In a reductionist view, the cause of an event is an aggregation of events on a smaller scale. Science tends to side with this view.
In what we might call a "maintainist" view, the cause of an event is a previous event on the same scale. (The size of causal events is maintained.) Many sorts of dualism seem to fall into this category.
In a "enlargist" view, the cause of an event is an event on a larger scale. Religions tend to side with this view.
Are any of these views, taken in isolation, particularly saner than the others? It seems to me that there is merit to each of these views, and for any particular event, we could probably come up with "causes" on all three scales. I don't think we necessarily have to choose just one of these explanations. Might we not integrate them somehow?
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Can you give an example of a maintainist cause, please?
ReplyDeleteSure! Suppose I find a volunteer tomato plant in my garden. I could locate the cause in any of these three ways.
ReplyDeleteI could look into the small-scale biology of tomato plants, in order to find what processes cause the formation of seeds, the departure of the tomatoes from the plant toward the ground, the rotting of the tomatoes, and the growth of tomato seeds into new tomato plants. This type of explanation is often too complicated to be useful.
Or, if I take an "enlargist" view, I could say that the ecosystem caused the growth of a tomato plant in that particular spot. This explanation, while potentially accurate, is often far too simplistic to be useful.
But from a common-sense point of view, I could just say that there are other tomato plants in the garden plot, and that must be where the volunteer plants came from. Plants beget plants. This is the "maintainist" view. The explanation for one plant is another plant -- there is no shift in scale in this explanation, either to smaller scale biology, or larger scale biological systems. Simple, but not too simple, at least for gardening.