Cause & Effect

by The Progressing Pilgrim on August 29th, 2011

What a week for New Yorkers. As I write this post we are waiting to find out what Hurricane Irene has in store for us. Earlier this week we sustained a 5.9 earthquake. Thank God there was no damage. I found out about the earthquake during a business meeting in Manhattan. A concerned manager ran in notifying us that NYC and DC had just been hit with an earthquake. I hadn’t felt anything. Neither did anyone else in the room. Years ago I had the experience of being in a quake. When you are in one you don’t forget it.

As we left the meeting one of the attendees started to explain to me that we haven’t seen anything yet. Always the curious one I asked, “What do you mean?” He enthusiastically proceeded to explain to me that we are going to experience a lot more disasters and we should not underestimate old cultures like the Mayans. Astronomically or astrologically (he wasn’t sure) they were extremely advanced. The complexity and accuracy of their calendars was evidence of this. They could also use astronomy to predict the future.

I wonder if they had a date on it for their cultural extinction.

He went on. The planets are now aligning themselves as they haven’t in 100s of years. We are in for some bad times.

As I was listening my mind was furiously trying to come up with a response. If I politely agreed, then I would have subjected my self to validating an astrological response as a reason for disasters. If I disagreed, I’d run the risk of insulting a good friend. Then, the light went on.

“Ok,” I said. “I see what your saying. We are to expect more disasters, and this is a result of the way the planets and stars align.

“Exactly”.

“That would mean then that these disasters are not random. There is a specific cause behind them such as the alignment of the planets.”

“Right, you got it.” He nodded approvingly.

Trying to be accommodative I suggested a scientific answer, I continued, “Maybe it has something to do with increased gravitational pull or something like that.” Then I asked, “I have one question though. What is causing the planets to align in such a way in the first place? In other words is there something or someone aligning them? If not, then the whole process is random and non-predictable.”

My friend smiled, thought for awhile, then said, “we’ll have to talk about this again”, and then he had to get going.

This discussion started me thinking about causation. How much do we really believe in cause and effect? Do we really believe that every effect has a cause? Questions of causation tend to arise during times of disaster. What caused the earthquakes in Haiti and Asia where so much suffering ensued?

Scientists are ready to give naturalistic answers. There is movement with the earth’s plates and energy build up. This just pushes the cause back. What caused the plates to move? What caused the energy to build up? These questions eventually rise to “why” questions. Why did the plates move, why did the energy build up, why did it happen here and not there,why does the earth act like this at all? And so on and so on until an ultimate un-caused first cause is sought. For Christianity and Judaism, this un-caused first cause is God. Since the time of Christ, this type of reasoning dominated Western thought.

With the advent of the Enlightenment causation started to come under attack. Skeptical philosophers saw the obvious implications of this argument. If God is the ultimate cause of everything, this would include evil. Since God allows evil, he is either not loving (because he would eliminate evil) or he is not powerful enough to do away with evil. This argument had two points of attack. The first, was to impugn the character of God thus making him not worthy to be believed in. The second was to disassociate God from the cause of suffering. Either he didn’t cause it or he was impotent of stop it. This argument demanded an answer and Christian theologians readily provided cogent ones. Click here. However the attack oncausation had begun.

In the mid 19th century, Charles Darwin proposed a theory on origins that seemed to sound the death knell for causation. Darwin insisted that the natural order was a result of the natural selection of randomly produced mutations, not supernatural design. Nature therefore, (including man) becomes the product of chance causes not the result of cosmic purpose. This produced a revolution in intellectual thought whereby secular men were no longer constrained by biblical criticism. Man was now free from God. He had achieved autonomy. He became the ultimate designer. Secular academia sensing the “God liberating” implications of evolution quickly assimilated evolutionary thought into all academic disciplines including theology, economics, history & sociology.

As Richard Weaver reminded us ideas do have consequences. Consider what atheist, philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell said,

The world of modern science is more purposeless, more void of meaning than the world outlined by Mephistopheles to Dr. Faustus. The modern world has no meaning. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation hence forth be safely built.

Russell understood the logical outcome of a purposeless universe much more clearly than did many of his peers then, or today. All of man’s love, achievements, heroics and genius are devoid of meaning and destined to be buried in a ruined universe.

Unfortunately Russell did not see the fallacious logic of such a position. If there is no ultimate purpose, design or meaning in the universe why should Russell’s ideas have any meaning. He did not perceive that this philosophical position is ultimately destructive of reason itself. Click here.

Without an ultimate starting pointing for reason, can there be reason? Without an ultimate starting point for logic, can there be laws of logic? Without an ultimate starting point for intelligence, can there be intelligence? The answer is no.

Today however our schools and universities have infused their disciplines with the evolutionary paradigm. History is taught as a series of random of events connected in time. Biology is taught as a series of random events over long periods of time. Economics is taught as a series of human actions without any ultimate meaning or purpose. As Shakespeare’s Macbeth lamented, “life is sound and fury signifying nothing.” These institutions should be avoided like the plague.

Consider Genesis 1:14-16

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.

Design is embedded in the universe. It is inescapable. God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.

Also consider these verses from Deuteronomy 8:11-20

Take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day. And if you forget the Lord your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. Like the nations that the Lord makes to perish before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.

I asked at the beginning of this post if we believe that every effect has a cause. Deuteronomy 8:11-20 is bursting with cause and effect. Do we believe this type of cause and effect. Do we believe there are laws to be obeyed. Do we believe in all the moral laws in both testaments? If we believe in wealth and prosperity, if we we believe in poverty and disaster, If we believe in cause and effect, let us hasten and not delay to keep his commandments.

Below is a video of the day before and the day after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.