First Cause: Ipsum Esse Subsistens Aeternum - Rethinking God in a Scientific Age exposes the deep metaphysical fracture at the center of modern thought and reconstructs a unified philosophical framework capable of repairing it. For centuries, debates over the a priori have divided philosophy into rival camps-rationalist versus empiricist, analytic versus continental-yet the true origin of this divide, and its far-reaching consequences for metaphysics, science, and theology, has remained obscured. This book brings that hidden rupture to light and offers a coherent path beyond it.
The central thesis is uncompromising: early modern philosophy severed intelligibility from experience, generating the crisis that shaped the last three hundred years of thought. Once being, causality, necessity, and essence were disconnected from their grounding in reality itself, Hume's skepticism became unavoidable, Kant's limits on knowledge became permanent, and classical metaphysics was pushed to the margins. First Cause dismantles this inherited framework and rebuilds a synthetic a priori rooted in the intelligibility of being. Drawing together Aristotelian principles, Thomistic metaphysics, contemporary modal logic, analytic philosophy, and insights from the natural sciences, the book offers a renewed account in which causality, necessity, and essence become rationally necessary features of a unified metaphysical system.
What distinguishes this work is its integration of classical theism with modern analytic precision. It recovers a robust account of ipsum esse subsistens-the self-subsistent act of being-and demonstrates that the intelligibility of the world, whether scientific, philosophical, or experiential, presupposes a necessary, eternal, incorporeal First Cause. God is not treated as an optional explanatory add-on but as the metaphysical ground that makes reason, causality, and coherent explanation possible. In this framework, the very possibility of understanding anything at all points beyond contingent reality to a transcendent source of existence.
