Creation, Providence, and Miracle
30
Creation, Providence, and Miracle
The leaf hanging from the tree does not fall, nor does either of the two sparrows sold for a farthing fall to the ground, nor does anything else whatever happen without God’s providence and will either intending it as a particular or permitting it as a particular.
Luis Molina, Concordia 4.53.3.17
We turn now to a discussion of issues arising from God’s relation to the world.
1—Creatio ex Nihilo
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1 RSV). With majestic simplicity the author of the opening chapter of Genesis thus differentiated his viewpoint, not only from that of the ancient creation myths of Israel’s neighbors, but also effectively from pantheism, such as is found in Eastern religions like Hinduism and Taoism, from panentheism, whether of classical Neoplatonist vintage or twentieth-century process theology, and from polytheism, ranging from ancient paganism to contemporary Mormonism. For the author of Genesis 1, no preexistent material seems to be assumed, no warring gods or primordial dragons are present—only God, who is said to “create” (bārāʾ, a word used only with God as its subject and that does not presuppose a material substratum) “the heavens and the earth” (ʾēt haššāmayîm wǝʾēt hāʾareṣ, a Hebrew expression for the totality of the world or, more simply, the universe). Moreover, this act of creation took place “in the beginning” (bǝrēʾšît, used here as in Is 46:10 to indicate an absolute beginning). The author thereby implies creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) in the temporal sense that God brought the universe into being without a material cause at some point in the finite past.
Later biblical authors so understood the Genesis account of creation (e.g., Is 44:24; cf. Is 45:12, 18). The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is also implied in various places in early extrabiblical Jewish literature. And the church fathers, while heavily influenced by Greek thought, dug in their heels concerning the doctrine of creation, sturdily insisting, with few exceptions, on the temporal creation of the universe ex nihilo in opposition to the eternity of matter. In the form of the kalam cosmological argument, a tradition of robust argumentation against the past eternity of the world and in favor of creatio ex nihilo continued for centuries in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thought. In 1215, the Catholic church promulgated temporal creatio ex nihilo as official church doctrine at the Fourth Lateran Council, declaring God to be “Creator of all things, visible and invisible, . . . who, by his almighty power, from the beginning of time has created both orders in the same way out of nothing.” This remarkable declaration affirms not only that God created everything without any material cause but even that time itself had a beginning. The doctrine of creation is thus inherently bound up with temporal considerations and entails that God brought the universe into being at some point in the past without any antecedent or contemporaneous material cause.
At the same time, the Christian Scriptures also suggest that God is engaged in a sort of ongoing creation, sustaining the universe in being. Christ “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power” (Heb 1:3 RSV). Although relatively infrequently attested in Scripture in comparison with the abundant references to God’s original act of creation, this idea of continuing creation came to constitute an important aspect of the doctrine of creation as well. For Thomas Aquinas, for example, this aspect becomes the core doctrine of creation, and the question of whether the world’s reception of being from God had a temporal beginning or not has only secondary importance. For Aquinas creation is the immediate bestowal of being and as such belongs only to God, the universal principle of being; therefore, creation is ex nihilo in that God’s causing a creature to exist is immediate. Even if that creature has existed from eternity, it is still created ex nihilo in this metaphysical sense.
Thus God is conceived in Christian theology to be the cause of the world both in his initial act of bringing the universe into being and in his ongoing conservation of the world in being. These two actions have been traditionally classed as species of creatio ex nihilo, namely, creatio originans (originating creation) and creatio continuans (continuing creation). While this is a handy rubric, it unfortunately quickly becomes problematic if pressed to technical precision. For if we say that a thing is created at a time t only if t is the first moment of the thing’s existence, then the doctrine of creatio continuans implies that at each instant God creates a brand new individual, numerically distinct from its chronological predecessor. We are thus landed in a bizarre doctrine called occasionalism, according to which no persisting individuals exist, so that personal agency and identity over time are precluded.
One could elude this problem by reinterpreting creation in such a way that it does not involve a thing’s first beginning to exist at the time of its creation. But something important about the concept of creation would then seem to be lost. It is therefore preferable to take “continuing creation” as but a manner of speaking and to distinguish creation from conservation. As John Duns Scotus observed,
Properly speaking . . . it is only true to say that a creature is created at the first moment (of its existence) and only after that moment is it conserved, for only then does its being have this order to itself as something that was, as it were, there before. Because of these different conceptual relationships implied by the words “create” and “conserve” it follows that one does not apply to a thing when the other does.
