The First Way in Physical and Moral Space

THE FIRST WAY IN PHYSICAL AND MORAL SPACE Introduction ST. THOMAS'S FIRST Way admits of fruitful study from many perspectives on its differently distinguishable stages. But it is only finitely divisible, even in intellectu, at least to any good purpose. However cheering one may find the light of reinterpretative reason, some perspectives and some such stages may remain most crucial of all for evaluating the lasting importance of the argument. Saint Thomas himself at Summa contra Gentiles I, 13, assures us that the crucial stages of his argument in the Summa Theologiae are two in number. These are, (I) the stage of showing whether every" change" 1 (kinesis, motus), in our experience of natural bodies is caused by something other than that which is " changed " ; (II) the stage of arguing that one cannot allow the chain of concurrent causes of " changes " to go on to infinity or else one can give no real explanation of any " change " at all. It does not seem unreasonable to concede a Comon Sense analogue of (I) . It is less momentous, but not very audacious, to say that no " change " in anything which we abserve seems causally quite independent of any sets of concurrent events. The " leap " from p1 to p2 of what is said to be an " essentially unpredictable " nuclear particle at t3 seems pretty plausibly to depend at least in good part on the position and velocity of a great many microscopic and macroscopic co-existent things in the universe and their concurrent behavior. This particle within the nucleus of that atom in my right hand might not 1 For a valuable discussion of "motus" and its technical meaning as "change" see Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 7-9. 349 350 JOHN KING-FARLOW be taking its particular leap now if an atomic war had just begun with an irradiating bang, or if the sun had just started radically disappointing Hume's expectations of solar consistency . The sceptic who cheerfully grants this to be eminently plausible may well suggest yet again that the very existence of Nature viewed as a complete, self-subsistent, law-governed physical system of " changes " would he quite as good a First Cause as any. In nearly two decades of scientifically erudite championship for Saint Thomas, Dr. William Wallace, 0. P., has argued that such a sceptical move betrays an ignorance of science and its history.2 Father Wallace protests that such talk of a "self-subsistent, law-governed, etc., physical system" abstracts away too many important characteristics of natural bodies. But his protest, I shall argue, may tum out to be, (scarcely less than the sceptic's move), an irrelevant response to a religious person who poses the question "Why?" as a religious question and to a Christian theist's attempt to reply as a theist. For the religious type of" Why?" questioning may tum out to engulf the sceptic with expressions of fresh wonderlike "Why is there then a complete, self-subsistent physical system in which this ' change ' occurs? " And it may tum out to engulf Wallace and his historical Newton with utterances of new bafflement like: " Why then is there a universe with this kind of ' change ' in it, and also with a higher intelligence maintaining its gravitational laws, and also with other scientifically describable regularities? " " How could this happen if the universe were controlled by an intelligent being? " This sort of question about the first stage will be taken up in a brief Part II, The First Way in Moral Space, which will bring this essay to a close. It may turn out that not only Newton's 2 See W. A. Wallace, 0. P., (i) "Newtonian Antinomies and the Prima Via," The Thomist XIX, 2, (1956), pp. 151-19~; (ii) "Saint Thomas, Galileo, and Einstein ," The Thomist XXIV, 1, (1961), pp. 1-22; (iii) "The Cosmological Argument ," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association XLVI, (1972), p. 43-57; (iv) Causality and Scientific Explanation, Volume I: Medieval and Early Classical Science, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 197~), THE FffiST WAY IN PHYSICAL AND MORAL SPACE 351 but even Aristotle's physics sometimes seems to result...