An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part III

Here I respond to Keith Parsons’ third post.  Jeff Lowder’s index of existing and forthcoming installments in my exchange with Prof. Parsons can be found here.

I’d like to respond now, Keith, to your comments about Bertrand Russell’s objection to First Cause arguments.  Let me first make some general remarks about the objection and then I’ll get to your comments.  Russell wrote, in Why I Am Not a Christian:

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.  If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.  (pp. 6-7)

The context makes it clear that Russell is presenting this as a knock-down refutation of the First Cause argument.  For example, he immediately goes on to say that that argument “is exactly of the same nature as” and “really no better than” the view that the world rests on an elephant which rests on a tortoise, where the question what the tortoise rests on is left unanswered. 

Now, this might be a knock-down refutation of a First Cause argument if such an argument either rested on the premise that absolutely everything without exception has a cause, or made a sudden, unexplained exception to this general rule in the case of God.  For in the first case the argument would be guilty of contradicting itself, while in the second case it would be guilty of special pleading.

The trouble is that none of the major proponents of First Cause arguments (Avicenna, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Leibniz, Clarke, et al.) actually ever gave an argument like the one Russell appears to be attacking.  For none of them maintain in the first place that absolutely everything has a cause; what they say instead is that the actualization of a potential requires a cause, or that what comes into existence requires a cause, or that contingent things require a cause, or the like.  Nor do they fail to offer principled reasons for saying that God does not require a cause even though other things do.  For they say, for example, that the reason other things require a cause is that they have potentials that need actualization, whereas God, being pure actuality, has no potentials that could be actualized; or that the reason other things require a cause is that they are composite and thus require some principle to account for why their parts are conjoined, whereas God, being absolutely simple or non-composite, has no metaphysical parts that need conjoining; or that while a contingent thing requires a cause insofar as it has an essence distinct from its act of existence (and thus has to acquire its existence from something other than its own nature), a necessary being, which just is existence or being itself, need not acquire its existence from anything else; and so forth.

So, in the actual arguments of proponents of the idea of God as First Cause, there just is no self-contradiction or special pleading of the sort Russell’s objection requires.  The arguments may or may not be open to other objections, but Russell’s objection seems either aimed at a straw man or simply to miss the point.

Now you suggest reading Russell’s objection as directed at the sort of argument in which “cause” means something like “explanation” (where the notion of an explanation is broader than the notion of an efficient cause, which is what is usually meant by “cause” these days).  Thus read, Russell’s objection becomes:

If everything must have [an explanation], then God must have [an explanation].  If there can be anything without [an explanation], it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. 

But the trouble with this is that it does not save Russell from the charge that he was either attacking a straw man or missing the point.  At best it just makes him guilty of attacking a different straw man or of missing a different point.  For this reconstructed objection would be a good one only if proponents of First Cause arguments either insisted that everything has an explanation but then suddenly made an exception in the case of God, or if they denied that everything has an explanation but nevertheless arbitrarily insisted that the universe must have one while God need not.  For in the first case they would be contradicting themselves while in the second case they would be engaged in special pleading.

But in fact defenders of First Cause arguments like the thinkers I named are doing no such thing.  In fact they would agree that everything has an explanation, and they would not make any exception in the case of God.  In their view, neither God’s existence nor the world’s existence is a “brute fact.”  But the explanation of God’s existence, they would say, lies in his own nature, whereas the explanation of the existence of other things lies in their having an efficient cause.  Nor is there any arbitrariness in their saying that God’s existence is explained by his own nature whereas the existence of other things requires an explanation in terms of some efficient cause distinct from them.  For they would say, for example, that the reason other things require such a cause is that they are mixtures of actuality and potentiality, and thus need something to actualize their potentials, whereas God, being pure actuality, has no potentials needing actualization, and exists precisely because he just is actuality itself; or they would say that since other things have an essence distinct from their acts of existence, they need something outside their essence to impart existence to them, whereas God, whose essence just isexistence, need not derive existence from anything else but exists precisely because being itself is what he is; and so forth. 

Now, other objections might be raised against these sorts of arguments and the metaphysics that underlies them.  But they are simply not guilty either of contradicting themselves, or of making an arbitrary exception in God’s case to a general demand that things must have explanations, or of failing to give a reason for saying that God has a kind of explanation that other things do not.  So, they are simply not at all subject to Russell’s objection even as you suggest we read it.

