Cause and effect?

Ray, Welcome to A2K. Everything is in a constant flux. Just because we say "cause and effect," it doesn't necessarily mean that it started with a "original" cause. For instance, when a lightening strikes a tree and starts a fire, there had to be something that proceeded the lightning and the growth of that tree.

Aquinas held that at some point you'd have to acknowledge an uncaused cause or "First Cause" and that would be God.

Your question seems to be more of "When did time start?" A question which is twists logic no matter how you arrive at the question.

Re: Cause and effect?


In theory it does. A cause creates an effect which results in another cause and another following effect. The cause's cause is the prior effect.

Actually, determinism depends on there being only ONE possible effect for every cause. That's the main reason that it doesn't work.

i think that life is a complete cycle, and human beings are limited that is why some why's cannot be ans. if we don't know the ans. its cause we have no way of reaching it on our conscious level, there is a glass ceiling with human being and limitations. evenything has a definate case closed ans.

Interesting slant, Rufio. If every condition or event had only one consequence this would suggest a rigid linearity of things. In fact, every condition and event has multiple consequences and they also have multiple consequences, resulting in an extremely complex web of connections, so complex that the notion of chance becomes useful. It does seem, however, that we do not find causes and effects in the world; they are not empirical phenomena, only ideas we use to explain how things come about and to anticipate what they may lead to. I think it was Hume who said something like (I've said this before at least a year ago) the following: When we see a cue ball move toward another pool ball and strike it "causing" the latter to move. We do not see cause, as if it were a force transferred from the cue ball to the object ball. What we see is the cue ball move toward the object ball and stop when it reaches it. Then at that moment we see the object ball movement foward. We THINK up the notion of force/energy as a cause, which is no more than an explanatory construction. Now the Buddhist convention is that our lives are determined by a great Cosmic process of karmic cause and effect. The zen version of buddhism/taoism does not require such a model of the Cosmos. It sticks to what we see, having no philosophical or spiritual need to add constructions to experience. We can and must do so, but we should not attribute more to such constructions than their purely pragmatic value.