Against the Unmoved Mover

Theology has, since its beginning, rooted itself in a demand for creation. This is so much so that creation myths are identified by scholars as a primary form in world mythology. Since human beings could examine the world they live in they have wondered where it came from. In pre-scientific times it was natural to imagine some very powerful agent that preceded this realm and the agents that now live in it that brought about the latter in a display of divine power. In post-scientific revolution modernity we have a scientific cosmology which traces the origins of the universe to an extremely hot and dense incarnation of matter and energy. We don't yet know whether this was the temporal beginning of nature, or whether there were infinitely many "big bangs" before this.

Instead of ceding to scientific cosmology theology has repeated essentially the same demands it has always made for a creation myth. Cosmological arguments for God's existence go back to ancient and medieval philosophy and aim to show that the universe is dependent on God's nature/creative act. A foundational version of the argument is Aristotle's unmoved mover. According to Aristotle all objects combine unformed matter with principles of intelligibility and purpose called form. All substances were combinations of matter and form and explanation had to be broken down into a description of the matter that made things up (material cause), the form of the thing (formal cause), the efficient cause (that which brought the unity of matter and form about), and the final cause (the end for which the unity is brought about).

Since the unity of matter and form explained the actualization of possibility there was a need to explain how this process of actualization got its start. Merely positing an infinity of actualized potentials isn't to explain actualization, but merely to reassert it's existence. Thus Aristotle posited the unmoved mover; a divine and already always actual being who imbued the world with potentiality. Today Aristotle's argument isn't much talked about in the philosophy of religion, but remains a threat for secular analytic philosophers who seek to defend Aristotle's "hylomorphic" view of substance. The unmoved mover anticipates later "contingency arguments" found in medieval thinkers such as Aquinas and Ibn Sina.

The contingency argument, still talked about in analytic philosophy of religion circles, observes the existence of things which didn't have to exist (contingency, or contingent being). It then asks for an explanation of contingent being. Again, merely invoking an infinite regress of contingency would repeat that which is to be explained. Thus a necessary being, one which could not fail to exist, must be invoked to explain contingent being. God, defined as a being who created the world and couldn't fail to exist, naturally fits the bill.

Recently apologists have souped up another cosmological argument from medieval Islam known as the Kalam. The argument asserts the beginning of the universe and the need for all things which begin to be caused to begin. Support is marshaled for each premise. It is noted that one can not form an actually infinite set simply by moving from one number to the other, so supposedly we would not be able to get from the past to now if the number of past moments is actually infinite.

It is also pointed out that according to relativity all space times which have on average been expanding (which would include ours) have a finite starting point at t.0. Further, it is argued that if things could begin to exist without cause then there would be nothing to stop random things from popping into existence all the time. With the development of modern science philosophy and theology itself began to resist the idea of the unmoved mover. Famously the Sephardic Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza offered a version of naturalistic pantheism in which nature is the impassable cause of all things.

In titanic German Idealist Hegel nature losses its impassable character when, explicitly critiquing Spinoza, Hegel envisions a natural totality that in constituting all reality brings together substance (the physical world) and subject (human experience). Hegel recast the cosmological argument (as he did all other arguments for God) to transform it into an apparatus for demonstrating the unity of substance and subject, rather than a supernatural creator. Instead of assuming the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), supposed by the original contingency argument and which in strong form posits that all facts have sufficient explanations, Hegel assumes a principle of ground PG. According to PG its not that all facts have sufficient explanations, but that every particular fact has a determinate relation to the whole in which it is part.

Thus instead of taking on a burden to sufficiently explain every fact we find we take on the weaker burden of explaining how all particular facts are related to the total reality. As such, for Hegel necessity and contingency are not two opposed ontological categories (ontology being the study of being). Instead they are fundamentally connected so that necessity is the result of contingency and vice versa given that the existence of contingent facts necessitate further facts about how the world must be if those contingent facts are to obtain. An example is that for me to write this article it must be the case that I have familiarized myself with the ideas of Hegel.