So, I continue to maintain that Russell is attacking a straw man, at least if his remarks are intended as a response to an argument some philosopher has actually given, as opposed to some popular version of the argument.  (And they surely are so intended, for what would be the point of a philosopher like Russell attacking only some unsophisticated version of the First Cause argument while ignoring the versions philosophers have actually given?)  And perhaps you would agree with that much, since you don’t cite any examples of theistic philosophers who have given arguments like the one Russell attacks.

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An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part II

Here I respond to Keith Parsons’ second post.  Jeff Lowder is keeping track of the existing and forthcoming installments in my exchange with Prof. Parsons here.

Keith, thanks for these remarks.  The question we are now considering is: Why would the material universe or anything in it (an electron or a quark, say) require a cause to conserve it in existence?  Your view is that the supposition that it requires one is “gratuitous.”  You write: “Is there anything missing from an electron that would have to be filled in or supplied from outside?  There is nothing in our physical theories that indicates such a lack.”

Now, this assumes that physical theory gives us an exhaustive description of electrons, quarks, and material reality in general, or at least something near enough to an exhaustive description for present purposes.  For only if we make that assumption would the absence from physical theory of a reference to the need for a conserving cause give us any reason to think a material thing doesn’t require one.  (Compare: The absence of legs from the Mona Lisa would give us reason to believe that the woman it pictures was legless only if we supposed that the portrait captures everything about her that there was to capture -- which, of course, is not the case.)

Now I would say that there is no reason whatsoever to make the assumption in question vis-à-vis physical theory, and in fact decisive reason to reject it.  Nor does one have to be a Scholastic or a theist to agree with me.  Bertrand Russell, for one, agreed at least about that much.  As he wrote:

It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give.  It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure… All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes.  But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (My Philosophical Development, p. 13)

Now if physics gives us only the mathematical structure of material reality, then not only does it not tell us everything there is to know about material reality, but it implies that there must be more to material reality than what it tells us.  For there can be no such thing as structure by itself; there must be something which has the structure. 

Nor, even if we could make sense of the idea of structure existing by itself, would physics give us any reason to believe that that is all there is.  To be sure, if there are features of physical reality susceptible of the mathematical description to which physics limits itself (which, as the success of physics shows, there surely are) then physics has a good shot at capturing them.  But if there are features of reality that cannot be captured by those methods, physics is guaranteed not to capture them.  So, that physical theory doesn’t tell us such-and-such really doesn’t mean much where metaphysics is concerned, because its very methods guarantee that it will not capture certain aspects of reality even if they are there.

Nor, contrary to a common fallacy, does the predictive success of physics’ methods give us any reason whatsoever to believe that there are unlikely to be features of reality that cannot be captured by its methods.  As I have said elsewhere, to assume this is like assuming that the success of metal detectors shows that there are unlikely to be features of reality that cannot be captured using metal detectors; or it is like the drunk’s argument that his lost car keys are unlikely to be anywhere else but under the lamppost, since, after all, that is where the light is and where he has already found his lost wallet and sunglasses. 

So, physics is of its very nature incomplete.  It requires interpretation within a larger metaphysical framework, and absolutely every appeal to “what physics tells us” presupposes such a metaphysical framework, implicitly if not explicitly.  This is as true of the appeals made by naturalists and atheists as it is true of the views of Scholastics.  So, physical theory is simply not going to settle issues like the one in question.  The issue is metaphysical and can in principle only be settled via metaphysical argumentation.

Now, the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, for metaphysical reasons that have nothing essentially to do with natural theology, maintains that any possible material reality will have to have an actuality/potentiality structure.  The reasons have to do with the very preconditions of affirming, contra Parmenidean arguments, the reality of change and of multiplicity.  Neither change nor multiplicity, the Scholastic argues, can coherently be denied; and neither can be made sense of unless between actuality and nothingness there is a middle ground of potency or potentiality.  Now, when the actuality/potentiality distinction is worked out, it implies that every finite substance is a compound of essenceand existence (with essence being a kind of potentiality and existence a kind of actuality) and that every material substance in particular is a compound of substantial form and prime matter (with substantial form corresponding to actuality and prime matter to potentiality). 

