Revisiting Aquinas's First Way

6/22/2021

I've been working a lot lately on Aquinas's First Way, the argument from motion, which builds on Aristotle's arguments in Books 6, 7, and 8 of the Physics, and which Aquinas develops at length in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, chapter 13. Aquinas calls it the "most manifest" way of proving God's existence, but it has not been popular with commentators or critics. Sir Anthony Kenny is thoroughly dismissive of it in his book on the Five Ways. He quotes Suarez, who wrote: "Taken by itself, this argument is shown in many ways impotent to prove there is anything immaterial in reality, let alone that there is a first and uncreated substance." (Disputationes metaphysicae XXIX, I, 7)

The basic argument is quite simple:
1. Some things are in motion (experience change).
2. Everything that is moved is moved by something else (no self-moving).
3. A chain of movers cannot regress to infinity.
Therefore, there must be at least one unmoved mover.

Almost everyone accepts premise 1, so all of the action concerns premises 2 and 3. In addition, the argument faces a serious "gap" problem: how does one get from an unmoved mover to a "first and uncreated substance" (as Suarez puts it)? By paying careful attention to the arguments, and by exercising a little imagination and creativity, we can rehabilitate the First Way into an argument that deserves consideration alongside the many other sound theistic proofs that have been crafted recently.

Before getting into the details, we have to consider first what Aristotelians like Aquinas assume about the nature of change and time. There are essentially only two options here: either time is fundamental, and change is definable in terms of time (Russell's at-at theory of change), or change is fundamental and time is definable in terms of change (time is the "measure" of change). There are very strong considerations in favor of the second, Aristotelian option. At-at theorists have never been able to develop a successful explanation of the direction of time or of causation. See, for example, Huw Price's Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point, or Alex Pruss's critique of David Lewis's counterfactual-conditional account of time's arrow. In addition, at-at theorists cannot explain how we are able to measure the true duration of processes, without making the ad hoc assumption that each kind of process has a fixed velocity (like the speed of light). Aristotle's option avoids both of these defects.

Famously (or, infamously, depending on your point of view), Aristotle defines change in Book III of the Physics as the actuality of the potential qua potential. Aquinas does a good job of unpacking this somewhat cryptic statement in his commentary on the Physics (Lectures 2 and 3 of Book III). Potentiality is, for Aristotle, something real and irreducible. It is a feature of all natural things, a kind of "natural intentionality" as David Armstrong and George Molnar put it. When a thing has a certain potentiality, it is pointing in a specific direction to a particular, non-actual situation. Motion occurs when such a potentiality is partially but not completely actualized.

Take a stone that is in the process of becoming hotter. Let's say that the stone is currently lukewarm. The stone has both the potential of being colder and the potential of being hotter, but only one of these two potentialities is now partially actualized, namely, the second of the two. That is what constitutes the stone's becoming hotter. Once the stone has reached its equilibrium state, it will have fully actualized that potential and will no longer be in motion (change). At that point in time, neither of the stone's potential will be partially actualized. Both will exist only in a state of perfect potentiality.

All change is, therefore, inherently directional. It is always change toward some unrealized state or states. Time passes as change occurs, and time itself is therefore also directional, pointing from the terminus ab quo and toward the terminus ad quem of the process of change. Moreover, the measure of time consists in the completion of certain standard processes, like the movement of light across a fixed distance. Thus, there is no mystery about the arrow of time, nor about the fixity of the velocity of these standard processes. In addition, the Aristotelian option yields the impossibility of time travel, since this would involve making the end of a process into its beginning.

Time passes because change happens, and not vice versa. Once we grasp this, we see that any law of inertia is completely irrelevant to the argument from motion. A law of inertia dictates that a body will continue to move in a straight line and at a constant speed as time passes. The inertial motion of the body thus depends on the movement of time and cannot be the explanation for the passage of time. The passage of time requires the continuous occurrence of change that is independent of time, in a way that no merely inertial motion can be.

Thus, the First Way points us toward a crucial metaphysical question: what is the source or explanation of this time-independent change?

2 Comments

Diego Langevin

8/30/2021 08:50:50 pm

Hello, Dr. Koons. I know that this post is a little old but I had a question concerning the uniqueness of the first cause. I recently came across an objection that accuses the first way of committing a quantifier shift fallacy. We know that every chain of movers is finite and that there must exist at least one first cause. The trouble seems to be that we do not know that this first cause is the first cause that all series of movers terminate in. Is this right? Thanks

StardustyPsyche

1/21/2023 01:48:15 am

"2. Everything that is moved is moved by something else (no self-moving)."
Clearly a false premise, as Aquinas moved himself, you move yourself.

This fundamental error by Aquinas was even embedded in his example of the hand and staff. We can give Aquinas the benefit of the doubt that he was merely being succinct in mentioning only the hand, as he must have realized that the hand alone does not move the staff, rather, the whole bodily system of heart, blood, muscles, and bones works in concert to move the staff.

Suppose you hold your breath, pick up a staff, and while still holding your breath you hurl the staff like a javelin such that it arches through the air and lands some distance away sticking in the ground like a spear.

That scenario lays bare false statements by Aquinas in the First Way. Clearly you moved yourself rendering your paraphrased version of Aquinas number 2 false, and I must stress that it is Aquinas who chose to employ the human body in his own example, yet failed to realize the obvious fact that a human body moves itself.

Further, the contention that the staff moves "only" because it is moved by the hand is also clearly false, since the hand is not in contact with the staff as it arches through the air. I am sure you realize that the First Way is not a temporal argument, rather, it is a hierarchical argument, so the fact that the hand moved the staff at some time in the past is irrelevant to the fact that in mid air the staff is moving without the continued force of the hand, rendering another premise of Aquinas false.

"3. A chain of movers cannot regress to infinity.
Therefore, there must be at least one unmoved mover."
This is logically invalid in that this statement employs a false dichotomy. However, one could argue that the assertion of a false dichotomy rests on the premise that there is a third alternative, so, in that sense, the First Way is merely unsound in this aspect.

The two choices presented are either an infinite hierarchical regress or a finite hierarchical regress terminating at base with a special case of mover, namely, an unmoved mover.

Consider what moved W, X moved W. What moved X, Y moved X. And so forth in a hierarchical, or fundamentally linear, regression from moved to mover. Either the list of movers regresses infinitely, or it terminates with a particular special mover, the unmoved mover.

However, consider what moved Y, Z moved Y. What moved Z, Y moved Z.

Thus the third sort of termination of the regression, a finite termination in mutual causation. For example, 1 electron alone in space cannot move itself, but 2 electrons can move each other. Causation is not fundamentally a hierarchical linear process, rather, an interactive mutual process that is fundamentally mutually circular.

Examples of things that move themselves abound, such as rockets, animals, spring or battery driven mechanisms such as clocks and cars, the sun and every star, and on and on. At base the distinction between mover and moved is arbitrary and meaningless, since there are only systems of mutually interacting material.

I suggest On the Notion of Cause, with Applications to the Free-Will Problem by Bertrand Russell and Against Measurement by John Stewart Bell to aid you in coming to terms with how deeply mistaken Aristotle and Aquinas were, and you remain.

The Rigorous Thomist

Revisiting Aquinas's First Way

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