Philosophical Essays on Divine Causation

Gregory Ganssle, Gregory Ganssle, Gregory E. Ganssle, Gregory E. Ganssle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367334697
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000530735
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book discusses various aspects of God's causal activity. Traditional theology has long held that God acts in the world and interrupts the normal course of events by performing special acts. Although the tradition is unified in affirming that God does create, conserve, and act, there is much disagreement about the details of divine activity. The chapters in this book fruitfully explore these disagreements about divine causation.

The chapters are divided into two sections. The first explores historical views of divine causal activity from the Pre-Socratics to Hume. The second section addresses a variety of contemporary issues related to God's causal activity. These chapters include defenses of the possibility of special acts of God, proposals of models of divine causation, and analyses of divine conservation.

Philosophical Essays on Divine Causation will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working in philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, and metaphysics.

1Divine Causal Agency in Classical Greek Philosophy

Donald J. Zeyl

DOI: 10.4324/9780429320767-2

“First of all there came a gap (chaos), and then broad-breasted Earth (Gaia), … and dank Tartaros.” So begins Hesiod’s (early seventh cent. BCE) genealogy of the Greek gods.¹ Hesiod’s account begins with a separation (“gap”) between earth and sky² and the underworld and goes on to chronicle the birth of other deities. The earlier generations of these deities are personifications of various basic aspects of nature (Love [Erōs], Aether, Night and Day, Sky and Ocean, etc.). The account progresses to subsequent generations of divinities, culminating in the familiar anthropomorphic gods—the Titans and after them the Olympians—and the various battles these waged against one another that make up the stuff of Greek mythology.

The Greek immortals may be to everlasting, but they are not from everlasting. Nor are they transcendent. They emerge out of cosmic processes that they did not create. A generation before Hesiod, Homer³ (mid to late eighth cent. BCE) likewise portrays the gods in starkly anthropomorphic terms.

The gods of Homer and Hesiod—and of Greek popular religion—control everything: cosmic and meteorological disturbances, agrarian seasons, and even human actions. Actions seemingly freely chosen are nevertheless under divine control. Human life is lived at the mercy of the gods, who use humans as pawns in the complex contests they wage against one another.⁴ Yet even the gods themselves are subject to the Fates or Destiny.

This picture of absolute, capricious supernatural control over both natural events and human affairs begins to be questioned by a succession of Ionian thinkers during the sixth century BCE. These thinkers, the so-called “Milesians,”⁵ embark on a road of inquiry into the causes of natural phenomena that breaks radically with the Homeric/Hesiodic world picture. While it is true that they replace causal explanations of natural events in terms of intentional divine action with explanations in terms of natural causes, it is far from true that their portrayal of the world is one in which divine agency has no place. After all, they regarded the physical reality that they sought to understand and explain as itself divine: living and powerful and, above all, immortal.

I. The Presocratics

Theoretical reflection in western philosophy on the subject of divine causal agency begins with the early Presocratic thinker Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–c. 478 BCE). Xenophanes emphatically rejected the Homeric (and Hesiodic) anthropomorphic conception of the divine. “Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all those things which among humans are shameful and reprehensible, such as theft, adultery and deception” (DK21B11).⁶ “Ethiopians describe their gods as snub-nosed and black, while Thracians depict theirs as light-eyed and red-headed” (B16). His positive theology, on the other hand is remarkable: There is “a single god … not in any way like mortals, either in body or in thought” (B23). Unlike human beings or Homeric deities, this god does not need organs of sense or thought: “All of him sees, all of him thinks and all of him hears” (B24). This god, moreover, remains unmoving in place and “without effort he shakes all things with the thought of his mind” (B25).

It is not known what exactly motivated Xenophanes to break radically with the anthropomorphism of popular religion. Possibly he anticipated Plato’s famous repudiation of Homeric theology in the second book of the Republic when he appeals to the notion of “fittingness” to reject an aspect of that theology (see B26). It is, however, an anachronism to attribute to Xenophanes’ god the aspect of transcendence if by that notion we mean subsisting independently from the natural world. Xenophanes’ physical explanations,⁷ like those of his Ionic predecessors, are what we would call naturalistic. There is no trace of a separate divine level of explanation that is to be integrated with natural causal explanations. Still, we are entitled to see in Xenophanes’ accounts of natural processes the beginning of an awareness that those processes are unified and rational and not random—the manifestation of a cosmic intelligence.

