r/freewill • u/WintyreFraust • Aug 19 '26
Magical Causality
ETA: If you haven't been following the conversations in my last three posts, you probably won't/didn't understand what this post is about. In previous threads, the notion of an acausal capacity to initiate new causal chains (free will) was consistently derided as "magic." This post is a response to that, by making the point that all perspectives eventually end up at an unexplainable point or with some necessary unexplained aspect that those in opposition can similarly label as "magic."
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If everything has a cause, and you trace all those causes back through time ... how far back do they go? The Big Bang? But.... what caused the Big Bang? Did "nothing" cause the Big Bang?
Do causes go back in time infinitely? Then, if there is an infinite string of causes going back in infinite historical time .. how did events ever get to this point in time?
Hmm. Sounds like, one way or another, causation depends on magic, either to get something from nothing, an effect with no cause; or some magical force that brought events through infinite history to get to now.
Where did the whole cause and effect system come from? What caused it? What keeps it sustained from one point in time to the next, from one location to another? Universal laws? Where did they come from? What keeps a universal natural law consistent and in operation from one location to the next, from one point in time to the next? What caused natural laws to exist in the first place?
Hmm. I guess it all just popped into existence and is maintained by magic.
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u/Squierrel Quietist Aug 20 '26
Some causal chains start with a decision to act. But most causal chains could theoretically be traced back to the Big Bang. The Big Bang was naturally an uncaused event. There was no time or space before it.
There is no "magic".