Alexander wrote:

DanielCC wrote:

'Fall into a trap' seems a rather strong way of putting it - if we are talking about something like the Kalam Argument which seeks to prove God specifically as the cause of the universe's temporal beginning it wouldn't be right to say there's anything wrong with it; it's just the scope is more limited than, say PSR or First Cause type Cosmological Arguments. Ditto for arguments which focus on motion or composition.

I agree that there's nothing wrong with such arguments but, as you say, they are limited. McCabe is pointing out that they don't get you to the God of classical theism (which is to say, in his opinion, that they don't get you to God).

Thinking about it maybe he had in mind the kind of inductive probabilistic cosmological arguments those like Addler and Swinbourne offered - I say this because those sorts of arguments very big at the beginning of the Philosophy of Religion revival. What time was he writing out of interest?

I am not certain those more limited arguments I initially had in mind can't get one to the God of Classical Theism. The composition argument can get one to Divine Simplicity - not sure if the KA can though (it can certainly get us to some of the Attributes of supplemented with something like the Scholastic principle of proportionate causality).

joewaked wrote:

I'm looking at my dog right now. God is responsible for the dog coming into existence and remaining in existence. True so far, right? The dog just moved across the room. (For that matter, I could replace "move" with "breathe" or any action.) Do we say that God caused the dog to move?

We say that God eternally causes and sustains the existence of the dog, including the dog's essence/nature and all of the causal powers associated with that essence/nature, and is thus the First Cause of the entire process (which takes place via secondary causation) dog's-being-conceived-living-its-entire-life-(including-its-movement-across-the-room)-and-finally-dying.

God doesn't, in the sense you appear to mean, directly "make" the dog move. What He does is make there be a dog that has the causal powers necessary for it to move itself, and allow it to exercise them. In whatever sense He is ultimately the cause of what the dog does, He exercises that power "through" the dog, not "on" it, if you know what I mean.

Last edited by Scott (11/08/2015 6:01 pm)