This belief in the unity and rationality of cosmic processes is next exhibited by Xenophanes’ younger contemporary, Heraclitus of Ephesus (late sixth–fifth cent. BCE). Heraclitus’ central explanatory concept is that of the logos. This complex and often elusive concept combines the ideas of, on the one hand, statement, reason and account and, on the other, measure, arrangement and proportion.⁸ We have no evidence that Heraclitus identified the logos directly with (any) god. He seems to have identified it with fire, the intelligent element in the cosmos, and fire in turn with Zeus—not the supreme deity of popular (Homeric) religion but the supreme and ultimate governing principle of the cosmos.⁹ The logos reveals, at least to those of sufficient understanding (B1), the unity/identity that underlies all (apparent) opposition, duality and even conflict. Harmony cannot exist without strife, peace cannot exist without war, health cannot exist without sickness, life cannot exist without death and so forth. (A clear implication is that we have no good reason to lament the realities of strife, war, sickness or death.) The logos is also a principle of universal causation: “all things happen in accordance with the logos” (B1). It is not clear, however, whether the logos here functions as a quasi-personal rational causal agent or as a supreme universal law according to which cosmic processes and possibly all events happen. It is quite possible that Heraclitus would have seen no distinction here.

A younger contemporary of Heraclitus, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c. 500–c. 428 BCE), proposed “Mind” (nous) as a principle of universal causation. Responding to conceptual challenges implicit in the argument of Parmenides of Elea (late sixth–mid-fifth cent. BCE), Anaxagoras proposed a complex system of multiple—in fact infinitely many—basic entities, all of which are always found in combination with each other in varying proportions. The mid-sized objects we encounter in our everyday experience are distinguishable from each other by the predominance of one type of basic entity (“portion”) over the others. No such object, no matter how small, is a pure, unalloyed specimen of some particular kind—fire or water, say—but “in everything there is a portion of everything” (DK59B6). There is, however, one important exception to this: the finest and perfectly pure substance of “Mind.” Whereas Mind is a constituent of everything else, nothing else is a constituent of Mind (DK59B11). Because of its purity, Mind alone “rules” (B12) the other “portions” that make up the substances and entities familiar to our experience. In so ruling them, Mind causes them to move and so interact with each other to bring about the changes we observe. So Mind is the ultimate cause of change.

For all its uniqueness and power, Mind is not represented as an immaterial or transcendent cause. Mind is the only ultra-fine and unalloyed substance but is none the less material (if the material-immaterial distinction even makes sense at this stage of Greek thought). And while nothing else is a “portion” of Mind, we do not find a suggestion that Mind subsists anywhere by itself without existing as a “portion” of some or other substance or entity. Still, the contrast between Mind as agent of movement and change and everything else as that which is moved or changed by Mind suggests that “Anaxagoras is striving toward the notion of immaterial existence.”¹⁰

Moreover, the movement Mind brings about in the things that it moves is orderly.¹¹ The mechanism by which Mind does this is by inducing a vortex motion or rotation that separates the ingredients of an originally undifferentiated stuff (in which “all things were together”—B1 and passim) from each other: the cold from the hot, the rare from the dense, the bright from the dark and the dry from the wet, and so forth. This “separating off of opposites”—a cosmogonical theme as old as Anaximander (c. 610–540 BCE)—accounts for the eventual formation of the observable universe. Mind “exercises judgment about everything” (B12) and “knows all things that are being mixed together and separated off and separated apart” (ibid.), so Mind is more than an impersonal mechanical principle. There is no evidence that Anaxagoras ever described Mind as “god” or “divine.” The hint that Mind is an agent who/that acts with intelligence, however, is enough to raise the expectation that Anaxagoras meant to assert that these processes can be understood teleologically. As we shall see, Plato’s Socrates entertained just such an expectation.

A counterpoint to the movement postulating an intelligent, rational and possibly purposive cause of the world that we have seen emerge in Xenophanes, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras is presented by the fifth-century “Atomists,” Leucippus (fl. c. 435 BCE) and Democritus (c. 460–350s BCE). Democritus’ physical system of miniscule, indivisible atoms of varying sizes and shapes swerving aimlessly in a void challenges the notion that world processes and their results are manifestations of rational and purposive agency. The universe is rather the product of the apparently fortuitous conjunction of atoms that move about in empty space, their motions being determined solely by their physical properties (shape, arrangement and position, DK67A6). This thoroughgoing materialism and determinism present a foil for the explicitly teleological cosmologies of Plato and Aristotle in the next century. If the atomists held a belief in the gods, that belief appears to have had no impact on their theorizing.

