First Cause

 When I lived in the International House of Madness in Putney all those years ago, I read Rod M's copy of Antony Flew's Introduction to Western Philosophy: Ideas and Argument from Plato to Sartre.

You'd think wouldn't you that writing one thing  here every day for all these years would mean that, in essence, everything I have ever felt or thought would be on the spindrift pages somewhere or other.

Not a bit of it.

I am still in a philostophical mood after yesterday so have an insight, my treat, from the book. Something that floored me at the time and has stayed with me ever since.

Flew says we, as moderns, can't understand St Thomas Aquinas' first cause argument for the existence of God but that this is because it seems to mean something different in a clockwork world where Isaac Newton has revealed the conservation of momentum. In such a world, the argument is all but a tautology because it implies a universe which God had to get going in the first place by giving it a kick up the backside. That is ugly reasoning because the conclusion all but contradicts its premise. Aquinas' argument when proposed was more like God as a necessary heartbeat, the maintainer of the stars in their courses.

There you go. Back on planet earth I am off the feed the Hendrie's cat now 'cause they are away. I first went round not long after six but I couldn't get in because I had left the keys behind in my house on the dining room table.

"You can't get there from here. You need to start off somewhere else." As wise people say.