Cause and effect is something that is essentially common sense to us, something that is seemingly self-evident. But years ago, I read a book by the philosopher David Hume called An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that challenged this notion.
His argument was that cause and effect was a habit of experience, and therefore, cause and effect weren’t in the actual objects or events themselves. To say one object caused another to move, for example, was just a pattern of experience we’ve become accustomed to. There’s nothing to say that it will always happen. So if that is the case, wouldn’t that mean the objects outside of us didn’t have any firm qualities, since they are contingent upon our experience?
That was Hume’s point: objects outside of our experience have a nature that is unknowable.
But we could counter this by arguing that experience is simply a means of knowing the outside world (not an end in itself), just as a microscope is a means of knowing the microbial world, and that cause and effect is inherent in the way the universe operates, since our reason has determined that to be so. Similarly, Newton’s Laws of Motion describe the rules that govern, or are inherent, in the way objects move and react to each other in the universe. Thus, experience isn’t everything. We need our reason to figure things out too.
Even though our experience gives us access to the world, we make sense of it by the principles and laws that govern it. These principles allow us to understand the world and to make predictions and calculations about it (i.e. how long it takes to get from point A to point B, how much weight a bridge can hold, etc.). If we denied the validity of reason, we couldn’t operate or function in the world, since we wouldn’t know truths that exist and can be applied universally.
Fallton Havenstonne 