/lit/ - Literature

>>10918070

In the second way, Aquinas argues that there must be a first efficient cause in nature; that is, he describes this cause as one that started the course of time from an originating moment, after which natural history has followed, leading up to now. Aquinas maintains that if there were no first state of time, then there would be no intervening states of time leading to now, and now would never have arrived - but since now does exist, there must have been some first state of time, and some explanation for this state. He affirms that the explanation is God. (This is distinct from the first way, which described the cause of the universe as active at every given moment of the universe's existence - which is not incompatible with this second way, but just focuses on a different aspect of Aquinas’ concept of God. Aquinas’ first way argued that for every time-slice, the causal chain through space is finite, and logically requires God. Kant argued that this causal chain through space can be pursued infinitely, and logically requires the human mind.)

Against the second way, Kant's objection would focus on time, rather than on space (as the first way would involve). The orderly pattern of time is the human mind's own function - simply one of the ways in which the human mind organizes the raw data that arises within it. Human consciousness proceeds temporally, and this is immediately obvious; everything the human mind processes ordered within to time, the law of which carries experience ever forward - human consciousness cannot set aside this temporal functioning, because it cannot set aside its own nature. Events begin and end within time: the very definition of an ending is the course of time after which an event has ceased, this course of time displaying that the event has not been continuing, but rather other events have continued on without it. Likewise, events can only being within time, and the prior duration of time without the event is exactly what provides the context within with the beginning of the event can be understood. An event can only originate if time is already there, so the order of time can be traced infinitely into the past as well as imagined infinitely into the future.