Creation, Conservation, and Providence

A clockmaker builds a clock, winds it, and walks away. The clock keeps time without him. Whatever else he may be owed, the clock's continuing to run is not something he is doing.

That picture of the relation between God and the world is widely held and it is not the classical one. On the classical view the world is less like a wound clock than like a note being sung, which does not persist for a moment after the singer stops. The difference between those two pictures decides what the arguments in the later tiers are even trying to establish, and it is not settled by anything either side says about the first moment.

Bringing something into being from nothing

The phrase means from nothing in the sense of not from anything. It does not name a material called nothing out of which things are made, and taking it that way generates confusions that have no counterpart in the doctrine.

Three positions are being rejected, and seeing which ones explains why the doctrine was formulated at all.

The first is that God works on material that was already there. This was the Greek picture, and Plato's Timaeus is its most influential statement: a craftsman imposes order on a pre-existing chaos. On that account matter is as old as God and is not something God is responsible for, which limits God in a way classical theism will not accept.

The second is that the world is produced out of God, as light is produced out of a flame. That preserves total dependence and pays for it by making the world divine, or by making God the sort of thing that has parts to give away.

The third is that creating is a kind of change. Every change we know has a subject that undergoes it, something that was one way and is now another. Creation has no such subject, since before the act there is nothing to be altered. Whatever creation is, it is not a process that anything goes through.

The doctrine in this explicit form is not simply read off the opening of Genesis, which can be construed either way, and the historian Gerhard May argued that it was worked out in the second century, by Christian writers pressed by Gnostic accounts of emanation on one side and Middle Platonist accounts of eternal matter on the other. Whether he is right about the details, the general point stands: the doctrine is a philosophical position with a history, arrived at to secure that nothing whatever is independent of God.

One consequence is regularly missed. Creation from nothing does not by itself entail that the world had a first moment. Aquinas held both that the world is created and that reason cannot show it to have begun, and he took its having a beginning to be something believed rather than demonstrated. On his view a world that had always existed would still be created, because what creation asserts is dependence rather than a starting date.

Keeping it in being

If creation from nothing were the whole of the doctrine, the clockmaker picture would be available. Conservation is what rules it out. The claim is that dependence is not an event in the past but a relation holding now, and that the same is true at every moment a thing exists.

Whether conservation is a second divine action, distinct from creation, or the same action described from a later point, is disputed. Descartes and Jonathan Edwards both held the strong version, on which God does not so much sustain a thing as produce it afresh at every moment, since a thing that exists now has in itself no power to bring about its existing a moment later. Others treat conservation and creation as one act differing only in how we describe it.

The more consequential dispute is about what is left for creatures to do.

At one end, everything that happens is done by God directly, and created things are occasions on which God acts rather than causes in their own right. Fire does not heat water; God heats the water when fire is present. This position, occasionalism, was held by philosophers in the medieval Islamic tradition and has been defended since, and its motivation is that a creature which cannot even keep itself in existence looks poorly placed to be causing anything else.

At the other end, God keeps things in existence and then leaves them to act. Creatures have their own powers and exercise them, and God's contribution is confined to their continuing to be there.

Between them, the position associated with Aquinas holds that God's activity and the creature's are not competing contributions to the same effect. God causes the creature to be and to be a thing with powers, and the creature genuinely exercises those powers, with God acting through it rather than instead of it. On this account there is no quantity of causal work to be divided, so nothing is subtracted from the creature by God's doing all of it.

The stakes are larger than they look. If created things have no real powers, then the sciences describe regularities that God maintains rather than capacities that things have, and the whole notion of a natural cause becomes a convenient way of speaking. If they do have real powers, the classical theist has to explain how something can be entirely dependent for its existence and still be a genuine agent. The advanced tier takes this up under the question of whether a thing, once made, would simply continue on its own.

Not one of the things, and present to all of them

These sound like opposites and classical theism asserts both, which is worth pausing on because the usual assumption is that more of one means less of the other.

The two ways of going wrong are instructive. A doctrine with immanence and no transcendence makes God identical with the world or with its unfolding, which is pantheism, and the cost is that God then has the world's limitations and cannot be responsible for its existing. A doctrine with transcendence and no immanence produces the clockmaker: a God who set things going and is now elsewhere, which is deism, and the cost is that nothing in the world's continued existence has anything to do with God.

The classical position is that immanence follows from transcendence rather than competing with it. Aquinas argued that God is in all things by essence, power, and presence, and his reason was that God is the cause of each thing's existing rather than one influence among others acting upon it. A cause of that kind must be present wherever it acts, and it acts wherever anything exists. The reason God can be wholly present to every particle is precisely that God is not a thing occupying space alongside them.

The gain from holding both is that neither of the natural questions embarrasses the position. Where is God, if not somewhere in the universe? The answer is that God is not located, and is nonetheless present to everything located. Why does God not simply intervene more? That question belongs to the next section, and the doctrine of immanence is what makes it hard, since on this account God is not standing back in the first place.

Running it

Providence is where the abstractions start to have consequences, because it is the doctrine that says the world's history is going somewhere and that its going there is God's doing.

Accounts of it differ mainly in how detailed the governing is.

On a general account, God establishes the order of the world and directs it broadly toward its ends, without every particular event being separately intended. Much of what happens is the working out of the natures God gave things, and the outcome God secures is at the level of the whole.

On a meticulous account, nothing at all falls outside the governing. Every event, down to the smallest, either is brought about by God or is specifically permitted with a purpose. Comfort and difficulty both follow from this. It supports the thought that nothing that happens to anyone is simply pointless, and it means that every particular horror is something God specifically allowed with a reason.

The pressure on any account of providence comes from human freedom, and the three families of response are worth naming now because the later tiers assume them.

The first says that God knows, prior to any decision about what to create, how each possible free creature would freely act in each possible situation, and creates accordingly. Luis de Molina set this out in 1588, and the position bears his name. It promises detailed providence with libertarian freedom intact, and it owes an account of how such conditional facts could be true and known before the creature exists.

The second, associated with Aquinas, denies that God's causing and the creature's freedom are in competition. God moves the will from within, as the cause of its being a will that acts, rather than as one prior event pushing another. Whether this preserves freedom in any recognisable sense or merely relocates the problem is disputed.

The third gives up part of the foreknowledge. On this view God is in time, does not know what free creatures will do until they do it, and governs responsively rather than from a settled plan. Freedom is secure and providence becomes a matter of God's competence rather than God's script, and the cost is a restriction on omniscience as the previous articles defined it.

Providence is also where the problem of evil enters, and the connection is direct. The stronger the providence, the more each particular instance of suffering is something a good and powerful being deliberately allowed. That problem gets a full treatment in the intermediate tier, and the reason it belongs there rather than here is that it cannot be stated properly until the doctrine it presses against has been stated.

Next

The last three articles have fixed what is being claimed and what the claim commits its holder to. Nothing yet has been said about how anyone could come to hold it, or about what would count in its favour. The next article asks what faith is supposed to contribute, and whether it supplements argument, replaces it, or answers to it.