II. Plato

Plato’s (428–348 BCE) foray into the question of causation and the role of divinity in causal processes begins with an important passage in his dialogue Phaedo. The purpose of that dialogue is to expound a series of proofs for the immortality of the soul. The final proof in the series, intended to demonstrate the soul’s imperishability, involves Plato’s character Socrates in an extended inquiry into “the causes of coming to be and passing away” (Phaedo 96a). Socrates begins that inquiry by recounting to his interlocutors that at an earlier stage of his life, he was fascinated by his predecessors’ and contemporaries’ accounts of the causes of coming and ceasing to be.¹² According to these accounts, it is a set of physical processes operating under certain physical conditions that explains why things come into being, exist and perish as they do. Socrates complains that he is confused by these accounts: they explain opposite effects by attributing them to identical causes and identical effects by attributing them to opposite causes. (Socrates’ examples seem rather bizarre, but that is another story.) Eschewing this type of causal explanation, Socrates searches for another. In the midst of his perplexity, he says, he encountered Anaxagoras’ theory of Mind.

One day I heard somebody read from a book that he said was by Anaxagoras. He was saying that all things are ordered and caused by “Mind.” I was delighted with this explanatory principle. It seemed to me somehow a good thing that Mind should be the explanation of everything. I reflected that if this is true, then—all things being ordered by an ordering Mind—everything is disposed exactly as it should be. So if one were interested in looking into the explanation why any particular thing comes into being or passes away, or why it exists, then what they should investigate is just this: how that thing’s existence and the ways it interacts with other things is for the best… . So I grabbed the books eagerly and began reading them as quickly as I could, to get that knowledge of “the best” and “the worse” without delay.

To Socrates’ great disappointment, Anaxagoras failed to deliver on his promise. Instead of offering teleological explanations of the characteristics of natural objects, events and processes, Anaxagoras reverted to the type of explanation that had troubled Socrates to begin with. Socrates does not deny that explanations in terms of physical processes may be relevant, but if they are, they describe only a set of necessary conditions for the operation of the true (teleological) cause. Using as illustration his own current situation—that of sitting in a jail cell awaiting his execution—he concludes:

Now if you were to say that without the possession of such things—my bones, my tendons and whatever else—I wouldn’t be able to do what I’ve decided on, you’d be right. But to say that it is by their means that I do what I do and do them with my “mind” though not on the basis of a choice for “what is best,” would be an egregious looseness of speech. It shows an inability to distinguish between, on the one hand, the actual cause and, on the other, those things without which the cause couldn’t be a cause.

Nevertheless, Socrates expresses the hope that teleological causal explanations may yet be found.

For my part, I would be most pleased to become anyone’s student and learn how this sort of causal explanation works. But since I’ve been deprived of it and have proved to be unable to discover it on my own or learn it from anybody else, would you like me, Cebes, to present you with my “second voyage” (deuteros plous)¹³ in search of that causal explanation I’ve kept myself busy with?

(Extracts from Phaedo 97b–99d)

The “second voyage” account that Socrates goes on to develop is one in terms of participation in Forms. A beautiful thing, say, is beautiful insofar as it participates in “the Beautiful,” a transcendent and eternal Form. That Form “causes” the sensible particulars that participate in it to be beautiful, though always in an incomplete and imperfect way. Moreover, some Forms are so logically or metaphysically connected with other Forms that if we seek to explain why a particular F-thing is F, it is possible to go beyond the “naïve” answer (which is tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Divine Causal Agency in Classical Greek Philosophy
• 2 Divine Causality According to Neoplatonism
• 3 Aquinas on Divine Causality
• 4 Three Competing Views of God’s Causation of Creaturely Actions: Aquinas, Scotus and Olivi
• 5 Durand and Suárez on Divine Causation
• 6 Descartes on Voluntary Action and Universal Conservation
• 7 Leibniz on Divine Causation: Continuous Creation and Concurrence Without Occasionalism
• 8 Berkeley on Divine and Human Agency: A Teleological Reconstrual
• 9 What Hume Didn’t Notice About Divine Causation
• 10 Defending Special Divine Acts
• 11 Divine Sustaining Causes and the Mind-Body Problem
• 12 Neo-Aristotelian Accounts of Divine Creation
• 13 Theistic Conferralism: Consolidating Divine Sustenance and Trope Theory
• 14 The Timing of Divine Conservation: Pushes, Nudges, and Merry-Go-Rounds
• 15 Divine Causation and the Pairing Problem
• Authors
• Index