Concept

Principle of Proportionate Causality

Not to be confused with the Causal Adequacy Argument, the historical argument that the rise of early Christianity needs the resurrection as its cause. This page is the metaphysical principle, sometimes called the causal adequacy principle, that such arguments rest on.

Intro

You cannot give what you do not have. A bank account holding nothing cannot pay out a thousand dollars. That common-sense idea, applied to causes and effects, is one of the oldest principles in philosophy: whatever is in an effect has to be accounted for by what is in its cause. An effect cannot contain more than its cause had the power to give it.

People often state this loosely: "the effect must be like its cause." That loose version is wrong, and skeptics use it to attack creation: "God is not material, so God cannot make matter." The careful version says something different. A cause must possess what is in the effect either in the same way the effect has it, or in a higher way that includes the power to produce it. A mind is not made of ink, yet a mind can cause a written page. God is not material, yet God can cause material things to exist, because the power to give existence is greater than matter, not less.

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In full

The principle of proportionate causality holds that whatever perfection (reality, power, actuality) is found in an effect must be present in its total cause, since otherwise that part of the effect would come from nothing. The scholastic tradition distinguishes three ways a cause can "contain" what it produces. Formally: the cause has the perfection in the same kind as the effect (a hot iron heating water). Virtually: the cause has the power to produce the perfection without having it in that form (the sun producing heat in things without being a stove). Eminently: the cause has the perfection in a higher mode that includes the lower without its limitations (an intellect containing the form of a house the builder will make). Thomas Aquinas states the principle in Summa Theologiae I q.4 a.2, arguing that the perfections of all creatures pre-exist in God in a more eminent way. René Descartes makes it the engine of the causal argument in the Third Meditation: there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in its effect, formally or eminently, so the idea of an infinite, perfect being cannot originate in a finite, imperfect mind.

Two consequences follow for apologetics. First, the objection that an immaterial God cannot cause matter rests on the crude "effect resembles cause" version, which the principle itself rejects; materiality is a limitation (extension, divisibility, location, potency), not a perfection God lacks, and the power to bestow being contains it eminently. Second, the crude version, applied consistently, strikes reductive materialism before it strikes theism: if an immaterial cause cannot produce a material effect because it lacks materiality, a non-conscious cause cannot produce a conscious effect because it lacks consciousness. The correct question in both directions is whether the proposed cause has sufficient causal resources for the effect. Theism answers that an eternal, rational, personal cause has the resources for matter, mind and meaning; naturalism must explain how mindless, valueless beginnings supply all three.

Crude version and correct version

The three modes, with examples

1. Formal. A fire heats a pot. Heat is in the cause in the same way it is in the effect.
2. Virtual. A battery powers a light. The battery is not bright, but it has the power to produce brightness.
3. Eminent. An architect holds the house in his intellect before it exists in stone. The house is "in" him in a higher mode: as understood form, without the weight, extension and bulk of the building. A mathematician understands triangles without being triangular, and his not being triangular is not an intellectual defect.

The immaterial-cause objection and the reply

Objection: "God's being is immaterial. By the causal adequacy principle the effect must have the features of the cause, so an immaterial God could never produce matter."

Reply, in four steps:

1. The principle never required that the cause share the effect's features formally. It requires that the cause have enough reality or power to account for the effect.
2. Materiality is not an additional perfection. To be material is to be extended, divisible, located and changeable: limits on being. A cause can give a creature a limited mode of existence without itself acquiring the limit.
3. Classical theism does not say God turns part of Himself into matter. Creation from nothing means God gives creatures their very act of existing, the most fundamental effect there is. Whatever can give existence as such can give material existence.
4. Everyday causation already refutes the crude reading: minds cause arrangements of ink, sound and stone that they are not made of. See Agent Causation.

The reversal: if the objector insists on the crude reading, he must also say that non-conscious matter could never produce conscious minds. Either the principle is the careful one (and God can create matter), or it is the crude one (and matter cannot produce mind). The materialist cannot have the crude version against God and the careful version for himself. See Argument from Consciousness, which states the proportionate-causality premise explicitly.

Where the principle is used in the codex

• Argument from Consciousness, a conscious effect requires a cause with the resources for consciousness
• Necessary Being is an Intelligent Mind, the first cause of a world with minds must itself be mind-like
• Argument from the Proportionate-Causality Convergence, the principle applied to the historical rise of Christianity
• Contingency Argument and Aquinas Five Ways, which rely on the dependence of effects on causes with the needed actuality
• Divine Omnipotence, the power to create from nothing

Common misuses to avoid

• "Complex effects need complex causes." Not a consequence of the principle. God is simple (see Divine Simplicity) and the cause of complex things; what matters is causal power, not internal complexity.
• "Information always comes from a mind, so software cannot arise from electricity." The design argument from information has its own careful statement at Information Argument for Design; it should not be run as a bare corollary of this principle.
• "The cause must resemble the effect." Resemblance is at most one way of containing an effect (the formal mode). The principle concerns power and reality, not likeness.

See also

• Causal Principle, the broader principle that what begins or depends has a cause
• Causal Adequacy Argument, the historical-evidential argument that borrows the name
• Argument from Consciousness and Consciousness
• Rene Descartes and Thomas Aquinas
• Ipsum Esse Subsistens, God as subsistent being itself, the source of existence
• Materialism, the view whose own causal story the principle presses