Over the last two days, I’ve been thinking critically about Aquinas’ First Way. Central to my thinking, and especially yesterday’s post, was the idea that you could have an unmoved mover who is in time but isn’t pure act and who isn’t God. Such an unmoved mover constantly and unchangingly exercises—perhaps mentally—one and the same causal power to make something else move.
But I now wonder if this is possible. Suppose a demiurge that exists in time and has the power to make Bob rotate, and constantly exercises this power. Could this demiurge be unchanging? After all, at noon the demiurge is actively rotating Bob at noon, and at 1 pm the demiurge is actively rotating Bob at 1 pm. We can easily and coherently suppose that the demiurge engages in qualitatively the same activity at 1 pm as at noon. That was the intuition that was driving my thinking about this. But can we coherently add that it is the numerically same activity? For if it’s not numerically the same activity at 1 pm as at noon, then the demiurge has undergone a change, from engaging in activity a12 to engaging in activity a13, even if the two activities are exactly alike.
I am not sure, but I feel a pull to thinking that rotating Bob at 1 pm is a different thing from rotating Bob at noon, assuming that the agent is in time. I don’t just mean that it has different effects—which it does, since spinning-at-noon is a different effect from spinning-at-one—but that the activing of causing rotation is itself different. Maybe the pull comes from this thought. Perdurantists think that substances exist at different times by having different temporal parts at them. Perdurantism is likely false for substances. But whether or not it is true for substanes, it seems very plausible for events and activities. What made World War II exist on each day between September 1, 1939 and September 2, 1945 is that there were hostilities on each day, hostilities that are a part of World War II. Even if on two successive days the hostilities happened to be exactly alike, they would have been numerically different hostilities. If this is right in general, then the activity of rotating Bob at 1 pm is numerically different from that of rotating Bob at noon.
Furthermore, I think existence is a kind of activity. This is most obvious in the case of living things, given the Aristotelian idea that life is the existence of the living and life is an activity, but I think is true in general. Thus a thing that exists in time over a lifetime engages in a sequence of numerically different activities—existing at t1, existing at t2, and so on. And hence it changes. And intrinsically so. If so, then everything that exists in time must always change.
If the suggestion that there are no unchanging activities that last over time, then we can escape my worry yesterday that perhaps the sequence of moved movers in the First Way leads to a mover that is unchanging with respect to the activity of moving the next mover in the sequence but is still changing in some other coincidental respect. For the activity of moving the next mover in the sequence would have to change over time, and so the mover would be changing in respect of of its moving the next item in the sequence.
But perhaps not. For we might admit that in all the cases we are familiar with, activity only perdures over time, and there is always something numerically different happening at different times, but say that we could still imagine a being where the numerically same activity is temporally multilocated. And such a being could everlastingly rotate Bob with the activity of spinning Bob being genuinely unchanging.
I don’t know.
It is my understanding that the First Way is not about reaching a mover that simply happens to be an unmoved one. The argument rather aims at an Immovable Mover. Now, you can dispute if the argument makes that explicit. But the idea is generally there: If the mover itself did not move, but could, there needs to be a further explanation. And you have not reached the absolute explanation, God. There are various ways of fleshing that out. E.g., Feser would say if you have a being that just happens to be actual but has potentials but never does change, that still points to the Immovable Mover as true First Cause. Soon, your friend Robert Koons, plus Daniel Bonevac, will come out with two books on the Five Ways (publisher Word on Fire) where they do exactly that, argue for the Immovable Mover. You'll see their ideas. Also, when you compare Aquinas' copy of the orginal three arguments of Al-Farabi (that became the first three Five Ways), what do you notice in the original? https://x.com/abduyimre/status/1707447644786774257 Al-Farabi says immovable, not unmoved.
ReplyDeleteHere, btw, Prof. Koons gives a preview: https://youtu.be/lko5l1dpYVs?si=sOxGQlsPr6VGSqxx min. 19:32. Everything unmoved but still movable must still be in time. God must be even higher, the Immovable Mover, so Koons' argument.
ReplyDeleteI think it's pretty plausible that anything in time is movable, I agree. Switching to an immovable mover does help. But we still need to worry about the possibility of something outside of time that isn't God, something that has some potential-actual distinction.
ReplyDeleteHere is the quote from Prof. Koons: "Anything that's changeable is in time — no matter if it actually changes. It's still in time, sitting there not changing, despite its changeability. So, the only thing that could be outside of time is something that's utterly unchangeable." So, he would boldly claim that there is nothing outside of time that is not God, instead having a potential–actual distinction. He would say that it then never was outside of time, after all! I propose that the issue at play is what "outside of time" means, then. Maybe you have different things in mind there. And how does he even justify his bold claim? We will have to wait and see the entire argument in the new book(s).
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