Obviously not every reader will agree with or even be familiar with these ideas.  But there are serious arguments for them, arguments which I have defended at length and against all the standard objections in my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.  And when their implications are worked out, it turns out that nothing composite in these ways can exist on its own even for an instant.  For instance, prime matter is pure potentiality for the taking on of form, and qua pure potentiality has no actuality of its own.  In mind-independent reality, then, it can exist only as informed by a substantial form.  The substantial form of a purely material thing, though, is, apart from matter, a mere abstraction.  In mind-independent reality, then, it can exist only as instantiated in prime matter.  But this leaves us with a vicious metaphysical circle unless there is something outside the composite that accounts for the parts being combined.  And the regress this threatens to generate can in principle be terminated only by that which is in no way a composite of actuality and potentiality -- something which is pure actuality devoid of potentiality.

This is compressed, obviously, and much more could be said both in the way of working out the background metaphysics (as I have done in the book just referred to) and in the way of spelling out the arguments for the necessity of a sustaining cause and defending them against objections (as I have done in my American Catholic Philosophical Quarterlyarticle “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways”).  But this much suffices to show that there is nothing gratuitous about the idea of the need for a conserving cause.  It has a serious metaphysical motivation, and a motivation that is independent of natural theology, even if it ultimately has implications for natural theology.

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An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part I

Prof. Keith Parsons and I will be having an exchange to be moderated by Jeffery Jay Lowder of The Secular Outpost.  Prof. Parsons has initiated the exchange with a response to the first of four questions I put to him last week.  What follows is a brief reply.

Keith, thank you for your very gracious response.  Like Jeff Lowder, you raise the issue of the relative amounts of attention I and other theistic philosophers pay to “New Atheist” writers like Dawkins, Harris, et al. as opposed to the much more serious arguments of atheist philosophers like Graham Oppy, Jordan Howard Sobel, and many others.  Let me begin by reiterating what I said last week in response to Jeff, namely that I have nothing but respect for philosophers like the ones you cite and would never lump them in with Dawkins and Co.  And as I showed in my response to Jeff, I have in fact publicly praised many of these writers many times over the years for the intellectual seriousness of their work.

 
I have given the “New Atheists” the attention I have only because they have themselves gotten so much attention and needed a vigorous response.  Even so, my book The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, is, the title notwithstanding, really less about the New Atheism per se than it is about defending the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, which is my preferred approach to philosophical questions in general and the philosophy of religion in particular.  And my (non-polemical and more academic) book Aquinas has almost nothing to say about the New Atheists, beyond some brief references to Dawkins.  
 

This interest in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition is key to understanding my attitude toward authors like the ones you cite.  I would distinguish what might be called classical and modernapproaches to the key themes of natural theology.  The classical approach is represented by schools of thought like Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Thomism and other forms of Scholasticism.  The key writers here would be thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Anselm, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Suarez, and later writers influenced by them down to the present day (such as twentieth-century Neo-Scholastics and contemporary analytical Thomists). 

The modern approach is represented by Leibniz-Clarke style cosmological arguments, Paley-style design arguments and “Intelligent Design” theory, Plantinga-style ontological arguments, “Reformed epistemology,” Swinburne-style inductive arguments, etc.  Contemporary philosophy of religion is dominated by these modern sorts of arguments, though there are some thinkers (John Haldane, Brian Davies, Eleonore Stump, et al.) whose sympathies are classical.  These modern arguments typically operate with very different conceptions of causation, modality, substance, essence, and other key metaphysical notions than the ones classical thinkers would accept.

Now, my approach, being Aristotelian-Thomistic, is decidedly classical.  Like many other Thomists, I not only do not defend the sorts of arguments most other contemporary philosophers of religion do, but I am critical both of the metaphysical/epistemological assumptions underlying the arguments and of the conception of God the arguments arrive at.  For instance, I reject the possible worlds theories in terms of which modality is typically understood in the contemporary arguments; I think the “argument to the best explanation” approach gets reasoning from the world to God just fundamentally wrong; I think the rationality of theism does depend not only on there being evidence for it, but metaphysical demonstrations of an aggressively old-fashioned sort; and so forth.  I also reject the “theistic personalist” or “neo-theist” conception of God that underlies so much contemporary philosophy of religion, and regard classical theism and its key themes -- divine simplicity, immutability, eternity, etc. -- as non-negotiable elements of any theism worth defending.

