COMMENT ON VAN INWAGEN'S
"THE PLACE OF CHANCE
IN A WORLD SUSTAINED BY GOD"
Van Inwagen (hereafter: Peter) is dealing here with a domain that over
the past three or four years I myself have come to think of as the most
profound and perhaps the most profoundly difficult in philosophical theology,
viz., the causal dimension of the doctrine of Divine Providence. This is
a rich and suggestive paper, as well as a shocking one in some respects.
Much of what Peter says I find myself either approving of or wavering back
and forth on, so naturally I will just ignore all that and get to the points
of disagreement. The target of my reply will be the middle section of the
paper, the part having to do with the notions of a divine plan and chance.
But I shall proceed by indirection, beginning with comments on what Peter
says about (i) God's causal role in the ordinary course of nature, (ii)
miracles and (iii) divine decrees. In the end, it seems to me, Peter's
more shocking claims about chance and Divine Providence spring in part
from an excessively deistic conception of God's causal relation to the
world. (Those of you who know Peter's commitment to Christian orthodoxy,
a commitment recently documented by the magazine Christianity Today,
may think of this as my shocking claim!)
1. God's causal role in the ordinary course of nature. On Peter's
simplified model of the universe, God creates and sustains (or conserves)
the basic entities and their causal powers. This is the extent of His causal
contribution to the ordinary course of nature. Like the power generator
in the example involving the two pieces of iron, God is at most a remote
or mediate (as opposed to immediate or direct)
cause of the changes that the basic entities immediately cause in
one another. More simply, God supplies the power, and the created entities
then move one another. Their movements are not the immediate effects of
God's action.
Anyone familiar with the medieval debates over secondary or creaturely
causation will realize that the position Peter propounds here is stigmatized
as (in effect) a form of deism by almost every important medieval
Christian philosopher. To be sure, this brand of deism, which I will label
weak deism is much more benign from a theistic perspective than
that strong deism which limits God's causal role in nature to creation
alone. Nonetheless, medieval religious thinkers agree almost unanimously
that a central element of orthodox theism is the doctrine that God is an
immediate cause of every effect brought about in the created universe,
that every such effect results directly from an action of God's.
Some of these thinkers go so far in the opposite direction as to claim,
astonishingly, that God is the only genuine efficient cause (as
opposed to merely "occasional" cause) of such effects--this is
the position called occasionalism, and it numbers among its advocates
such luminaries as al-Ghazali, Gabriel Biel, and, later on, Malebranche
and Berkeley. Most of the scholastics, however, endorse what I will call
concurrentism, according to which natural effects derive immediately
from both God and creatures. That is to say, in addition to conserving
natural entities and their causal powers, God must act with or co-operate
with those entities in order for them to bring about their characteristic
effects. These effects thus result from God's action and from the
action of the relevant created things.
However, outside of perhaps a few Latin Averroists, the only medieval
Christian thinker I know of who holds the weak deism Peter advocates here
is the 14th century Dominican Durandus, whose name came to be the one and
only proper name associated with weak deism by later thinkers--among whom
I have in mind both concurrentists (e.g., the 16th century Jesuits Luis
de Molina and Francisco Suarez), who cite him with mild disapproval, and
the occasionalists (e.g., Malebranche and Berkeley), who contemptuously
dismiss him. So it is only perhaps by chance, so to speak, that Peter escaped
being vilified by Malebranche and Berkeley.
The Christian theological tradition, then, is by and large not sympathetic
to Peter's account of God's causal role in the ordinary course of nature.
But this is a mere argument from authority, even if the authorities in
this instance have no little purchase on us. More telling, though, are
the reasons why these authorities reject Durandus' weak deism. For prominent
among these reasons is the very one Peter gives in rejecting what he calls
the interventionist account of miracles, viz., that Christians ought
not to believe that in performing miracles, God has to overpower or struggle
with or overcome His creatures. The occasionalists and concurrentists are
convinced that there are certain miracles recorded in Scripture that weak
deism cannot construe other than as events God was able to bring about
only by overpowering certain creatures.
