A quick philosophical aside:

Our hoping may be limited and preconditioned. Hoping of what can be depends on our notion of becoming. Becoming is conditioned by understanding cause. Cause is a broad concept that can be analyzed. An exhaustive analysis will yield a total partitioning of our notion of causality, of becoming-directing. We know that an inventory or division of knowledge is exhaustive or complete when it strikes us as plainly so, when it is derived systematically from a single principle, and when it fails to change over history.

Aristotle’s four causes model pretends to be an exhaustive analysis of our innate prejudices about governed becoming.

The model is revealing of our internal meaning-making activity. We “use” kinds of causality when we construct objects in imagination. We posit a weak empirical stuff from nothing. This makes the stuff transparent—it was quiddity before being present in intuition. This Aristotle calls material cause. We shape the colored blob—formal cause. If we are arranging multiple blobs, this arranging is also formal. Formal means combination—logical, geometrical, temporal. Then we imagine the formed stuff pushing or otherwise imparting force as change of another stuff. A rolls into B, A stops, B rolls. This is efficient cause.

Then there is the biggie—Why am I positing? I am being led by desires, which are clinging to future states, absences that are not yet. I feel I am moving towards them. Since these end-points are determining my action, they also count as causes.

Things that are transparently meaningful to us are made. The four causes are our four ways of constituting a being. For Aristotle, we think we have knowledge of a thing only when we have grasped its cause, and this occurs in four ways. The deepest, in that it identifies with our own telos, the end of very intentionality, is Final Cause.

Now, the fourth cause, called Final Cause, is what the thing exists for the sake of. If there is a Big Final Cause, it would be a thing that is the cause of material, formal, and efficient causes. All this stuff is here, formed, and moving towards an end-point. The end-point, then, is the informing and shaping agent—a cause.

Formal Cause is scary. If there is one, it means that error—sin—is possible.