>[T]he Middle Eastern Monotheists' insistence that the Creator is somewhere else than inside His Creation and of a radically different nature from His Creation. Assimilating this notion in Western philosophy made it possible to envision causes that are fundamentally different from their effects and not mere abstractions from the "natural" categories perceived by our naive senses.< I don't know quite how to respond to this because I don't know exactly what sort of thing John is proposing. The sacred writings before the Common Era suggest that God causally intervenes in the world; that he (for so he is characterized) has conversations with humans; and that he has a face, and even a body, although his anatomy is not richly delineated. God _usually_ is elsewhere, but does his being elsewhere give us a new notion of causation? It isn't clear to me that it does: the phenomena and events God brings about (floods, whirlwinds, e.g.) are 'natural' phenomena, and if the _way_ in which God brings them about isn't clear, it is at least as clear as the stories about the causes of such phenomena in the pre-Socratics. How God brings things about in terms of pushes and pulls is never spelled out, that is, how he makes it happen that there is a flood is explained by saying that he makes it rain for an unusually long time--but how he makes it rain is obscure. Still, one can wonder how God makes _anything_ happen if there is no causal nexus between him and the world. And if there is such a nexus, God must establish some sort of causal contact, so to speak, with the world. The same thing might be asked about Descartes' Evil Genius: how does he bring it about that Descartes is universally deceived unless there is a possible world to which Descartes has no access? Yet, if there is such a possible world, the Evil Genius must somehow bridge the gap between it and our world. This is how things stand with God (on certain views)--there must be a wormhole in Creation through which godly transmissions pass. Of course, on other views (Leibniz's, Spinoza's), God does not intervene in the world at all. Spinoza calls an appeal to God's will as the first event in a chain of causes 'the sanctuary of ignorance.' [Ethics, I, Appendix] Things happen in the world because of the operation of the laws of nature, and God plays no causal role in activating this law or that. So there is at least one Western philosopher who does not think God acts in mysterious ways. Still, is it likely that by placing God in a different realm of being Western thought found a new way of conceiving causes such that they were 'fundamentally different from their effects'? I take John to be saying that causes could afterwards be thought of as different in kind from their effects--as Leibniz might have said, an explanation of why there are catfish can't just invoke catfish all the way down--but what it is to be different in the required sense isn't clear. In one way electrical impulses are different from human beings, but in another way they are not; both exist in the natural world (unlike numbers), and although they are different sorts of things, they causally interact in a (now) fairly non-mysterious way. Kant's noumena, again, although 'fundamentally different from' phenomena, insofar as they are logically incapable of being perceived directly, bring about phenomena: that is their metaphysical job. To say that there is a world behind appearances meant one thing to Locke, and another thing to Kant. Whether either of their views (or Murray Gell-Mann's) comes close to expressing what John has in mind, I do not know. I would, of course, like to find out. Robert Paul Reed College ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html