Uncaused Events

I t’s been a metaphysical dogma for philosophers from Scholastics to Cartesians that an effect cannot be greater than its cause. John Milbank begs to differ. Writing in defense of the historicity of the Gospels’ account of the crucifixion ( Being Reconciled , 84), Milbank points out that “well-attested and yet extraordinary and unpredictable events do occur,” citing the attack on the World Trade Center.

He goes on:

The immediate aftermath of this event illustrates the truth that we are often far more certain that something has happened, than why it has happened. The surprisingness and often inexplicability of precisely the most outstanding events renders them the most typical events—since an event, to be recordable, and so to be an event, must to some degree by an exception to ‘the normal course of events,’ for which in reality only ‘the course’ . . . is really an ‘event’ in human history. This constitutive exceptionality of the event means that the most event-like events are necessarily surprising and very often inexplicable, since they exceed the normal expectations of causality. Indeed one can go further: given the complexity of human reasoning, humans lack of reasons and the contagion of human behaviour, it may be true to say that the bigger events—those that most shape our experience and understanding—occur literally without sufficient causation. Causal explanation of, for example, the First World War, runs the danger of seeing it as, with hindsight, an inevitable event. In reality it much more plausibly seen in Tolstoyan terms as arriving according to the gather pace of its own mad momentum. There were preceding occasions, for this is as for other greatest and most event-like events, but no causes in the strict sense.