Hume and necessary causation

Mathetes · #1 (**permalink**) 09-28-2007, 12:59 PM

Quote:

The Idea of Necessary Causal Connection

Hume begins Chapter VII of the first Enquiry with a hunt for the impression behind our idea of causal power. This has been interpreted as an attempt to specify the parameters of the concept of causation — i.e. what we mean when we deploy causal terms — and the traditional analytical take on Hume’s answer is that it is to be found in the regular succession of certain of our impressions; their ‘constant conjunction’. On this interpretation, Hume is basically saying that when we make statements of the form "X caused Y", or "Y happened because of X", we just mean that X happened, then Y did, and that X-like events always precede Y-like ones.

However, this take is almost certainly flawed, for at least two reasons. Firstly, Hume offers two ‘definitions’ of causation, the first of which is in terms of pure regularity, but the second of which introduces the notion of the natural passage of the mind from the appearance of the cause to the idea of the effect (e.g. someone knocks a coffee mug off the table and, having always experienced unsuspended objects to fall, you anticipate its falling to the floor). This feeling stems from a natural association of the two events after persistent observation of them as constantly conjoined. And it is this feeling, or ‘determination of the mind’, which is the basis of our idea of necessity, i.e. that the cause necessitates its effect.

Secondly, this is the basis for our idea not in the sense that our concept of necessary connection can be analysed into such feelings of anticipation, expectation, etc., but that we then come to see the world as structured by a certain predictability of order, and we attribute this predictability to the external objects themselves, i.e. we attribute them a causal power which makes things fall out, or occur in, the way they do; a property of necessary connection. So Hume's argument is that the mind synthesises and then projects a concept of causal power when it observes similar events to occur together repeatedly. This is an example of what the philosopher Simon Blackburn has entitled ‘projectivism’; Hume argues that we project our feeling of predictability onto the objects, much as he argues that we project our moral attitudes onto situations or objects, as “nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation which they occasion.”

David Hume - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I've been wondering lately if this challenge to causation poses a problem for the theist. Just about every Christian short of Deists believe in some sort continuing divine causation. And something like the Kalam Cosmological argument relies exclusively on divine causation.

So on the one hand, the Christian has an argument for causation - there is a Divine Agent that effectively causes things to occur, and as such, we can explain why an action being followed by a subsequent effect is more than just an illusion or projection.

But what about, on the other hand, if divine causation is the very thing in question, such as in the kalam argument? Would there be any way to demonstrate causation to an objector without begging the question?