Unsurprisingly, a great deal of contemporary atheist argumentation is devoted to criticizing these very ideas and arguments that I do not agree with myself.  Equally unsurprisingly, then, I have not engaged much with those atheist arguments.  I simply don’t have a dog in those fights, as it were.  I have tended instead to focus my attention on those objections that have been raised against classical arguments specifically, and especially against Aristotelian-Thomistic arguments.

Hence in my book Aquinas, for example, I have a lot to say in response to writers like Anthony Kenny and J. L. Mackie who have criticized Aquinas at some length. Naturally, I also have a lot to say there in response to Humean and Kantian objections to cosmological arguments in general.  Now, much of what contemporary atheists have to say in response to Aquinas is a reiteration of Humean objections, or of points made by writers like Kenny.  (For example, David Ramsay Steele in his book Atheism Explained, and to some extent even Mackie in The Miracle of Theism, suppose they can largely dispatch Aquinas by referring the reader to Kenny’s book on the Five Ways.)  Hence to respond to objections of the sort raised by Hume and Kenny is ipso factoto respond to much of what have become standard atheist moves vis-à-vis Aquinas. 

Other objections, as I have showed at length in Aquinasand The Last Superstition, are based on misunderstandings of the metaphysical underpinnings of Aquinas’s arguments, and often on a tendency to read modern assumptions that Aquinas would have rejected back into his arguments.  For example, it is very common for critics of Aquinas to be unaware of the distinction between what Scholastics call a per se or essentially ordered causal series and a per accidens or accidentally ordered causal series, and they fail to realize that when Aquinas rules out a regress of causes it is the first rather than the second sort he has in mind.  Critics also often wrongly assume that in the Third Way Aquinas is appealing to something like a modern understanding of modality.  And so forth.  Once these misunderstandings of the background metaphysics are cleared up, it can be seen that many standard moves against Aquinas simply miss the point.  This is true e.g. of Oppy’s treatment of Aquinas in Arguing About Gods.  I have nothing but respect for Oppy; he is smart and well-read and a formidable philosopher.  Still, in my view he just misreads Aquinas and his objections thus misfire. 

For this reason I haven’t commented explicitly on every single contemporary atheist philosopher who has criticized Aquinas.  For in the main they are offering variations on standard objections which I answer in my books and other writings, so that anyone who has read both my stuff and (say) Oppy’s book, or Sobel’s, would know how I would respond to their objections.

I don’t want to offend too much against the word limitation Jeff has proposed to us, so I will resist my tendency toward long-windedness and close with the following thought.  You may or may not know that I was an atheist myself for about ten years, and that my journey back to theism involved a discovery of what classical thinkers like Aquinas had actually said.  I recounted this intellectual journey in a blog post some time back, and as I note in that post, many of the objections I had as an atheist to the work of modern philosophers of religion are objections I still would raise as a classical theist.  So, perhaps we have at least a little more in common that it might seem at first glance!

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Descartes’ “preservation” argument

In previous posts I’ve critically examined, from a Scholastic point of view, some of Descartes’ best-known arguments.  Specifically, I’ve commented on Descartes’ “clear and distinct perception” argument for dualism, and his “trademark” argument for God’s existence.  We’ve seen how these arguments illustrate how Descartes, though the father of modern philosophy, in some respects continues to be influenced by the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, even as in other respects he abandons it.  It’s the novelties, I have suggested, that get him into trouble.  This is evidenced once again in what is sometimes called his “preservation” argument for God’s existence.

