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The Hume–Edwards Principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

James Cain
James Cain
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky 40292
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Extract

In such a chain too, or succession of objects, each part is caused by that which preceded it, and causes that which succeeds it. Where then is the difficulty? But the WHOLE, you say, wants a cause. I answer, that the uniting of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct counties into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body, is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable, should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts. (David Hume)

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , September 1995 , pp. 323 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, part IX.

2 ‘A Critique of the Cosmological Argument’, in Louis P. Pojman (ed.), Philosophy of Religion: an Anthology (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1987), p. 16;Google Scholar originally published in The Rationalist Annual for the Year 1959.

3 See Rowe, William L., ‘Two Criticisms of the Cosmological Argument’, The Monist, vol. 54, no. 3 (1970),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Chapter 3 of The Cosmological Argument (Princeton University Press, 1973).Google Scholar See also Chapter 7 of Swinburne, Richard, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).Google Scholar

4 Ibid. p. 24.

5 Ibid. p. 123.

6 Ibid. p. 124.

7 For a discussion of the cosmological argument in which the supposition that causation cannot ‘go in a circle’ is abandoned, see Le Poidevin, Robin, ‘Creation in a Closed Universe Or, Have Physicists Disproved the Existence of God?’, Religious Studies 27 (03 1991), pp. 39–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 By the open-closed interval of time (0, 1), I mean all the moments of time after time o and up to and including time 1, i.e. {t|0 < t ≤ 1}.

9 Take, for example, high school physics problems where we are asked to determine the path a projectile will take over an interval of time given its previous trajectory and the gravitational forces involved. Here a process taking place over one time interval is seen to be causally explicable in terms of an earlier process. Here too we are comfortable with treating a process taking place over an interval of time, like the falling of a body, as being decomposable into subprocesses of arbitrarily small size.

10 I am assuming for the argument that sea anemones do not have an immaterial part. Also, I am not claiming that all individuals are supervenient on processes.

11 And Hume does independently address these claims in the very section of the Dialogue in which we find HEP propounded.