LESSON IV.
(Scripture Reading Exercise.)
III. MISCELLANEOUS EVIDENCES AND ARGUMENTS FOR THE DIVINE EXISTENCE. (Continued.)
I. THE ARGUMENT FROM "A FIRST CAUSE."
ANALYSIS | REFERENCES. |
I. Definition of Cause. | Theism (Mill) "Three Essays on Religion." pp. 142-154. John Fisk's "Cosmic Philosophy." Vol. I, Chapter vi on "Causation." "First Principles," Herbert Spencer, pp. 37-44 and pp. 95-96. (1) Note 1. (2) Notes 2 and 3. (3) Notes 4, 5, 6, 7. (4) Notes 8, 9. |
II. Necessity of Causation to Account for the External World. | |
III. Mind as the Originator of Force. | |
IV. The Substitution of "Eternal Cause" for "First Cause." |
SPECIAL TEXT: Intelligence, or the Light of Truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. (Doc. & Cov., Section cxiii, 30)
NOTES.
1. Definition of Cause: "The power or efficient agent producing anything or event; agent or agency; as gravitation is the cause of the stone's falling; malice is a cause of crime. * * * In a comprehensive sense, all the circumstances, (powers, occasions, actions, and conditions) necessary for an event and necessarily followed by it; the entire antecedent of an event. Efficient Cause, the power or agency producing anything or event; Material Cause, the material out of which by the efficient causes anything is made; Formal Cause, the pattern, place, or form according to which anything is produced by the operation of efficient causes; Final Cause,—God as uncaused and as the original source of all power, change, motion, and life. Styled by Plato and Aristotle the "Prime Mover." (Standard Dictionary, Funk and Wagnall.) The four last forms of the definition are known as "Aristotelian Causes."
2. Evidence of Causation in the External World: "The consideration of the external world around him, even in its broadest aspect, leads man up to the thought of an Eternal Cause; the study of its phenomena in detail with its marvelous intricacy of harmonious interaction produces the impression of design, and leads to the thought of a Designer—i. e., of an Eternal Cause that is intelligent and free.
"Man finds in himself a principle of causality in the light of which he interprets the external world. He cannot help regarding the succession of phenomena which he observes as effects—attributing each to some cause, When he examines that again he discovers it to be no true or absolute cause, but itself the effect of something further back, and so on. He finds in himself the nearest approach to a vera causa. Yet he would recognize the absurdity of calling himself self-caused. And the mind cannot rest in an endless chain of cause-effects. There must be, he feels, if you go far enough back, a real cause, akin, in some way, to man's own power of origination, yet transcending it—a cause that owns no cause—no source of being—but itself." (Belief in God, Dummelow's Commentary, p. ci.)