230
PARTISAN REVIEW
of invariable association and succession or as involving efficacy. The
chain of causes, on the basis of the
postulate
that everything has a
cause, something
assumed
to be true, extends infinitely into the past
and, like the series of negative numbers, may not have a first member.
That is to say, even
if
we admit that everything which comes into
existence has a cause, the world may never have come into existence.
If
the existence of God
is
an empirical hypothesis, then any
statement about
him
must have the same contingent and probable
character as statements about invisible stars or electrons or any other
entity in whose
exis~ence
we believe on the basis of what is ob–
servable but which cannot itself in fact be direcdy experienced. Thus
even if we start from the reported
facts
of mystic experience and
from the conviction of the necessity of God's existence, we cannot
conclude that God
necessarily
exists.
Now
if
the existence of God
is
not causally determined in the
way in which science and common sense use the expression "causally
determined," and
if
it
is
not logically entailed by any fact in the
way logical propositions are said to entail each other, what can be
meant by saymg that God's existence is necessary and how can that
fact be established? Father Copleston's recent book on Aquinas
grapples boldly with this difficulty. In
it
he states that in his argu–
ment for the existence of God, Aquinas "was asserting a
unique
rela–
tion between finite things and the transfinite transcendant cause on
which they rest" (my italics).
Now what does it mean to assert that an existential relation
is "unique"? Not necessarily that there is
only
one instance of the
relation or
many
but that there is
at least one
instance. A unique
existential relation between this tree and the apples hanging from it,
this man and his children, this pear and its taste requires at least the
existence of one apple, one child, one experience of tasting the pear.
But in every case the presence of a unique relation is based on a dis–
covery or an experience exhibited by at least one instance. The rela–
tion in its uniqueness cannot be like something else. And it cannot
be established by argument from canons of general validity.
If
the
relation between finite things and the transfinite cause they depend
upon is unique, arguments could never prove it. There would have
to be some other way of knowing it even if it were maintained that
the relation between finite things and God was uniquely unique or
analogically unique.
