causality

Divine Causality (Primary Causality) Does Not Preclude Natural Causality (Secondary Causality) and Vice Versa.
(A) Question: Must God "withdraw" from His creation in order to make room for the existence of creatures who function as true causes in the world?

1. If God causes everything to happen, then it seems that there is no need for other causes in the universe.

2. Just as the complete causality of the natural laws of physics seem to leave no room for divine causality, so the complete causality of the divine will seems to leave no room for natural causality.

3. Must there be a necessary antagonism between God's action and the natural laws of the universe?

(B) The Answer of Thomas Aquinas:

1. Review of Thomas's notion of creation and creation ex nihilo.

2. When God makes something to exist, it truly exists!

3. Since creatures do have their own being, they are able to act as true causes in the universe.

4. "The same effect is not attributed to a natural cause and to divine power in such a way that it is partly done by God, and partly done by the natural agent; rather, it is wholly done by both, according to a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument and also wholly to the principal agent." Examples of the axe and the match.

5. Because God is the complete cause of the being of whatever is, we can say that the effects in the universe are wholly the result of God as primary cause, and yet wholly the result of creatures as secondary causes. Just as God's existence did not preclude the existence of things in the universe -- rather the existence of things in the universe presuppose the existence of God -- so too God's primary causality doesn't preclude the secondary causes in the universe; rather, the secondary causes in the universe presuppose God's primary causality.

6. Far from "withdrawal," the fact that things exist and act in their own right is, for Thomas Aquinas, the most telling indication that God is existing and acting in them.

7. Thus belief in a Creator is not irrational because:
(a) a creator is needed to explain why there is anything at all; and

(b) because it is not necessary to oppose the laws of nature with divine causality. There would be no laws of nature without God.

1. Rebecca Flietstra's warning:
(a) Neglecting God's providential control over all aspects of the natural world results in the notion that if natural law is involved, somehow God can't be.

(b) God could work by influencing seemingly random and chance events [or a whatever combination of chance and necessity science requires].

(c) If we base our apologetic on presumably supernatural events that are subsequently explained by naturalistic processes, God appears to shrink. Such an apologetic eventually compromises our spiritual witness rather than "showing the reasonableness of the faith."

(d) Why we reject materialism: because we recognize that without God, nothing could happen -- or even exist.

(e) God is entirely capable of working supernaturally through apparently natural processes.

2. Whatever scientific theory seems more reasonable, that's fine.

3. Whatever "laws" of the universe there are -- or combinations of law and chaos -- these will be expressions of God's own will.

4. Whatever science discovers will tell us more about how God expresses Himself in the universe.