Think of Shadrach sitting in the fiery furnace. Here we have real human
flesh exposed unprotected to real fire, and yet Shadrach survives unscathed--even
though the fire is so hot that it consumes the soldiers who usher him into
the furnace. How, on the weak deist view, can God save Shadrach? Only,
it seems, by either (i) taking from the fire its power to consume Shadrach,
which is inconsistent with the soldiers' being incinerated but in any case
amounts (or so the anti-deists all claim) to destroying the fire
and in that sense overpowering it; or (ii) endowing Shadrach's clothing
and flesh with a special power of resistance, in which case God is opposing
His creature, the fire; or (iii) placing some impediment (say, an invisible
heat-resistant shield) between Shadrach and the flames, in which case God
is yet again resisting the power of the fire. By contrast, on the occasionalist
and concurrentist models, God accomplishes this miracle simply by withholding
His own action. The (real) fire is, as it were, beholden to God's word;
He does not have to struggle with it or overcome it or oppose it. The fire's
natural effect cannot occur without God's action, and in this case God
chooses not to act in the way required. An elegant account, and one that
does not in any way give any creature a power that God must oppose.
In summary, then, I have some worries about the way in which Peter conceives
of the relation of God to the world. What's more, I believe it is this
weak deism that allows and perhaps even induces Peter to adopt such a restricted
notion of a divine decree. More on this below.
2. Miracles. My remark here is a brief one. I am very surprised
by the metaphysical characterization Peter gives of miracles, viz., that
God accomplishes miracles by supplying created entities with unusual causal
powers, powers that they themselves then exercise ("they rearrange
themselves" (p. 5)) to bring about abnormal (i.e., miraculous) effects.
On this view, then, created things bring about miraculous effects in the
same way they bring about their ordinary effects, viz., by exercising their
own powers.
I would think, to the contrary, (i) that a miraculous effect is brought
about either, as above, by an omission on God's part or by God's acting
by Himself directly on some created entity, and, further, (ii) that
a miraculous effect is such that the created entities present in the circumstances
cannot bring it about, at least not at that very time. So, for instance,
God acts directly to accomplish in Mary's womb what would normally be accomplished
by the sperm, viz., the fertilization of an ovum. I'm not sure how Peter
would think of this miracle. Does God give the ovum special powers? That
doesn't seem quite right--after all, the miracle is something that happens
to the ovum, not something that it does.
3. Decrees. According to Peter's account, divine decrees are divine
actions. Fine and good. Further, God's decreeing a state of affairs S
entails that S obtains. Once again, fine and good. But Peter
also seems to think that if God decrees S, then the nature of God's
causal contribution to S's obtaining rules out its being the case
that any creature, and a fortiori any free creature, should also
causally contribute to S's obtaining. Now perhaps my disagreement
with Peter here is nothing more than a verbal disagreement. But the term
'decree' is one worth fighting for in the metaphysics of divine causation.
And I find Peter's use of the term much too restrictive and, further, restrictive
in a way that both reflects his weak deism on the one hand and leads directly
to some strikingly implausible claims about God's plan on the other.
The weak deism is reflected as follows: Only if some form of deism is
true can created effects be divided neatly into those that God directly
causes and those that creatures directly cause. (By contrast, according
to occasionalism and concurrentism, God is a direct or immediate cause
of all natural effects.) But this seems to be exactly the distinction
Peter uses to separate off what is decreed by God from what is
not decreed by God. That is, God decrees just those states of affairs
that He directly brings about. Moreover, since on Peter's view God is an
immediate cause of an effect E just in case He is also the sole
cause of E, it will be "obvious" (p. 13) that God
cannot decree, say, the free actions of His rational creatures. But all
this seems excessively restrictive to me, and leads directly to Peter's
very limited, indeed shockingly limited, conception of God's plan.
Before we turn to what Peter says about chance and the divine plan,
let me sketch an alternative account of divine decrees.
Following Peter, let's distinguish between God's non-reactive decrees
and His reactive decrees. Unlike Peter, however, I do not restrict the
objects of God's decrees just to states of affairs that God brings about
by Himself. Rather, the objects of God's decrees are non-evil states
of affairs that God brings about directly either by Himself or in cooperation
with (free and non-free) created or secondary causes.
There are also divine decrees of a third sort, though these are called
decrees only in an improper and extended sense. For they are not, strictly
speaking, actions of God's, though, like decrees proper, they do entail
that their objects obtain. I will call them permissive decrees.