The recast cosmological inference creates an understanding of contingency and necessity which integrates the two together in a unified ontological picture which limits itself to empirically discoverable truths about the natural world. The simplicity and unification of this picture makes it preferable to the un-recast cosmological inference which imposes an abstract demand for a separate ontological category of necessity distinct from empirically observable contingent reality. In doing so Hegel's recasting of the cosmological argument eliminates the need for a supernatural first cause for all that is. Similarly Hegel's idea of the concrete universal transcends Aristotle's hylomorphic basis for the unmoved mover.

Whereas for Aristotle properties and the particular objects that posses them as attributes are brought together by combinations of matter and form known as substances, universal and particular come together in Hegel's system via the concrete universal. To understand this we should take a detour through some basic metaphysics (philosophy dealing with the nature of reality at large) of objects which philosophers have puzzled over from Aristotle, to the scholastics, through to contemporary analytic philosophy. Take the shirt you are wearing right now, or any other article of clothing for that matter. Suppose its red.

Your shirt is red, but a bunch of other stuff is red, including balls, soda cans, and shoes. How is this true? How can a feature like redness be instantiated (exemplified) in multiple different objects all spatially discontinuous from each other? What is redness to begin with? One way of answering this question is to say that attributes, or properties such as redness that are instantiated in particulars such as a ball, or your shirt, are universals. That is to say properties are actually existing objects whose nature is to be instantiated in different particular objects.

The other basic way to answer the question is to say that there aren't any universals, but just ways of differentiating particulars from each other. So the redness in your shirt, or ball, isn't a real thing, its just a way of distinguishing your shirt and the ball as particulars from other particulars. The view on which universals exist is called realism about universals and the view on which they don't is called nominalism. Realism comes in transcendent and immanent varieties (sometimes called ante rem and in rebus respectively). Transcendent realism, associated with Plato, is the view that universals are abstract objects; non-causal entities that exist without space, or time, that are then exemplified in the spatiotemporal world.

Immanent realism, associated with Aristotle, is the view that universals are not abstract objects, but instead entities that inhere in the particular objects that exemplify them. Whereas Plato thought that there was a realm of perfect forms in which the perfected versions of universals exist Aristotle, as we noted, saw form as the principle of intelligibility that gave shape to the matter of a substance. Plato actually did think that the forms stood in casual relations to their bearers, but because this relation would have to be rather obscure contemporary transcendent realists maintain the acausal nature of universals. There are also different types of nominalism corresponding to different ways of explaining how distinctions between particulars are made without reference to universals, but we won't run down the list here as this would take us far afield.

The virtue of realism is supposed to be that it explains the relation between properties and their bearers, whereas the virtue of nominalism is suppose to be that by axing properties as real entities we need not add in new weird objects to our ontology. However while this Ockham's razor style move (William of Ockham was himself a nominalist) has something to recommend it it seems that axing properties really is just axing the data we are trying to account for. Instead of accounting for an observed relation between attributes and their bearers we simply deny the relation exists. One way to appreciate the force of this criticism is via the concept of a bare particular. A bare particular is a particular with no distinguishing attributes.

Its very hard to get a grip on what a bare particular is because it lacks attributes. If nominalism is true then in some ultimate sense all particulars are bare particulars, or we have to insist that there is something about particulars that distinguishes them. However, the natural way to express that is to say they have attributes, but that is what in the ultimate sense nominalism denies. So it seems that nominalism would have difficulty saying what it is that makes particulars not bare and if it admits that they are then its hard to see what nominalism is even saying when it says that there are only particulars. Hegel expresses the point this way in his first major work Phenomenology of Spirit:

Those who put forward such assertions really themselves say, if we bear in mind what we remarked before, the direct opposite of what they mean: a fact which is perhaps best able to bring them to reflect on the nature of the certainty of sense-experience. They speak of the “existence” of external objects, which can be more precisely characterized as actual, absolutely particular, wholly personal, individual things, each of them not like anything or anyone else; this is the existence which they say has absolute certainty and truth. They “mean” this bit of paper I am writing on, or rather have written on: but they do not say what they “mean”. If they really wanted to say this bit of paper which they “mean”, and they wanted to say so, that is impossible, because the This of sense, which is “meant”, cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e. to what is inherently universal. In the very attempt to say it, it would, therefore, crumble in their hands; those who have begun to describe it would not be able to finish doing so: they would have to hand it over to others, who would themselves in the last resort have to confess to speaking about a thing that has no being. They mean, then, doubtless this bit of paper here, which is quite different from that bit over there; but they speak of actual things, external or sensible objects, absolutely individual, real, and so on; that is, they say about them what is simply universal. Consequently what is called unspeakable is nothing else than what is untrue, irrational, something barely and simply meant.