It has been objected that trying to differentiate creation and conservation in this way wrongly presupposes that the power required to create something ex nihilo is different from the power needed to keep it from lapsing back into nonbeing once it has been created. Since God’s power and action in creation and conservation are the same, there is no intrinsic difference between the two. But we need not find the intrinsic difference between creation and conservation in God’s power or action. Rather, we may find it in the object of that action. Intuitively, creation involves God’s bringing something into being. Thus, if God creates some entity e (whether a thing or an event) at a time t (whether an instant or finite interval), then e comes into being at t. We can analyze this last notion as follows:
E1: e comes into being at t if and only if (a) e exists at t, (b) t is the first time at which e exists, and (c) e’s existing at t is a tensed fact.
Accordingly,
E2: God creates e at t if and only if God brings it about that e comes into being at t.
God’s creating e involves e’s coming into being, which is an absolute beginning of existence, not a transition of e from nonbeing into being. In creation there is no entity on which the agent acts to bring about its effect. It follows that creation is not a type of change, since there is no enduring subject that persists from one state to another. It is precisely for this reason that conservation cannot be properly thought of as essentially the same as creation. For conservation does presuppose a subject that is made to persist from one state to another. In creation God does not act on a subject, but constitutes the subject by his action. In contrast, in conservation God acts on an existing subject to perpetuate its existence. This is the meaning of Scotus’s remark that only in conservation does a creature “have this order to itself as something that was, as it were, there before.” In conservation there is an existing entity on which the agent acts to produce its effect.
To analyze God’s conservation of e as God’s re-creation of e anew at each instant or moment of e’s existence is to run the risk of falling into the radical occasionalism of certain medieval Islamic theologians, who denied that the atoms out of which things are made endure from one instant to another. Rather, atoms were said to be created in new states of being by God at every successive instant. The Islamic theologians therefore denied the reality of secondary causation, leaving God as the sole cause of change.
The fundamental difference between creation and conservation, as we have seen, lies in the fact that in conservation, as opposed to creation, there is presupposed an object on which God acts. Intuitively, conservation involves God’s preservation of that object in being over time. Conservation ought therefore to be understood in terms of God’s preserving some entity e from one moment of its existence to another. A crucial insight into conservation is that unlike creation, it involves transition and therefore cannot occur at an instant. We may therefore provide the following analysis of divine conservation:
E3: God conserves e if and only if God acts upon e to bring about e’s existing from t until some t٭ > t through every subinterval of the interval t → t٭.
In this light, when it is said that God’s creating and conserving the world are indistinguishable with respect to the act itself, that statement is misleading. For creating and conserving cannot be adequately analyzed with respect to the act alone but involve relations to the object of the act. The act itself (the causing of existence) may be the same in both cases, but in one case may be instantaneous and presuppose no prior object, whereas in the other case it may occur over an interval and does involve a prior object.
The doctrine of creation also involves an important metaphysical feature that is underappreciated: it commits one to a tensed or dynamic or A-theory of time. For if one adopts a tenseless or B-theory of time, then things do not literally come into existence. Things are four-dimensional objects that tenselessly subsist and begin to exist only in the sense that their extension along their temporal dimension is finite in the earlier than direction. The whole four-dimensional, space-time manifold exists coeternally with God. The universe thus does not come into being on a B-theory of time, regardless of whether it has a finite or an infinite past relative to any time. Hence, clause (iii) in E2 represents a necessary feature of creation. In the absence of clause (iii) God’s creation of the universe ex nihilo could be interpreted along tenseless lines to postulate merely the finitude of cosmic time in the earlier than direction.
What about conservation? At first blush this notion would seem to be much more amenable to a tenseless construal. God can be conceived to act tenselessly on e to sustain it from t1 to t2. But a moment’s reflection reveals this construal to be problematic. What if e exists only at t? Or what if e is the whole, four-dimensional space-time block? In neither case can God be said to conserve e, according to our analysis, since e does not persist from one time to another. Yet on a tenseless view of time God is the source of being for such entities and therefore in some sense sustains them. Similarly, if we allow timeless entities in our ontology, such as abstract objects, then God must be the source of their being as well. In their case there is properly speaking no conservation, no preserving them in existence from one moment to another. The existence of such entities would seem to necessitate a third category of creation not contemplated by the classical theologians, a sort of static creation. Static creation is the relation appropriate to a tenseless theory of time. We use sustenance as the technical term for such divine action and explicate it as follows:
E4: God sustains e if and only if either e exists tenselessly at t or e exists timelessly, and God brings it about that e exists.
The very idea of the need for conservation in being thus also implies an A-theory of time, according to which temporal becoming is real and moments of time do elapse. Conservation of an entity is necessary if that entity is to endure from one moment to another and not to lapse into nonbeing. On a B-theory of time, no such lapse occurs, and so conservation is unnecessary, indeed, excluded. Rather, God is engaged in sustaining the four-dimensional universe as a whole including every entity in it, whether that entity has a temporal extension or exists merely at an instant. Thus even conservation is compromised if definitions of it are given that are compatible with a B-theory of time.