The argument is presented in Meditation III (specifically, in paragraphs 28-36 of the version linked to), in the context in which he presents the “trademark” argument.  It is not clearly set off from that argument, and has perhaps gotten even less attention from commentators.  But then, as André Gombay notes in his book Descartes, “in the history of God’s proofs, Meditation Three is not a significant event” (p. 54).  While the “trademark” argument makes use of Scholastic notions and the “preservation” argument is not completely dissimilar to earlier arguments for a divine First Cause, both arguments are nevertheless idiosyncratic, reflecting the epistemological situation Descartes has put himself in in the first two Meditations.  It is no surprise, then, that they did not catch on with later modern philosophers who did not completely share Descartes’ approach to epistemology.  Nor, given the significant philosophical differences between Descartes and the Scholastics, is it surprising that his proofs were not appealing to thinkers who remained within the Scholastic tradition.  The arguments were perhaps destined to be orphans.

By the beginning of Meditation III, Descartes knows I think, therefore I am, but he has yet to establish that anything else exists.  That God created him with the faculties he has and is not a deceiver is going to be his key to regaining knowledge of the external world, but how is he going to prove that God exists?  He cannot do so via arguments like Aquinas’s Five Ways, since they begin with premises that appeal to observation, and Descartes does not yet know as of Meditation III whether his senses are reliable.  If he is going to establish God’s existence, then, he is going to have to do so on the basis of what he does know, viz. that he exists and that he has various ideas.  The “trademark” argument begins with the second of these bits of knowledge, specifically with the fact that he finds within himself the idea of God.  The “preservation” argument starts with the first, the fact that he exists.

Granted that (as the Cogito shows) I exist, Descartes asks, what caused me to exist?  Of course, the natural answer would be to say that his parents did, but as of Meditation III Descartes still does not know whether his parents or anything else about his previous life is real.  But what Descartes is concerned with in any event, as he goes on to make clear, is what conserves him in existence here and now and at any moment.  What causes him to keepexisting, instead of being annihilated?  His parents cannot be the answer to that question, and it is a question that arises however long he’s existed and whether or not the material side of his nature, or indeed the material world as a whole, turns out to be real.  Sounding not unlike Aquinas, Descartes writes:

In truth, it is perfectly clear and evident to all who will attentively consider the nature of duration, that the conservation of a substance, in each moment of its duration, requires the same power and act that would be necessary to create it, supposing it were not yet in existence; so that it is manifestly a dictate of the natural light that conservation and creation differ merely in respect of our mode of thinking [and not in reality].

Now “creation,” as that is understood in traditional theology, is causing the existence of a thing in its entiretyrather than merely modifying pre-existing materials.  It is creation out of nothing, and it is for the Scholastic what God does in the act of conserving the world in being, not merely something he did at some beginning point in time.  Descartes is thinking of creation in similar terms, his point being that causing a thing’s sheer existence out of nothing at any particular point in its lifespan -- that is, conserving it in being -- is for purposes of the question at hand in no relevant respect different from having created it out of nothing at the time of its origination. 

So, what is the cause of his being preserved in existence at any moment?  Is he is own preserving cause?  Is something other than him but still non-divine the cause?  Or is it God?  Descartes argues that the first two answers cannot be right, leaving the third as the only remaining possibility.  One way to summarize the reasoning is as follows:

1. I am preserved in existence or continuously created out of nothing at every instant.

2. Causing the sheer existence of a thing out of nothing requires greater power than causing any other perfection does.

3. So if I were preserving or creating myself out of nothing, I could also cause myself to have any perfection, including the perfections characteristic of the divine nature.

4. But if I could give myself the divine perfections, I would have done so, and yet I have not.

5. And since I am a thinking thing, I would be aware of creating myself out of nothing if I were doing so, and I am not aware of doing so.

6. So I am not preserving or continuously creating myself out of nothing.

7. Anything that is preserving or continuously creating me must, like me, be a thinking thing, since there cannot be less reality in the cause than in the effect.

8. Since any possible non-divine preserving cause of my continued existence also lacks the divine perfections, it could not be the preserving cause of its own existence either.

9. The only thing that could terminate this regress of preserving causes is something which does have all the divine perfections, which would be God himself.

