Aristotle’s Fourfold Foundation
To understand where we are, we must look back to Aristotle. He did not see causality as a simple "A hits B" interaction. Instead, he proposed four interrelated explanatory factors that account for why a thing exists:
- The Material Cause: The physical substance (e.g., wood).
- The Formal Cause: The design or blueprint (e.g., the "chair-ness" of the object).
- The Efficient Cause: The primary source of change (e.g., the carpenter).
- The Final Cause: The purpose or telos (e.g., to provide a place to sit).
This teleological view is based on Aristotle's belief that a valid distinction can be made between a thing's essence and its observable form.² Perhaps in keeping with Aristotle's idea of a "formal cause," Michelangelo said that, when sculpting, he simply removed the stone that hid the figure already existing within.
Hume’s Skeptical Hammer
The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume eventually took a hammer to this foundation. He argued that causality is not something we actually observe in the world, but rather a mental habit born of "constant conjunction."
When we watch a game of billiards, for instance, the white ball appears to cause the motion of other balls when impacting them on the gaming table. However, Hume pointed out that all we truly observe is a sequence of events in space and time. We cannot prove that the first ball’s impact will always be followed by movement of the other balls. As Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature:
"Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho’ aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the ideas of these objects, and unite them in the imagination."³
The Divine Gap: Who Really Pulls the Trigger?
If, as Hume suggests, we cannot see a rational "link" between cause and effect, where does that power reside? For many thinkers, the answer was theological.
Philosophers of Occasionalism argued that "secondary causes" (like a fire burning a piece of wood) have no inherent power of their own. Instead, God is the only true "Efficient Cause." The fire doesn't burn the wood; rather, God burns the wood on the occasion of its contact with the flame. This suggests that God makes things happen—but perhaps not always in a rigid, predictable way. While we rely on the consistency of "Natural Law," the concept of a miracle represents a moment where God chooses to suspend the usual causal chain to achieve a specific purpose.
From Dogmatic Slumbers to Quantum Realities
Hume’s skepticism famously "awakened" Immanuel Kant from his "dogmatic slumbers."⁴ Kant realized that if Hume was right, science itself was in jeopardy. Kant’s solution was to argue that causality is a Category of the Understanding—a lens through which the human mind must process reality to make sense of it. We don't find causality in the world; we bring it with us.
In the modern era, subatomic physics has further complicated the picture. In particle reaction chambers, the neat, linear causality of the macroscopic world dissolves. At the quantum level, physicists claim that observations of subatomic particles support the ideas of probability and simultaneity instead of linear causality.⁵
This radical uncertainty is reflected in the arts and in the depth psychiatry of C. G. Jung. His concept of synchronicity—meaningful coincidences that suggest the possibility of non-causality or acausality—proposes that the universe may be bound together by principles we are only beginning to grasp.
Humility and the Divine
Seen this way, the long debate over causality—from Aristotle’s purposes, through Hume’s doubts and Kant’s categories, to modern scientific uncertainty—suggests not a failure of reason, but its limits. Causality may be less an observable force than a cognitive framework that allows the world to remain intelligible at all. For those open to faith, this leaves room for the thought that events unfold not merely through mechanical necessity, but within an order sustained by meaning itself—an order ultimately grounded beyond human comprehension.
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² A distinction that the Catholic Church adheres to when explaining the efficacy of the Eucharist.
³ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1896 ed.), SECTION VI.: Of the inference from the impression to the idea, paragraph 278.
⁴ Adler, Mortimer J. (1985). Ten Philosophical Mistakes, pp. 68, 133 at https://churchhistory101.com/docs/Adler-Ten-Mistakes.pdf
⁵ Some argue, however, that it's invalid to compare quantum and macroscopic levels of reality because subatomic particles exist in an entirely different arena, and behave in different ways than the larger aggregate objects that they make up.
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