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In chapter 1, we
saw that the Principle
of Causal Closure is a linchpin of naturalism. Jaegwon
Kim defends it
thus:
If you pick any
physical event and trace out its causal ancestry or posterity,
that will never take you outside the physical domain. That is,
no causal chain will ever cross the boundary between the
physical and the nonphysical.
We know this is
not true because we found a causal chain leading directly to
God. What is Kim missing?
If Kim knew either perennial
or Eastern philosophy, he would distinguish two kinds of
efficient causality. Aristotle differentiated between
what the Scholastics called essential and accidental causality.
While time-sequenced or accidental causality continues to be
debated, essential causality is neglected.
It is the concurrent causality
used in my proof of God: for energy to be conserved here and
now, the law of conservation of energy must be operative here
and now. Kim traces chains of causal events forward and
backward in time
and finds only temporal events. Given that he is only
looking at events, it is not surprising that events are
all he finds.
Accidental, or
Humean-Kantian, causality is the time sequence of
events according to rule we saw in Hume‘s critique. In the
first edition of Critique of Pure
Reason, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote
“everything which occurs (comes to be) posits something
previous upon which it follows according to a rule.”
Accidental causality underlies the Causality
Postulate of
quantum field theory, which states that for one event to
affect another it must be temporally prior in all frames of
reference (in the past light cone). It is accidental because,
as Hume observed, it lacks necessity.
Essential
causality is quite
different. Aristotle developed the
concept by reflecting on a builder building a
house.
He noticed an identity of cause and
effect: The cause (the builder building the house) is identical with the
effect (the house being built by the builder). The only
difference is the focus of our attention.
Unlike Humean-Kantian causality, we don’t
have two separate events, but a single event viewed
in two projections. In one projection, we focus on the
agent, in the other, the effect. As we saw with
conservation of energy, the operation of the cause and
the realization of its effect are simultaneous and
inseparable.
Because it has one
event in two projections, essential
causality has
a unity and necessity impossible with accidental
causality‘s
disjoint events. I don’t mean that
conservation of energy or building a house is
necessary, but that, given these events, it is impossible to
separate the operation of the cause from the realization
of its effect. Every happening is a doing, and every doing is
a happening.
Relation of Causal
Types
While essential
and accidental causality are distinct, they are
directly related. The regular sequence of events in
Humean-Kantian causality is a consequence of the
cumulative or integral effect of the essential causality of the laws of nature.
Thus, Humean-Kantian causality is dependent upon the
essential causality of the intentional laws of nature. We
shall see in the next section that this is reflected in
physics’ most basic laws.
In extreme cases,
e.g. in some
theories of quantum gravity, the concept of time can break
down, and with it, Humean-Kantian causality. Essential
causality, by which the laws of nature operate, survives as it
is independent of space-time structure.
The Failure of
Causal Closure
Naturalists like
Kim are trapped in
a single causal dimension. They look only horizontally, at
temporal sequences, for causality. This misses the
vertical dimension of ontological dependence. The house
being built depends on the builder building. The builder
building depends on laws of nature maintaining him in
operation. The laws of nature depend on God‘s sustaining
will.
Since the vertical
line of causation is atemporal, it is missed by a mechanical
projection looking solely at time-ordered events for
explanations. No prior event can explain a later, disjoint,
event. It is simply not
there when the later event occurs. Physics reflects this
insight in relativistic quantum field theory’s
locality postulate, which
rejects action at a distance.
Information from an earlier event is only present later
because a logical propagator has brought it forward
in time. Logical propagators operate on information,
acting in the physical theater of operation via intentionality.
Immaterial entities are not only causally effective, but
are causes par
excellence. Without them, events would be disjoint
monads.
This is seen in
the fundamental equation of quantum field theory, a
paradigm of fundamental physics.
Equation 1 calculates all time development
in quantum physics. It describes the
development of a state at time t1, |?1>,
into a state at a later time t2, |?2>.
The states each represent every field, particle and
physical property at their specified time. They exhaust
the materiality of the initial and final events. Those events
affect each other only through exp-iH(t1
– t2).
It expresses the immaterial laws controlling material
systems and is a logical propagator carrying
information from time t1 to time
t2.
Thus, physics
reflects the causal
ineffectiveness of purely material states. The answer
to the question “how can immaterial entities be causally
effective in
physical systems?” is: by being the laws
transforming information in time. The real question
is: “How can disjoint
material states cause one another?” They
can’t absent an operative intentionality. Thus, we
conclude with Albertus Magnus, “the work of nature is the work
of intelligence.”
We shall see in chapter 5 that causal closure is
experimentally falsified for human minds, and
incompatible with other objective data.
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