Tetsugaku
Well-known member
Ah, now I know what you are talking about. If you'd said you were talking about the PSR instead of 'Law of Sufficient Case' we could have avoided pages of confusion. I refer you back to my post #707 where I said that it "sounds like an outdated principle of scholastic philosophy rather than any part of modern logic or science". And that is exactly what it is. The PSR was advocated by Leibniz, though dates back to the presocratics. It was also discussed by Hamilton (though not Aristotle - the Wiki footnote there is spurious), but has a very different formulation - he does not say that every event must have a sufficient cause, but only that we should never infer anything without good reason. This formulation has nothing to do with causation, and nothing to do with Aristotle. The PSR as applied to causation has had little relevance since Hume, and as Hamilton notes: "In the more recent systems of philosophy, the universality and necessity of the axiom of Reason has, with other logical laws, been controverted and rejected by speculators on the absolute." Here's a better source than the Wiki page if you want to read further: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/
Aristotle never advocated the PSR as a law of logic, as I've been saying for many pages now.
Is nature an axiomatic formal system, where its theorems are recursively computable? If not, Godel doesn't apply. Your last point bears further thought though. Clearly a system (or at least any non-tautological system) can only be explained by going beyond that system. But that applies to the system of 'God+Nature' as well. Would you go beyond and outside of that system in order to explain it? The point is that at some point explanations must bottom out with something that is brute fact and necessarily inexplicable. Christians like to think explanation stops with God, but there's really no good reason not to stop one step earlier with the universe and its fundamental laws and constants.
