Providence and Science in a World of Contingency

Thomas Aquinas' Metaphysics of Divine Action

Ignacio Silva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000437416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Providence and Science in a World of Contingency offers a novel assessment of the contemporary debate over divine providential action and the natural sciences, suggesting a re-consideration of Thomas Aquinas' metaphysical doctrine of providence coupled with his account of natural contingency. By looking at the history of debates over providence and nature, the volume provides a set of criteria to evaluate providential divine action models, challenging the underlying, theologically contentious assumptions of current discussions on divine providential action. Such assumptions include that God needs causally open spaces in the created world in order to act in it providentially, and the unfitting conclusion that, if this is the case, then God is assumed to act as another cause among causes. In response to these shortcomings, the book presents a comprehensive account of Aquinas' metaphysics of natural causation, contingency, and their relation to divine providence. It offers a fresh and bold metaphysical narrative, based on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, which appreciates the relation between divine providence and natural contingency.

1 Digging for criteria

A metaphysical history of divine providence

DOI: 10.4324/9781003173465-2

It seems that were God to intervene in nature, to act within nature following his divine intentions, God would be breaking, suspending, or simply not following the apparent lawful order of the created universe, which, for many, would imply an inconsistency in God’s nature. Moreover, the idea of God acting directly in nature seems to bring challenges to the autonomy of nature, and, thus, to the foundation of the natural sciences. Still, it seems necessary for Christian thinkers today to offer models and accounts of how it is possible to understand that nature has its own order and regular actions together with the claim that God can participate actively in the development of the natural and human world. Ultimately, the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is not a God of the sidelines. Before considering the different models available today, however, it will prove beneficial to find some criteria with which to assess such models. I suggest ‘digging in history’ for these criteria, by which I mean analysing models that were offered in past controversies and debates over providential divine action, seeking those ideals that guided the conversations. These ideals will turn out to be what I call criteria or desiderata.

Thus, before fully delving into the contemporary debate and Aquinas’ metaphysical thought, this chapter will present a short metaphysical history of divine providential action, starting from Islamic medieval discussions, through Christian medieval and early modern approaches to the issue, and arriving at nineteenth- and twentieth-century presentations that have shaped our debate today. In essence, Aquinas dealt with very similar problems during his time, and discussions sharing similar assumptions appeared also in the seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries. So, even if the debate in the thirteenth century was framed in different philosophical terms (not including, for instance, any mention of quantum, chaos, or Big Bang theories), there were similar philosophical and theological positions on how to explain divine providential action in the universe, and many looked interestingly similar to those present in early modernity and today. My hope is that this brief historical sketch will, thus, allow me to dig out four criteria for assessing the debate together with its unexamined assumptions, and to show why I believe it is still worth seriously considering the metaphysical thought of Thomas Aquinas about natural and divine causation. As I mentioned in the Introduction to this volume, these four criteria will turn out to be: 1) God’s omnipotence; 2) God’s involvement in the workings of nature; 3) the autonomy of nature; and 4) the success of natural reason and science. I prefer not to expand on how to understand these criteria at this point, since they will reveal themselves during my archaeological expedition through this brief metaphysical history. Still, it might be worth noting that it would be unwise to attempt a definition of these four desiderata, since, while they have all played a major role in discussions on providence and divine action, even if they keep a shared core, they have also changed. In the end, my argument will hold that regardless of how thinkers have understood these tenets, they have always had to deal with them in their models of providential divine action.

I will, thus, start with an analysis of the medieval Islamic and Christian debates, presenting the thought of scholars such as al-Ghazālī, Ibn-Rushd, Aquinas, and Avicebron. This debate was framed under the philosophical insights of Aristotle and whether they were sufficient to explain the nature of the relationship between the divine and the world. I will move later to early modernity and the thought of Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and René Descartes. Models of providential divine action in this episode are derived from the new ways of conceiving how God interacted with the created universe by means of the laws of nature – a notion alien to medieval thinkers. Finally, I will look into how early twentieth-century discussions over whether the universe behaves deterministically or indeterministically have shaped theological conceptions on how God would act (or not) providentially in the world.

A The Middle Ages

My brief historical sketch of the metaphysics of providence starts in the twelfth century, when Persian scholar al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) attempted to show, in his famous book The Incoherence of the Philosophers, that philosophers who adopted Greek thought (in the form of the Aristotelian philosophy), and in particular his Persian predecessor Ibn-Sīnā (980–1037), were unsuccessful in achieving a coherent theory of divine action. Before al-Ghazālī, from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, there was a strong defence of the Islamic religious ideas held by Mutakallimūn theologians (of which al-Ghazālī was the greatest proponent), within which Kalam theology was the main stream of thought.¹ The basic idea of Kalam theology was that the unchangeable nature of God’s omnipotence and providence meant that there could be no active power in nature, and that, instead, God acted in every apparently natural event, a doctrine that would in later centuries would be known as occasionalism.² On the contrary, philosophers inspired by the thought of Aristotle argued for the existence of real natural powers and causes.

