ess of movers, which he considered impossible, for reasons we will see, or else there must be finally an unmoved mover to end the chain.
The argument from causality might logically be the argument that underlies all the other here. It is the argument that every creature must be the cause of its own being or else be caused by another being. A being that is not its own cause is a contingent being, and in order to avoid an infinite regress, as with the argument from motion, one must finally postulate a being which is its own cause.
Aquinas defines being as not only the essence of God but also the proper effect of God, thus establishing God as the unique and direct cause of the being possessed by every finite thing. This argument also has the distinction of conceiving of God as the cause of being itself, rather than as the cause of motion or order or some other less essential attribute of being.
As summarized by Adler and his co-workers (II, 257), Aquinas wrote that all creatures, before they were created, were possible, and in this sense were contingent, not necessary. He goes on to argue that, just as the Creator was able to produce them before they existed in themselves, likewise the Creator is able, even when they exist in themselves, to bring them to nothing. Furthermore, at every moment of their existence, their contingent being depends upon GodÆs power. God preserves them in being by continually giving them being, for if he ever took his presence and power away from them, all things would be returned to the nothingness they began from. It is this concept that also underlies Whiteheadian process philosophy, in that it conceive
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