Exploring Causality: Understanding Truth and Divine Creation

His basic thesis was this: that we never have a direct, immediate perception of causality. Now we think we do, and we’re constantly looking for the causes of things and we observe what’s going around us. For example, we see a common experience where the rain falls and the grass gets wet, and what’s the assumption we make? [03:41]

A customary relationship is a relationship that we seem to see repeated again and again and again, and we are accustomed to assume will continue even as it has in the past. It’s our custom to assume when we go to bed at night that the sun, which has set will rise again in the morning. [05:21]

But Hume was saying is, we don’t know it for sure. And we don’t know really what causes it. All we see is a relationship of contiguity. Now, a relationship of contiguity indicates a relationship where one event follows sequence after another—where one action follows after another—in many cases with a high degree of predictability. [06:13]

What Hume is saying is what you see is a person grab a stick, and you see the person and the stick moving. You see the stick hit the ball. You see the ball start moving. You see the ball hit the object ball, and then you see the object ball start moving and roll into the pocket. [08:26]

Now, Hume is saying we don’t perceive the immediate cause. We see relationships of contiguity—contiguity—that is, contiguous events, namely events that follow one another. We don’t perceive the connection. All we see are the series of events. Do we understand that? [10:00]

Hume did not destroy causality. Hume did not destroy the law of cause and effect. Hume did not deny that there are causes for things. All he was saying was, we don’t know what is the particular cause in a particular moment. That’s one kind of skepticism. [12:00]

The law is every effect must have a cause because for something to be an effect, to come into being—or to say it another way, every contingent being must have a cause. That’s the meaning of contingency. That doesn’t mean that everything that is, is contingent or is an effect. [18:40]

Self-creation is a logical impossibility, self-existence isn’t, and what Christianity asserts is that God is an eternal being who exists in and of Himself. He is not an effect. He’s not contingent. He’s not created. He didn’t have a beginning. Nothing produced Him. He is eternal. [19:17]

There’s nothing inherently irrational about the idea of an eternal uncaused being. In fact, as Aquinas, I believe, rightly demonstrated, not only is it possible that there be such a being, it is logically necessary that there be such a being if anything exists at all. [19:41]

Anything that exists either exists in and of itself or is produced by something else. Those are the only options we have. See? But Mill was saying that everything that is has to have a cause. No. That’s not true, and unfortunately, when Bertrand Russell was a young, impressionable man—eighteen—he was persuaded by an erroneous argument from a very excellent philosopher, John Stuart Mill. [21:21]

What we need is an eternal, self-existent, independent being, who Himself or itself is not an effect. Nothing less, dear friends, can save the phenomena of the universe in which we live. [22:53]