10. So God exists.

What should we think of this argument?  Let me begin by noting three objections which are, in my view, no good.  First, it might be suggested that the continued existence either of the Cartesian subject or of anything else requires no cause at all.  One basis for this claim might be a rejection of the principle of causality, which says (in what I take to be the most fundamental formulation) that a potential that is actualized must be actualized by something already actual.  But there are no good objections to the principle of causality and decisive arguments in its favor, as I have argued in several places and argue at greatest length in chapter 2 of Scholastic Metaphysics.  Another basis for the claim might be the suggestion that though the generation of a thing requires a cause, its continued existence at any moment does not.  This would be an appeal to what has sometimes been called “existential inertia,” the notion that in general a thing will just continue to exist unless something positively acts to destroy it, without its requiring any positive causal action to conserve it.  But there are no good reasons to believe in existential inertia, and decisive reasons for rejecting it, as I argue in my ACPQ article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways.” 

A second objection might be that there is no reason to think a regress of preserving causes would have to terminate in a first cause, divine or otherwise.  But such a series would be what Scholastic metaphysicians call an essentiallyordered (as opposed to an accidentallyordered) series of causes, and the former sort of series (unlike the latter) must have a first member.  More precisely, for such a series to exist there must be a cause which is “first,” not in the sense of standing at the head of a queue, but rather in the sense of having underived or intrinsic causal power, since everything else in the series has only derivative or “secondary” causal power.  I have expounded and defended this idea in several places, once more at greatest length in Scholastic Metaphysics. 

A third objection would be to reject the principle (appealed to in step 7 of the argument above) that what is in the effect must in some way be in the cause.  Commentators on Descartes call this the Causal Adequacy Principle and Scholastic metaphysicians call it the Principle of Proportionate Causality.  I have defended this principle too in several places, and (yet again) at greatest length in Scholastic Metaphysics.

In short, these objections are directed at aspects of Descartes’ argument that it has in common with Scholastic arguments for God’s existence, and those aspects are in my view all sound.  So if these were the only objections that could be raised against Descartes, the argument would in my view succeed.  However, those are not the only possible objections, and the argument is seriously problematic in other ways -- in particular, it is problematic precisely in those respects in which it departs from Scholasticism.

Implicit in Descartes’ argument is the idea that a thing might be the cause of its own existence, and indeed that God is the cause of his own existence.  Now this notion of a causa sui is one that Scholastics like Aquinas explicitly reject, and for good reason since it is incoherent.  (It is sometimes suggested that science, or at least science fiction, shows otherwise, but as I have argued elsewhere, such suggestions are confused about what is being ruled out when one rules out the notion of a causa sui.)  But when Descartes considers the proposal that he might be his own cause, he doesn’t say: “No, because self-causation is impossible” --as, in the Scholastic view, he should have said.  Rather, he says: “No, because if something could cause itself to exist, it could also cause itself to be God, and I haven’t done that.”

Now the conditional appealed to here -- that ifsomething could cause its own existence thenit could also give itself the divine attributes -- is one for which Descartes gives an interesting argument.  The argument is that causing something to exist out of nothing requires greater power than causing any other attribute.  That is certainly plausible, because to cause a thing to have some attribute is merely to modify some pre-existing substance, whereas to cause a thing to exist ex nihilo is to cause the substance itself together with its attributes, and not merely to add something to the already existing substance.  And substances are, metaphysically speaking, more fundamental than attributes.  So, if you could cause the sheer existence of a substance ex nihilo, then surely you could, Descartes with at least some plausibility holds, also cause it to be omniscient, or omnipotent, or omnipresent, or indeed to have all the divine attributes together.  And thus, if you could cause yourself to exist ex nihilo then you could cause yourself to be God.

The trouble is that the antecedent of this conditional is false.  Nothing can cause itself in the first place, so the whole idea of something causing itself to be God is just a non-starter.  But Descartes not only does not reject the antecedent, he makes it essential to his whole argument.  For the way he gets to his conclusion is by way of the idea that there is and must be something that causes itself, only it cannot be you, me, or any other non-divine thing but has to be God, since a self-causing being would be one that causes itself not only to exist but also to be omnipotent, omniscient, etc. 

From a Scholastic point of view, this is, metaphysically speaking, just a complete mess.  To be sure, there is for the Scholastic a sense in which God is self-explanatory, insofar as that which is pure actuality, being itself, and absolutely simple must also be absolutely necessary.  God’s existence is in that way explained or made intelligible by his nature.  He is by no means an unintelligible “brute fact.”  But that is very different from being self-caused, in the sense of being the efficient cause of one’s own being.  That, again, is for the Scholastic simply incoherent.  (Notice that to be the efficient cause of a thing is not the same thing as to be the explanation of a thing.  An appeal to an efficient cause is merely one type of explanation among others.)  And it certainly makes no sense whatsoever to think of God somehow imparting to himself omnipotence, omniscience, or any other attribute -- as if he could in principle have existed without these attributes, but decided not to. 

