To speak is human, to cause, divine?
Channel: rozeboosje
Date: 01/12/2012

One objective of philosophy is to identify the baggage we don't realise we are carrying in our language, and to try and remove it from a deeper understanding. The concept of "causation" is deeply rooted in an "intentional stance" view of reality, and it needs to be ditched when thinking about things such as "ontology".

If you fail to realise that the common language concept of "cause" is agency based, and you then proceed to work from the premise that "cause and effect" is a fundamental part of reality, then your "proof" for, e.g., the existence of some "god" thing is nothing more than the sort of magic trick in which a magician puts a rabbit into a hat in full view of the audience, and then gets pissed off when nobody is impressed with him pulling it out at the end.

If you accept that "agency" must be removed from a philosophical understanding of words such as "cause" and "causation", you have to face the fact that nothing in any "laws of physics" that we have ever invented to formally describe our understanding of how reality works seems to hint at anything akin to an impersonal, non-agency type of "causation". If you wish to insist that it DOES, you will need to explain what part of our "laws of nature" you think represents such an impersonal, non-agency type of "causation", and what, exactly, makes you think that.