Their objects are evil states of affairs that God knowingly permits to
obtain.
Each type of decree is associated with God's will in a distinctive way.
God's non-reactive decrees have as their objects states of affairs that
God wills antecedently, where what God wills antecedently constitutes,
as it were, His preferred plan for the created realm. However, for His
own good reasons God permits (or "wills permissively") deviations
from this plan as a concession to creaturely weakness and defectiveness.
(God's so-called permissive will is God's will only in an
extended sense--just as in the case of permissive decrees.) Finally, when
God re-channels, as it were, such deviations from his preferred plan toward
further goods, He is said to will such goods consequently. So God's
reactive decrees are directed at states of affairs that He wills consequently.
Notice, this picture yields at least three different but wholly understandable
senses in which a (metaphysically contingent) state of affairs might be
a part of God's plan:
Sense 1: S is part of God's plan1 iff S
obtains and is antecedently willed by God.
Sense 2: S is part of God's plan2 iff S
obtains and is either antecedently or consequently willed by God.
Sense 3: S is part of God's plan3 iff S
obtains and is either antecedently or consequently or permissively
willed by God.
With this background in hand we can now turn to the central section
of Peter's paper.
4. Chance and God's plan. The most striking feature of Peter's account
of God's plan is how limited and narrow God's plan turns out to be. According
to Peter, S is a part of God's plan only if S obtains and
is non-reactively decreed by God. What's more, on Peter's view no free
creaturely action is non-reactively decreed by God; nor, as far as
I can tell, is any non-free action of any creature non-reactively
decreed by God. God sustains the basic entities and their powers, but He
is not an immediate and sole cause of their motions. So these motions are
not part of God's plan. (I may be misinterpreting Peter here, but I don't
think I am.)
Well, given this construal of God's plan, it is no surprise that Alice's
death turns out not to be part of God's plan. After all, neither do other
events which, with Holy Week just behind us, we might have thought part
of God's plan. In fact, if Peter is correct, then no significant event
in the history of salvation is part of God's plan. For each such event
involves free human choices and/or results from decrees issued by God in
response or reaction to the sin of Adam. So, for instance, what Peter says
entails that the call of Abraham is not part of God's plan; neither is
Abraham's positive response to that call; neither is the commissioning
of Moses nor his positive response. The same holds for Mary's freely consenting
to be the mother of God, the virginal conception (which, though miraculous,
would not have happened had Adam not sinned), Christ's life, death and
resurrection, etc. I can speak only for myself, but it seems to me too
obvious for words that Peter's construal of God's plan is too limited.
At the very least, it is misleading to attribute all these events to chance
and leave it at that. (Notice, by the way, that the threefold account of
God's plan I suggested above does indeed give us a sense in which the events
of salvation history were not part of God's preferred plan, but my account
does not forbid us to say that there is yet another wholly proper sense
in which (O felix culpa!) those events are most assuredly part of
God's plan. It seems to me important for Christians to have both such
senses among our conceptual resources.)
5. Caveats and retractions. However, it does not follow that I reject
all of the most important theses of Peter's paper. To be sure, if a chance
event is defined as one that occurs but is not part of God's plan even
in sense 3 laid out above, then there are no chance events--indeed, it
is a necessary truth that there are no chance events. That is to say, I
hold the doctrine of Divine Providence to entail that every event E
occurring in the created universe is such that E is willed either
antecedently or consequently or permissively by God. That is, each such
event is either specifically and knowingly intended by God (providentia
approbationis) or specifically and knowingly permitted by God (providentia
concessionis). Nevertheless, even such a strong conception of Providence
as this is able, I believe, to accommodate many of the most important claims
Peter wants to make.
For instance, this conception of Providence is perfectly consistent
with the presence of genuine causal indeterminism in the world, as long
as God is in a position to know what will result from the action of genuinely
indeterministic causes--be they free or natural causes. (The theory of
middle knowledge provides one way, but not the only way, to demonstrate
this consistency claim.) So my strong view of Providence is arguably compatible
with there being many events that "might very well not have happened."
