The Person God Is by Bertocci Peter A Peter A.;

Author:Bertocci, Peter A, Peter A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

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In the preceding discussion we have purposely assumed that the changes or beings in the world are not internally related, for the view that they are is in itself a cosmological answer, on a monistic ontological model, to the problem of an orderly many-in-one. But since the cosmological argument is historically connected with theistic arguments, we shall deliberately not pursue this alternative, once we have granted that the theistic view needs to confront this other theoretical alternative. Yet the theistic and monistic views of ‘the world’ are united against any basic pluralistic views which so atomize the world that the order we observe is a constant surprise. If what we observe about us is a realm of dependably predictable, determinate changes, then, if there is no Self-Sufficient Unified Structure in some way controlling-sustaining the order we observe, we seem to be courting rather than cornering mystery. For now many substance-causes (to collapse ‘beings’ and ‘events’), each ab initio intrinsically independent of each other, presumably interacted in a fashion that produced and will go on to produce a dependable togetherness that is unreasonably expected if they indeed were initially unrelated to, and constitutionally independent, of, each other. Ultimate Pluralism is always hard put to explain order. For if there is a dependable order among the events or beings that make up what we call the world, why make that order difficult to understand by postulating beings that presumably are independent completely of each other? Hence both theistic and monistic cosmologists are united against any view of the world that makes the order itself a constant anomaly, given pluralistic presuppositions.

Restricting ourselves to a theistic alternative we must ask how the Ground of the world is related to events in the world and their order. On any theistic view the dependent substance-causes are created, which is to say basically that they are neither part of the Ground nor emanations from it. They are ‘posited’, ‘planted-out’, to use F. R. Tennant’s terms. But any cosmological theist must disabuse himself and others of the view that the Ground is a First Cause in a temporal sense – some cosmic Watch-maker who makes the parts of the watch, then the watch, and finally, perhaps, leaves it alone while he goes about other business. For what the world calls for, if it calls for any Ground at all, is a Ground that is at every moment related to each contingent being and relation just because every moment, as we know it, is not self-dependent. Any First Cause cannot be merely a Self-Sufficient Being that creates a time-series which then runs presumably by derived power.

If there is any Productive Ground at all, it is not First Temporal Cause but Creator and Recreator or Continuer persistently and contemporaneously involved in the very existence and interrelations of the beings that we know as ‘the world’. The notion of cause as merely regular sequence is to be given up because regularity could not be adequately conceived as ‘residing’ in the substance-cuases as such or in their different relations.

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