd take your suggestion that protons and neutrons exist necessarily to make no sense whatsoever, which is why he tries to avoid theism by denying PSR. I don't even know what to make of the suggestion, as even the existence of quarks is conditioned -- they don't exist alone by themselves so to speak, they always need two or three more, etc. You've been ignoring arguments on why physical beings can't be either self-sufficient or necessary (and I've given some of them in another thread while we were discussing), and it seems like you openly admit that you're generally ignorant on metaphysics, and yet that doesn't stop you from suggesting that people here are wrong or unable to understand the "scientific picture". How can you be sure of this, if this whole discussion is about metaphysics (Even the science discussion iis related to metaphysical notions such as causality, conditionality, existence, essence, necessity, modality, etc) and at the same time you claim to be ignorant in metaphysics? How exactly are we wrong? People here have literally been trying to explain and re-explain the same things for more than 20 pages and SP refuses to interact with what is being said. SP refuses to think metaphysically, he repeats the *same* scientistic bull every single time to the point where it seems like he's not even reading what we're writing. I've tried explaining how hierarchical series of causes do not strictly require temporal simultaneity and we can even forget temporal simultaneity if so he pleases; RomanJoe has said the same; SP basically ignores and continues talking about linear motion and temporal simultaneity.

The dude has problems; he seems incapable of trying to understand what the other side is saying, he has been involved in 3200+ post long discussions in certain blogs before; he has been repeating the same things about the first way for MONTHS almost on a daily basis; he managed to get BANNED from Feser's blog; he's been debating us for 36+ pages and people keep complaining about him. What's more likely? That EVERYONE here is wrong, dogmatic, or incapable of understanding him, and pretty much everyone in Feser's blog is just unwilling to try to understand and talk to him, OR that the problem somehow lies with SP instead?

Last edited by Miguel (12/21/2017 8:07 pm)

An electron's essence isn't identical to its existence.

@RomanJo #335

I just don't really understand SP's objection to the existence of  essential causal series.

Fair enough.  I will do my best to find better words to explain my meaning.

IEven if the process is temporal, involving causal members that exert their causal efficacy over time, how does it follow that such a series is accidental rather than essential?

At an ordinary naked eye personal day to day perception of things what you are saying seems to fit with our perceptions.  But those perceptions break down on closer examination.

Things are often not as they seem.  For example, solid objects don't seem to have space in them, but upon closer examination we find a solid object is mostly space.

Instaneity is not necessary for a per se causal series. What is necessary is derivative causal power,

Once temporality is allowed for there is no identifiable first source for what you call causal power.  In the classic hand-stick-rock example the hand is said to be the first member, the original source of causal power.  On closer examination the hand derives from the tendons, which derive from the muscle, and back to the blood, heart, lung, oxygen inside the lung, oxygen further from the lung, and still further, and the plants that produced the oxygen, and the water, the dirt, and back and back and back in time and space.

With this we see that the hand-stick-rock are not some special sort of causal series, rather, they are merely the most recent members of a vast causal series that goes back all the way to the big bang and perhaps to a past eternal universe, which is clearly an "accidental" series.

The idea that the hand-stick-rock is somehow not a part of a vast "accidental" series is merely an artifact of limited and incomplete human perceptions.

a continual dependence of latter members on earlier members of the series.

Continual is a good word because it illustrates the fact that causation is composed of separate events.  Human beings tend to lump things together.  Closer analysis breaks these causal events apart.

People tend to assign the title of "cause" to one thing and "effect" to another, when in fact the objects assigned those titles are actually undergoing a vast number of minute causal processes.

A car motor seems to be an ongoing cause of motion of the car.  Stop the motor and the car stops.  Actually each individual molecule of oxygen and fuel react and each causes a tiny amount of energy to be transferred to the motion of the car.  Each one of those tiny causal processes is "accidental", since just like the grandfather in the classic example of an "accidental" causal series, an individual molecule of CO2 can exit the engine and it could disappear yet nothing can undo its causal influence. 

Since every real macro scale material causal process is composed of a multitude of minute "accidental" causal series, then every real macro scale material causal process is an "accidental" causal series.