If nothing is said of a thing except that it is an actual thing, an external object, this only makes it the most universal of all possible things, and thereby we express its likeness, its identity, with everything, rather than its difference from everything else. When I say “an individual thing”, I at once state it to be really quite a universal, for everything is an individual thing: and in the same way “this thing” is everything and anything we like. More precisely, as this bit of paper, each and every paper is a “this bit of paper”, and I have thus said all the while what is universal. If I want, however, to help out speech – which has the divine nature of directly turning the mere “meaning” right round about, making it into something else, and so not letting it ever come the length of words at all – by pointing out this bit of paper, then I get the experience of what is, in point of fact, the real truth of sense-certainty. I point it out as a Here, which is a Here of other Heres, or is in itself simply many Heres together, i.e. is a universal. I take it up then, as in truth it is; and instead of knowing something immediate, I “take” something “truly”, I per-ceive (wahrnehme, per-cipio).

Another way of understanding the point is to take the variety of nominalism known as concept-nominalism. According to concept-nominalism what distinguishes particulars is a concept, so attributes like redness are really just mental states that represent particulars in certain ways. However one has to ask what is actually being represented. There is no universal corresponding to redness so if the redness concept is not misrepresenting particulars what could it possibly be representing about them?

Thus we may judge realism to be preferable to nominalism. Hegel also develops an argument in favor of in rebus/immanent/Aristotelian realism over ante rem/transcendent/Platonic realism. He points out that if universals are beyond the particulars that exemplify them then it seems strange that we could perceive that an object exemplifies a universal. If there is no necessary connection between the universal and our perceptual experience of particulars then it doesn't seem like we can say with any confidence whether a universal is instantiated in a particular. However, if universals transcend particulars in that the universal is not what we are interacting with perceptually when we experience particulars, then no necessary connection between our perceptual data and the universal seem apparent.

Thus in order to preserve the correctness of our attributions of universals Hegel declares that we must accept in rebus realism so that there is a necessary connection between the particular and the perceptions we have of it under the right conditions and the universal itself. On Aristotle's hylomorphic version of in rebus realism we are left with the question of how form and matter ultimately combine to form substances that actualize possibilities. This problem leads Aristotle to the unmoved mover. Hegel takes a different approach to immanent realism that does not require a purely actual first mover.

In Hegel's metaphysics PG demands that our picture of the world ultimately ground all particular determinate facts in a global network of mutually constitutive relations. That means that every universal is already embedded in a larger concrete structure of particulars so that it is possible to describe all existing universals as immediately and immanently exemplified in the one unitary concrete structure; the concrete universal. Therefore there is no need for separate categories of form and matter that must be brought together by a third category substance which then must be explained by the unmoved mover. The concrete universal already contains the development of all universal categories.

In the case of the Kalam cosmological argument, while it is widely discussed in philosophy of religion literature, it has little to recommend it's premises. The mere existence of a uncaused starting point of, say, spacetime, would not thereby necessitate that anything and everything randomly pops into existence out of thin air. There is also just no need to traverse the infinite past because there is no finite starting point from which to traverse; there is by hypothesis no beginning. While the BVG Theorem does in fact demonstrate from relativity that on average expanding spacetimes do go back to a finite t.0 the initial singularity, particularly the quantum effects that predominate near it, can't be explained by relativity. This is in fact precisely one of the areas in which relativity is reaching its limits as a physical theory.

