ESSENTIALLY ORDERED CAUSAL SERIES AND QUANTUM INDETERMINACY: TESTING THE ARISTOTELIAN-THOMISTIC FIRST CAUSE ARGUMENT AGAINST NON-DETERMINISTIC PHYSICS
ESSENTIALLY ORDERED CAUSAL SERIES AND QUANTUM INDETERMINACY: TESTING THE ARISTOTELIAN-THOMISTIC FIRST CAUSE ARGUMENT AGAINST NON-DETERMINISTIC PHYSICS

Summary/Abstract: Aristotelian-Thomistic arguments for a first cause turn on a distinction between accidentally ordered causal series, whose members act in succession, and essentially ordered series, whose members act simultaneously and whose intermediate members exercise causal power only as instruments deriving that power from a prior member. Critics of these arguments have concentrated on regress termination and on whether persistence needs a sustaining cause; almost nobody has asked what the instrumental structure itself demands of physics. I argue that the standard formulation of the per se argument carries a tacit commitment I call the Derivational Sufficiency Requirement (DSR): that whatever an intermediate cause contributes to its effect is wholly derived from what it receives from the prior member. DSR is trivially satisfied under determinism and non-trivially contested under every indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Working from a corpus of thirty-eight verified sources published between 2019 and 2026, I develop the article's original contribution: the derivational trilemma, according to which a defender of the per se argument must either (i) commit the argument to a deterministic interpretation, thereby forfeiting the interpretation-neutrality classical theists typically claim, or (ii) weaken DSR to the derivation of propensity distributions rather than of singular outcomes, or (iii) accept irreducibly underived transitions inside the very structure designed to eliminate brute facts. A survey of eight interpretive families shows the trilemma to be exhaustive over the extant options, with 37.5% falling on the first horn, 25.0% on the second, and 37.5% on the third. I then defend the second horn as the strongest available position and identify a convergence, so far unremarked in either literature, between the propensity-based indeterministic physics of Del Santo and Gisin (2023) and the Thomistic distinction between primary and secondary causation. The convergence has a determinate price: the per se argument, so weakened, delivers a sustainer of powers rather than a determiner of outcomes. The emanational morphology of Knežević (2024a) is examined as a further, structurally distinct way of paying that price.

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