THE FIRST CAUSE: IPSUM ESSE SUBSISTENS AETERNUM - RETHINKING GOD IN A SCIENTIFIC AGE: 1 (The Metaphysics of Being and Science Series) - Tapa dura

Sinopsis

The First Cause is a bold, wide-ranging exploration of one of the oldest and most profound questions in human thought: Why does anything exist at all? Drawing on classical metaphysics, modern science, contemporary analytic philosophy, and the deepest intuitions of reason, this volume offers a clear, compelling, and rigorous demonstration that the existence of the universe ultimately depends on a First Cause—an uncaused, necessary, self-subsistent act of being itself.

Rejecting the caricatures that dominate popular debates, the book restores the intellectual precision of Aristotle, Aquinas, and the classical tradition, while engaging the discoveries of physics, cosmology, biology, chemistry, and probability theory. The First Cause argument is reconstructed not as a relic of medieval thought but as a live, philosophically powerful explanation grounded in the very features of the world that science seeks to understand: change, motion, contingency, intelligibility, order, and the rational structure of natural laws.

The book begins with the undeniable fact that contingent things exist—beings that come into existence, change, and pass away. From this starting point, it develops a systematic account of causality, potentiality and actuality, essence and existence, and the metaphysical conditions required for anything to be real. It then shows, step by step, why a world composed entirely of contingent beings cannot be self-explanatory. The chain of causes, no matter how long or complex, cannot explain itself unless it ultimately rests on a being whose existence is not received, not dependent, and not conditioned by anything outside itself.

This First Cause is not a temporal “first event,” nor a cosmic starter that set the universe running, but a necessary being whose essence is existence, the ground of all causal powers, and the source of the intelligibility of every finite thing. The book explores how such a being must be simple, eternal, immaterial, and unchanging—not through theological assertion, but through rigorous metaphysical analysis.

This volume sets the stage for the other volumes within this series. While engaging Hume and Kant directly restoring metaphysics to its rightful place in philosophy and science, The First Cause prepares the way for the second volume in this series, Being and Necessity, to engage contemporary challenges: quantum indeterminacy, the multiverse, problems of temporal beginnings, physical cosmology, evolutionary explanations, and the claim that modern science has made classical metaphysics obsolete. Instead of conflict, the book argues that science presupposes a metaphysical structure it cannot itself explain: the constancy of natural laws, the existence of causal powers, the intelligibility of the world, and the reliability of reason. Far from undermining classical theism, scientific discoveries deepen the philosophical case for a necessary ground of being.

Written with clarity and intellectual ambition, The First Cause serves as both an introduction and a substantial contribution to metaphysics and epistemology. College students will find it accessible and eye-opening; scholars will find a fresh reconstruction of a venerable argument; and general readers will encounter a gripping narrative about reality, existence, and the ultimate foundation of the world. The result is a work that bridges ancient wisdom and contemporary thought, offering a vision of classical theism that is rationally compelling, philosophically rigorous, and deeply relevant in a scientific age when read as a series.

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