Since a robust doctrine of creatio ex nihilo commits us to an A-theory of time, we are brought face-to-face with what has been called “one of the most neglected, but also one of the most important questions in the dialogue between theology and science,” namely, the relation between the concept of eternity and that of the spatiotemporal structure of the universe. We have already discussed this problem briefly in our handling of the divine attribute of eternity (chap. 27). Here we may enter into more detail.
Since the rise of modern theology with Schleiermacher, the doctrine of creatio originans has been allowed to atrophy, while the doctrine of creatio continuans has assumed supremacy. Undoubtedly this was largely due to theologians’ fear of a conflict with science, which creatio continuans permitted them to avoid by ignoring the realities of the physical, space-time world. But the discovery in the early twentieth century of the expansion of the universe, coupled with the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems of 1968, which demonstrated the inevitability under very general conditions of a past, cosmic singularity as an initial boundary to space-time, forced the doctrine of creatio originans back into the spotlight. As physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler observe, “At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilo.”
Of course, various and sometimes heroic attempts have been made to avert the beginning of the universe posited in the standard big bang model and to regain an infinite past. But none of these alternatives has commended itself as more plausible than the standard model. The old steady state model, the oscillating model, and vacuum fluctuation models are now generally recognized among cosmologists to have failed as plausible attempts to avoid the beginning of the universe. Most cosmologists believe that a final theory of the origin of the universe must await the as-yet-undiscovered quantum theory of gravity. Such quantum gravity models may or may not involve an initial singularity, although attention has tended to focus on those that do not. But even those that eliminate the initial singularity, such as the Hartle-Hawking model, still involve a merely finite past and, on any physically realistic interpretation of such models, imply a beginning of the universe. Such theories, if successful, thus enable us to model the origin of the universe without an initial cosmological singularity and, by positing a finite past time on a closed geometrical surface of space-time rather than an infinite time on an open surface, actually support temporal creatio ex nihilo.
But if the spatiotemporal structure of the universe exhibits an origination ex nihilo, then the difficulty concerns how to relate that structure to divine eternity. For given the reality of tense and God’s causal relation to the world, it is difficult to think that God could remain untouched by the world’s temporality. Imagine God existing changelessly alone without creation, with a changeless and eternal determination to create a temporal world. Since God is omnipotent, his will is done, and a temporal world begins to exist. (We may set aside the question of whether this beginning of a temporal creation would require some additional act of intentionality or exercise of power other than God’s timeless determination.) Now in such a case, either God existed temporally prior to creation or he did not. If he did exist alone temporally prior to creation, then God is not timeless, but temporal, and the question is settled. Suppose, then, that God did not exist temporally prior to creation. In that case he exists timelessly without creation. But once time begins at the moment of creation, God either becomes temporal in virtue of his real, causal relation to time and the world or else he exists as timelessly with creation as he does without it. But this second alternative seems quite impossible. At the first moment of time, God stands in a new relation in which he did not stand before (since there was no before). We need not characterize this as an intrinsic change in God; but there is a real, causal relation that is at that moment new to God and that he does not have in the state of existing without creation. At the moment of creation, God comes into the relation of causing the universe or at the very least that of coexisting with the universe, relations he did not before have. Since he is free to refrain from creation, God could have never stood in those relations, but in virtue of his decision to create a temporal universe God comes into a relation with the temporal world the moment the temporal world springs into being. As God successively sustains each subsequent moment or event in being, he experiences the flow of time and acquires a growing past, as each moment elapses. Hence, even if God remains intrinsically changeless in creating the world, he nonetheless undergoes an extrinsic, or relational, change, which, if he is not already temporal prior to the moment of creation, draws him into time at that very moment in virtue of his real relation to the temporal, changing universe. So even if God is timeless without creation, his free decision to create a temporal world constitutes also a free decision on his part to enter into time and to experience the reality of tense and temporal becoming.
The classic response to the above argument is to deny that God is really related to the world. Aquinas tacitly agrees that if God were really related to the temporal world, then he would be temporal. For in the coming to be of creatures, certain relations accrue to God anew and thus, if these relations are real for God, he must be temporal in light of his undergoing relational change. So Thomas denies that God has any real relation to the world. According to Aquinas, while the temporal world does have the real relation of being created by God, God does not have a real relation of creating the temporal world. Since God is immutable, the new relations predicated of him at the moment of creation are just in our minds; in reality the temporal world itself is created with a relation inhering in it of dependence on God. Hence, God’s timelessness is not jeopardized by his creation of a temporal world.
This unusual doctrine of creation becomes even stranger when we reflect on the fact that, on Thomas’s view, God in creating the world does not perform some act extrinsic to his nature; God just is, and creatures simply begin to exist with a relation to God of being created by God. According to this doctrine, then, God in freely creating the universe does not really do anything different than he would have, had he refrained from creating. The only difference is to be found in the universe itself: instead of God existing alone without the universe, we have a universe springing into being at the first moment of time possessing the property being created by God, even though God, for his part, bears no real reciprocal relation to the universe made by him.
