Gravity - concept or fact?
An apple doesn’t fall on your head because of gravity. Gravity is not the cause. Gravity IS the apple falling on your head. In reality there is no such thing as gravity; there are only apples and heads.
Now to qualify that statement!
A concept has no value unless it correlates to the natural world. For example, the concept of falling might correlate to a falling apple, with neither one being the precursor of the other. And if you were asked to demonstrate the concept of falling you could just toss an apple. Falling involves actual observable movement through space and over time.
But if I ask you to demonstrate gravity what will you do? You could throw an apple again but I will tell you I only saw an apple falling; I didn’t see ‘gravity’. The fact is gravity IS the apple falling; it is not the cause of it falling.
We have become conditioned to think that nature does what it does because of the laws of physics. It’s almost as if there’s a virtual room with mechanical clocks and rotating cogs from which everything is manifested into physical reality. If that were so even in a metaphorical sense we still must ask how are these things manifested and by who or what… leading to all sorts of ‘creation’ theories.
So why do objects fall to the ground? - one might ask. What causes the apple to fall? And of course we answer gravity. However the question carries an implicit presumption that every movement has an invisible cause; and so we provide one. But why do we presume there is a cause to every actual event? Is there really is an invisible Law making the apple fall? Or is this Law inherent to the falling apple and therefore inseparable to it?
We can’t have it both ways. If the laws of nature are separate to nature then what is the agency by which these laws act upon nature? Something that is part of something else cannot act upon it; it must be separate to it; so this agency cannot be part of nature. And if the agency is separate to both nature and the laws of nature then by what means or agency does this agency exist separately to nature AND act upon nature? And so on in an infinite regression. It is the Third Man Argument that Aristotle used to expose the problem with Plato’s theory of Forms.
The Third Man Argument
If I intend to slap you then I can say that is the cause; and the effect is me slapping you. But what caused me to want to slap you? If we are in a world where effects are causes, and causes are effects, then surely we are pandering to illusion. Besides, my intention to slap you is a psychological cause, not a physical one.
If I hurt my head because an apple fell on it, then we can say there was a cause. But again, what caused the apple to fall? By asserting that everything we see is an effect, it means we must believe there must be an underworld of invisible causes. It is a preposterous idea that does not hold up to scrutiny.
In the natural world, the only phenomenon the idea of cause can correlate to is a seed or an egg; within this the essence of life is hidden. In time this seed or egg develops into a mature life form, or the effect. The mature life form then produces new seeds or eggs, and the cycle continues. Which came first - the chicken or the egg?
It is an error of reasoning to presume that the laws of nature exist separately to nature. Effectively man has separated spirit from matter and the result is an abomination. On one hand you have religion that panders to the invisible, and on the other hand you have a scientific atheism that views matter as a kind of clay that one can mold according to one’s will. Ironically the materialists have completely misunderstood the properties of matter, along with the spiritualists.
It is a challenge to rationally understand a phenomenon such as gravity. We take it for granted today, but even in the days of Aristotle the concept of it didn’t exist. And one reason for that is that it is not intuitive to imagine a concept that has no material counterpart. Newton’s contribution was utter genius in that regard, but certainly he must have known his Law of Gravitation was not itself the cause of falling apples.