Again, this strong conception of Providence does not entail that every
event has an explanation of the sort Alice's husband is looking for. I
say this even though I also believe that for any evil effect E,
God permits E only if He then channels or orders E toward
some good. This last thesis does not, I want to argue, entail that God
has a specific reason for permitting each particular evil, though
it does entail that He permits each evil knowingly. So, for instance, it
may well be, as Peter suggests, that God has adopted, for whatever reasons,
a general policy in keeping with which He allows various moral and
natural evils to occur. In that case, there may well be evils, like Alice's
untimely death, for which there is no (antecedent) providential reason
other than that God has adopted a certain general policy. And this is so,
even if there is some specific future good toward which God orders Alice's
death. So even if, for every existent evil E, God knowingly permits
E and then orders E toward some good, it does not follow
that God has some special reason for permitting E over and beyond
his reason for adopting the general policy in question. To make my negative
point bluntly, from the fact that God orders an existent evil E toward
some further specific good G, it doesn't follow that G provides
a specific reason for God's permitting E in the first place. Aiming
for G may well be God's 'response' to E; it doesn't follow
that attaining G is God's specific reason for allowing E.
So even on my very strong conception of Divine Providence, there may well
be no very specific answer to the question "Why did Alice have
to die that way?". In several places St. Thomas uses the following
example: God wills that every human being be saved, but permits, say, Jones
to sin mortally and be punished by eternal damnation; Jones' sin is thus
ordered to a manifestation of divine justice, viz., the punishment of the
wicked. "So even though he does not fulfill God's will, God's will
is fulfilled in him." However, it does not seem to follow that God
allows Jones to sin mortally in order that He might manifest His justice
by punishing Jones. The permission to sin comes first, perhaps as the result
of a general policy; the ordering of this particular sin, despite itself,
to some good comes later.
So I deny that there is chance or fate in an ultimate sense if
God is provident. That is, I deny that anything can happen which is not
in any sense at all--even sense (3)--part of God's freely and knowingly
chosen plan for the created world. But this does not mean that every evil
has an explanation of the sort Alice's husband is after, or that there
are no events that might very well not have happened, or that there is
no such thing as causal indeterminism among either free or natural causes.
(In effect, then, I am attempting to put asunder what Peter has joined
together, viz., the various characteristics of "chance" listed
on p. 9 and again on p. 10.)
6. A note on disjunctive decrees. I really don't see why God shouldn't
be able to choose arbitrarily among equally attractive options. There seems
to me nothing demeaning about this. In fact, such an ability may very well
be built into the notion of free choice (I'm not sure it is, but I'm not
sure it isn't, either.)
But grant for the sake of argument that God can issue disjunctive decrees
without explicitly decreeing any of the disjuncts by itself. Now suppose
that X was in fact the initial state of the universe, that X
and Y were the only two choices consistent with God's purposes,
and that X and Y were equally preferrable. Then it seems
there are only three possibilities:
(1) In the beginning God decreed X-or-Y and then "looked
to see" which of X or Y had been actualized, thus learning
that it was X that had been actualized.
(2) In the beginning God decreed X-or-Y while foreknowing that
X would occur were He to decree X-or-Y.
(3) In the beginning God decreed X.
(1) seems demeaning to a provident God, but it does not appear to be
what Peter has in mind, since Peter affirms in at least three places (p.
12, p. 15, p. 16) that God has foreknowledge of future contingents. Now
while (2) and (3) are admittedly distinct from one another, my own theory
of decrees has as a consequence that (2) describes a way in which God might
(antecedently) decree X as an initial state of the universe. That is, as
long as X and Y are non-evil states of affairs, (2) just entails (3)--though
not vice versa. But even if Peter balks at this, he has to admit that it
seems a bit hyperbolic to call (2) an instance of "chance" in
the sense of "not being a part of anyone's plan".
Still, the idea of irreducibly disjunctive decrees does strike me as
a bit bizarre--especially if God is acknowledged to have infallible foreknowledge
of future contingents. As I see it, God foreknows future contingents because
He decrees them--and, I believe, this claim can be shown to be compatible
with freedom and causal indeterminism, generally. (The doctrine of middle
knowledge is one way, but not the only way, to do this.)
Alfred J. Freddoso
Philosophy Department
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
April, 1987
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