Why would Descartes proceed in this bizarre fashion?  After all, existing Scholastic arguments would have gotten him to a divine conserving cause without appealing to the notion of self-causation, and that he starts with his own existence as a Cartesian subject rather than with the preservation in existence of ordinary material objects would make no difference.  A Cartesian subject may not be material, but it is still a compound of essence and existence and thus a compound of potency and act.  And that is all one needs to get an argument for a conserving cause going.  Descartes even makes use of the language of potency and act earlier in this very Meditation.  So why not just go the whole hog and adopt an Aquinas-style argument for the purposes of Meditation III?

The answer, perhaps, is just that while Descartes does not entirely abandon the Scholastic metaphysical apparatus, he wants to make as little use of it as possible, especially where it is closely tied to the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy of nature that he is very keen to overthrow.  And the traditional Scholastic arguments for divine conservation of the world are definitely tied to that philosophy of nature.  (As I argued in my lecture at Franciscan University of Steubenville some time back, I think you are not going to get from the natural world to God unless you make use of the theory of act and potency.)  So, though for the purposes of arguing for God’s existence he could have narrowed his application of the key metaphysical concepts to the Cartesian subject and kept them out of his philosophy of nature, perhaps he thought it better just to make a clean break and try a new approach.  But this is speculation on my part.

Here’s another interesting fact about Descartes’ argument.  Like the better-known versions of the First Cause argument, Descartes’ version does not amount to the stupid straw man: “Everything has a cause, so the universe has a cause.”  However, Descartes is arguably committed to the claim that “everything has a cause” -- not as a premise of the argument (he doesn’t explicitly say in Meditation III that everything has a cause) so much as an implication of it.  For he’s argued that the continued existence of any thinking thing has to be traced to the causal activity of a thinking thing which gives itself the divine attributes.  He also regarded non-thinking or extended things as having a divine sustaining cause as well.  So, everything other than God has a cause on Descartes’ view.  But he also characterizes God as a causa sui.  So God has a cause too, namely himself.  So, Descartes’ argument seems to imply, everything has a cause.

This does not make Descartes subject to the standard atheist retort to the straw man First Cause argument, though.  That retort is summed up in a remark made by Bertrand Russell in Why I Am Not a Christian:

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.  If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.  (pp. 6-7)

Now in response to this a Scholastic would say: “We never said ‘everything has a cause’ in the first place; in fact we deny that.  You’re attacking a straw man.  Furthermore, there is nothing whatsoever arbitrary in saying that things other than God require a cause while he does not.  For what makes something in need of a cause is that it has potentials which need to be actualized, or is metaphysically composite and is in need of a principle to account for how its parts are conjoined, or has an essence distinct from its act of existence and thus has to acquire its existence from something other than its own nature.  This is true of the material universe and every part of it.  However, what is pure actuality devoid of potentiality, or absolutely simple and without any parts, or has existence itself as its very essence, not only need not have a cause but could not have had one.  There might be other objections one could raise against First Cause arguments, but Russell’s objection just completely misses the point.” 

Descartes, however, might reply instead as follows: “But God does have a cause.  I’m not making any exception for him.  It’s just that he is his own cause, whereas other things are caused to exist by things distinct from themselves.  Nor is there anything arbitrary in my saying that God causes himself while other things do not.  For the reason I say that they do not cause themselves is that anything that causes itself to exist would also cause itself to have the divine attributes and thus would cause itself to be God, and neither the universe nor any part of it has done that.  Only God himself, naturally, has done that.  There might be other objections one could raise against this argument, but Russell’s objection just completely misses the point.”

Descartes’ “preservation” argument is also interesting, then, for what it tells us about vulgar criticisms of First Cause arguments, like Russell’s.  For Russell’s objection is so very feeble that it fails even as a response to Descartes’ crazy version of the argument!  That’s some kind of achievement.

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