Additional thought experiments have to been used to try to refute the existence of a beginningless past such as Hilbert's Hotel in which a hotel with infinite rooms can always accommodate new guests just by moving the infinitely many guests down one room, or the Grim Reaper Paradox in which given that an infinite number of grim reapers has been instructed to kill you before midnight it is the case that you both will and won't be killed by a grim reaper since before any grim reaper could kill you another grim reaper would have already done it. None of these paradoxes straight forwardly proceed from the mere assumption of an infinite past and some of them, such as Hilbert's hotel, are actually just completely consistent results of set theory where all members of an infinite set corresponding to the natural numbers (that is 0,1,2,3..) can be put in one to one correspondence with each other (that is can be lined up with each other). A major theme running throughout socialist philosophy is the self-sufficiency of nature. Since the socialists wanted to pull ultimate meaning down from heaven and place it squarely within earthly existence they variously argued that nature need not derive from any supernatural causes.

In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx makes the fallowing point in the style of a Platonic dialogue:

Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, ||XI| then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?

You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.

But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.

The point Marx makes here, under the influence of Hegel's naturalistic approach to questions of theology and metaphysics, as well as the development of modern natural and social science, is that the mere demand nature be casually explained by something else is a demand so abstract as to be devoid of intellectual content. The modern picture of nature as operating according to its own internal regularities provides a framework for interpreting all phenomena as immanent results of natural processes which has a glorious empirical track record within the sciences. It seems to just miss the point, to abstract from the totality of evidence, to continue to demand that nature had its origin from somewhere, or something else. Marx makes the same point in his doctoral dissertation on Greek atomism.

He criticizes commentators on Epicurus who claim that the latter has failed to explain the inherent atomic motion that accounts for the differentiation between living and non-living systems on the basis that Epicurus' whole point was to propose a starting point of atoms in motion that then accounts for the distinctions in nature. To ask for some further explanation for this inherent motion would be begging the question; simply presuming from the outset that atoms in motion can't be the starting point which is what the critic of Epicurus would have to establish in order to make a salient critique. Marx's Anarchist rival Mikhail Bakunin makes a similar argument for the self-sufficiency of nature in his most famous (and yet unfinished) work God and the State:

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it - that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rules, they have called this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, "supreme Being" and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.

The gradual development of the material world, as well as of organic animal life and of the historically progressive intelligence of man, individually or socially, is perfectly conceivable. It is a wholly natural movement from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to the superior; a movement in conformity with all our daily experiences, and consequently in conformity also with our natural logic, with the distinctive laws of our mind, which being formed and developed only by the aid of these same experiences; is, so to speak, but the mental, cerebral reproduction or reflected summary thereof.

In his Modern Science and Anarchism the father of Anarchist Communism Peter Kropotkin likewise argued the empirical evidence for the self-sufficiency of nature:

When the thinkers of the eighteenth century turned from the realm of stars and physical phenomena to the world of chemical changes, or from physics and chemistry to the study of plants and animals, or from botany and zoology to the development of economical and political forms of social life and to religions among men,—they never thought of changing their method of investigation. To all branches of knowledge they applied that same inductive method. And nowhere, not even in the domain of moral concepts, did they come upon any point where this method proved inadequate. Even in the sphere of moral concepts they felt no need of resorting again either to metaphysical suppositions ("God," "immortal soul," "vital force," "a categorical imperative" decreed from above, and the like), or of exchanging the inductive method for some other, scholastic method. They thus endeavored to explain the whole world --all its phenomena --in the same natural-scientific way. The encyclopædists compiled their monumental encyclopædia, Laplace wrote his "System of the World," and Holbach "The System of Nature;" Lavoisier brought forward the theory of the indestructibility of matter, and therefore also of energy or motion (Lomonósoff was at the same time outlining the mechanical theory of heat² ); Lamarck undertook to explain the formation of new species through the accumulation of variations due to environment; Diderot was furnishing an explanation of morality, customs, and religions requiring no inspiration from without; Rousseau was attempting to explain the origin of political institutions by means of a social contract--that is, an act of man's free will.... In short, there was no branch of science which the thinkers of the eighteenth century had not begun to treat on the basis of material phenomena--and all by that same inductive method.

As such the concept of the unmoved mover, divine/supernatural creation of the world, the uncaused cause in the theological sense, is an abstraction away from real life.

Sources
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology-theology/
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Murray and Rea
Hegel's Recasting of the Theological Proofs, Williams
Metaphysics: The Basics, Rea
Marx's Ethical Vision, Wills
Hegel, Fritzman
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/