According to Islam, the universe was created out of nothing and had a beginning in time. Kalam theologians considered that God re-creates the universe at every instant, hence regarding creation as an atomic event, by which God puts the universe into existence at every single moment of time, allowing it to be rational and intelligible by keeping the regularities that are today expressed in what we call the laws of nature (a notion that came to existence during early modernity, as I will show below). Kalam theologians assumed that the properties of an existent being in the natural universe changed constantly, in a continual process of re-creation, understood as a continuous creation of matter and powers within the universe, as if in every moment the universe is in the process of becoming. In fact, for Kalam theologians, the universe is restless and is continuously developing; nothing in the universe would stay two moments in a stationary state. Together with this idea, following their atomistic perspective on nature and creation, Kalam theologians believed that ‘no being, in and of itself, by virtue of the inherent principles of its being, is oriented towards a becoming other than it is’, and that ‘all things are no more than they are and their being is complete and fulfilled at any given moment of their existence’. Hence, ‘no being has in itself any intrinsic “potentiality” to change’; and ‘its becoming other is entirely dependent upon and resides in the potentiality of an exterior agent who is capable of effecting the change’, i.e., God.³

In addition, they considered that the efficient cause, the effect of which is the real material existence of the thing, must be the cause of the totality of its being, in terms of being something existent and having the reality that it has. Hence, the act of causality at the moment of the realisation of the act is itself grounded in God’s creative causality: the single act that produces the existence of the thing is the cause of the totality of its reality.⁴ This view, adding to the atomistic and constantly evolving universe framework, revealed to Kalam theologians that all change involves a creation, since whatever change is effected represents the realisation of a new being entirely.⁵ Ultimately, Kalam theologians

proposed this [the theory of constant re-creation] in order to preserve the involvement of God in the world and to perform his essential role, which they saw as necessary (but not always sufficient) to sustain the existence of the world.⁶

Hence, in order to accept the religious premises of the constant involvement of God in the universe, they felt the need to diminish the activities of nature to the point of denying them.⁷

Kalam theologians, then, admitted that there was no deterministic causality in nature; in fact, there was no natural causality at all, which left a completely indeterminate world, though ordered by the will of God, which was immutable. As Oxford-based philosopher William Carroll suggests, divine sovereignty over worldly events was clearly at stake.⁸ Were nature to act by itself, there would be no place at all for God to act. Given the theological premises that stated that God is omnipotent and that He governed and guided the universe, Kalam theologians needed to admit that nature had no causal powers at all. Hence, it was God who acted, creating, constantly and directly, every event without any intermediary agents.⁹ It was only God and God alone, by his own command and power, who was the direct cause of all events in the world.¹⁰

On the other side of the Islamic philosophical–theological discussion on divine action in nature, there are those whom Kalam theologians called the ‘philosophers’. Amongst these, one of the most important was Andalusian polymath Ibn-Rushd (1126–1198), usually called Averroes in Latin medieval universities. Averroes’ main idea on this matter was, following Aristotle, that nature acted autonomously, an assertion in direct opposition to Kalam theology, for whom an autonomous nature meant a diminishing of God’s omnipotence. In fact, Averroes’ position begins by rejecting the very idea of creatio ex nihilo, for the reason that if this doctrine were true, then anything could, he thought, come from anything, and there would be no congruity between effects and causes.¹¹ For Averroes, the doctrine of creation out of nothing contradicted the existence of a true natural causality in the universe, so if it were true, then no knowledge of the natural world would be possible at all.¹²

Averroes rejected the denial of natural causes with several arguments.¹³ First, for example, he said that if there were no natural causes, there would be no natural knowledge, given that there would be no knowledge of natural causes. Second, if the existence of worldly causes is denied, it is impossible to prove the existence of the cause that caused the existence of the universe, given that it would be impossible to know the very fact of causality at all. If there is no causality in the world, he argued, there is no possible way to reach the invisible agent who causes it, i.e., God.

This debate on God’s involvement in worldly affairs against the causality of natural powers came to Aquinas’ attention in thirteenth-century Europe through the works of Sephardic Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1138–1204) and the Latin translations of Averroes’ Commentaries on Aristotle. Aquinas summarises these debates explaining that for Kalam theologians, of whom he heard through Maimonides, natural forms (that is, in good Aristotelian fashion, formal causes that make things to be what they are) are considered to be accidental forms, i.e., forms that make things to have attributes that do not pertain to their own by nature, rather than substantial forms, i.e., forms that make things to be what they are by nature. Now, given that accidents cannot pass into other things, it is impossible for a natural thing to introduce a new form into another thing, i.e., natural things cannot be the cause of other things, concluding that God creates forms each time.

In arguing against this position, Aquinas holds that Kalam theologians misunderstood the difference between primary and secondary causality (discussed in length in the fourth chapter). Aquinas offers three arguments to support his view. He affirms that holding God to be the only one who acts in nature goes against the senses, reason, and the goodness of God.¹⁴ First, it goes against the nature of sensation because, for Aquinas, the senses do not perceive unless the sensible object acts upon them. If the sensible object would not act, but were God to act, then it would follow that a man does not feel the fire’s heat, given that the fire does not cause anything upon the sensorial organ. In fact, if the heat is produced in the organ by another efficient cause (and not the fire), although the touch would sense the heat, it would not sense the heat of the fire but of God’s, nor would it perceive that the fire is hot, and yet the sense judges this to be the case. Second, this position goes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations of Thomas Aquinas’ works
• Introduction
• 1. Digging for criteria: A metaphysical history of divine providence
• 2. Science and providence today
• 3. A metaphysics of natural contingency
• 4. A metaphysics of God’s providence
• 5. Thomas Aquinas today
• Final thoughts on Aquinas, contingency, and providence
• Bibliography
• Index