3.3 Three More Arguments
As I have said, arguments concerning motion form the bulk of SCG 1,13. Before he concludes this chapter, however, Aquinas adds three more arguments, though he presents them very briefly and with nothing like the detail he engages in when it comes to the arguments I have noted above. Here are the arguments.
The first of the three final arguments is this:
1. “In all ordered efficient causes, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, whether one or many, and this is the cause of the last cause.”
2. “When you suppress a cause, you suppress its effect.”
3. “If you suppress the first cause, the intermediate cause cannot be a cause,” and “if there were an infinite regress among efficient causes, no cause would be first” and “all the other causes which are intermediate, will be suppressed.”
4. So we have to suppose “that there exists a first efficient cause” (i.e., God).
You should notice that Aquinas is here assuming that there are efficient or agent causes, and that some of them are ordered to their effects, not in a chronological or linear way but in the hierarchical way exemplified by my example of moving books resting on my hand. So Aquinas is not now arguing that God exists since we can posit a past series of causes going backward in time to some temporally first efficient cause. If we could posit such a series of causes, then, Aquinas thinks, we would have a quick and powerful argument for the existence of God along the lines “Whatever has a beginning of existence must have a cause; the world had a beginning; so there must have been a cause for the origin of the world.”30 But that is not the present argument, which is claiming that there cannot be an infinite regression in a hierarchically ordered series of efficient causes.
The second of the three final arguments in SCG 1,13 goes like this:
1. There are degrees of truth in things since some things are more true (and therefore more in being) than others.
2. The existence of such degrees of truth in things implies that there is something supremely true and most in being.
The final argument in SCG 1,13 runs as follows:
1. “Contrary or discordant things cannot, always or for the most part, be parts of one order except under someone’s government, which enables all and each to tend to a definite end.”31
2. In the world we find that “things of diverse natures come together under one order, and this not rarely or by chance, but always or for the most part.”32
3. There is therefore some being by whose providence the world is governed.
As you will see by checking the text of SCG 1,13, the argument I have just represented really does say nothing more than I say that it does. So we are not dealing here with a very developed line of thinking. All Aquinas appears to be saying is that, though the world contains different kinds of things, there is an interaction between them that allows us to think of the world as a system implying an orderer, given that regular interaction among things forming a system needs to be accounted for in terms of intelligence.