Causality, Cosmology and Christianity

Human perceptions of causal orders were evolved to respond to stimulus commensurate with the environment. I do not think that knowledge of causality is a part of the implicit natural environmental complex perceived.

Arthus Schopenhuer in his book of neo-Kantianism 'The Fourfold Roots of Reason' noted some of the ways that perception is modified by reason and he used the example of depth perception. The mind must learn to integrate that binocular vision into a three dimensional portrait and then it become automatic.

Causality such as science learns is a cumulative social process. Epistemology and perception is obviously one of the perennial philosophical concerns. Modern science simply adds more knowledge to that database. Interestingly philosophical classification and assignment of causes or relationships within a neo-monistic field of uncertain pluralistic composition extending these days into speculation about extra-dimensions even might have a paradigm sharing overlapping set characteristics with Quine's ideas on linguistic arrangements in the Dewey lectures and published as’ Ontological Relativity'.

I don't mean to say that physical cosmology is a linguistic categorization process at all, I simply point out that incompleteness in logical descriptions of event-processes in the 'material' universe make reduction to any given selected area rather arbitrary and implicitly likely to be in error or inaccuracy. Where does one decide to cut off the causes and break them up into little, separate causes? It reminds me of the particle versus wave criterion of photons for example. Everything may be a part of some larger whole or cause, and the temporal view of things as extemporaneous things-for-themselves may be just because we as human beings are standing in some place watching the experience pass relativisticly as a nominalistic phenomenon.

Causality in some ways may be equated with physical forces of nature, though I noted above that laws of nature might be just consistent measurements of particular relationships that recur invariantly (per R. Laughlin).

If the weak force is found to be associated with another force such as electro-magnetism and is then the electro-weak force, if the virtual energy of the Universe is found to be a source of gravity because of the way it is effected by mass that creates an apparent warping of space (though space is better regarding as a kind of solid), our ideas of causality may be in error, and the ideas we have regarding sequence of events differs from what the causes of certain events are.

If the tides rise and fall associated with the moon and we don't know about gravity living in the year 1000 B.C. then correlation of the movement of water with the moon would be the best we could do. I would guess that someone sometime must have postulated that the moon was attracted to the Earth by the arrival of the water locally rather than speculating along the lines of Newton on gravity. It is easy to mistake the order of events with causes of events.

The causes of the existence of the Earth were quite contentious in many regards over the centuries when theorists with opposite points of view disputed them. The mistaking of the order of events with the causality of events occurs in politics all the time especially with contemporary macro-economic analysis and public debt in the United States.

I think that Robert Laughlin mentioned about the natural world of human perception (for example we only perceive a limited range of the electro-magnetic spectrum) that at a collective level the responses to that collective or concatenated physical level of protocol are appropriate for that particular context.

Perhaps that morphs into the concepts about Deism a little regarding causality--I don't regard Deism or a disconnect of God's power or omnipotence as an especially contemporarily viable context, and alternatively, I do not mean that an implication that a collective or concatenated state of the physical universe is continuously or occasionally changed by Divine intercession. Not because of Calvinism, yet neither in distinction to it, the deterministic nature of God's creative provenance allows a simultaneous belief that God pre determined everything yet did not create and forget about the Universe.

We have fairly plain prophetic messages in the Bible that make a determinist criterion nearly the inevitable interpretation of the phenomenal universe. Yet one may also belief that the degrees of free of movement and thought are also actual. The deterministic selections of probability, as Laughlin might have written about analogously, within a given quantum state, may be free locally yet when viewed in a larger sample seem deterministic or ordered.