It hardly needs to be said that Thomas’s solution, despite its daring and ingenuity, is extraordinarily implausible. “Creating” clearly describes a relation that is founded on something’s intrinsic properties concerning its causal activity, and therefore creating the world ought to be regarded as a real property acquired by God at the moment of creation. It seems unintelligible, if not contradictory, to say that one can have real effects without real causes. Yet this is precisely what Aquinas affirms with respect to God and the world.
Moreover, bizarre as it may sound, it is the implication of Aquinas’s position that God is perfectly similar across possible worlds, the same even in worlds in which he refrains from creation as in worlds in which he creates. For in none of these worlds does God have any relation to anything other than himself. In all these worlds God never acts differently, he never cognizes differently, he never wills differently. He is just the simple, unrelated act of being. Even in worlds in which he does not create, his act of being, by which creation is produced, is no different in these otherwise empty worlds than in worlds chock-full of contingent beings of every order. Thomas’s doctrine thus makes it unintelligible why the universe exists rather than nothing. The reason obviously cannot lie in God, either in his nature or his activity (which are only conceptually distinct anyway), for these are perfectly similar in every possible world. Nor can the reason lie in the creatures themselves, in that they have a real relation to God of being freely willed by God. For their existing with that relation cannot be explanatorily prior to their existing with that relation. Therefore, Thomas’s solution, based in the denial of God’s real relation to the world, cannot succeed in hermetically sealing off God in atemporality.
The above might lead one to conclude that God existed temporally prior to his creation of the universe in a sort of metaphysical time. But as we have seen in chapter twenty-five, the notion of an actual infinity of past events or intervals of time seems strikingly counterintuitive. Moreover, on such a view of time, we should have to answer the difficult question that Leibniz lodged against Samuel Clarke: Why did God delay for infinite time the creation of the world? In view of these perplexities, it seems more plausible to adopt the view that time begins at the first event, which, for simplicity’s sake, we may take to be the big bang (on the plausibility of a metrically amorphous time prior to creation, see chap. 27, on divine eternity). God’s bringing the initial cosmological singularity into being is simultaneous (or coincident) with the singularity’s coming into being, and therefore God is temporal from the moment of creation onward. Though we might think of God as existing, say, one hour prior to creation, such a picture is purely the product of our imagination.
Why, then, did God create the world? It has been said that if God is essentially characterized by self-giving love, creation becomes necessary. But the Christian doctrine of the Trinity suggests another possibility. Insofar as he exists without creation, God is not, on the Christian conception, a lonely monad, but in the tri-unity of his own being, God enjoys the full and unchanging love relationships among the persons of the Trinity. Creation is thus unnecessary for God and is sheer gift, bestowed for the sake of creatures, that we might experience the joy and fulfillment of knowing God. He invites us, as it were, into the intratrinitarian love relationship as his adopted children. Thus creation, as well as salvation, is sola gratia.
2—Providence
The biblical worldview involves a very strong conception of divine sovereignty over the world and human affairs, even as it presupposes human freedom and responsibility. While too numerous to list here, biblical passages affirming God’s sovereignty have been grouped by D. A. Carson under four main heads: (1) God is the Creator, Ruler, and Possessor of all things; (2) God is the ultimate personal cause of all that happens; (3) God elects his people; and (4) God is the unacknowledged source of good fortune or success. No one taking these passages seriously can embrace currently fashionable revisionist or “open” views, which deny God’s complete sovereignty over the contingent events of history. On the other hand, the conviction that human beings are free moral agents also permeates the Hebrew way of thinking, as is evident from passages listed by Carson under nine heads: (1) People face a multitude of divine exhortations and commands; (2) people are said to obey, believe, and choose God; (3) people sin and rebel against God; (4) people’s sins are judged by God; (5) people are tested by God, (6) people receive divine rewards; (7) the elect are responsible to respond to God’s initiative; (8) prayers are not mere showpieces scripted by God; and (9) God literally pleads with sinners to repent and be saved. These passages rule out a traditional deterministic understanding of divine providence, which precludes human freedom (for a discussion of which see chap. 15).
Reconciling these two streams of biblical teaching without compromising either has proved extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, a startling solution to this enigma emerges from Molina’s doctrine of divine middle knowledge. Molina, it will be recalled from chapter twenty-eight, proposes to furnish an analysis of divine knowledge in terms of three logical moments. Although whatever God knows, he knows eternally, so that there is no temporal succession in God’s knowledge, nonetheless there does exist a sort of logical succession in God’s knowledge in that his knowledge of certain truths is conditionally or explanatorily prior to his knowledge of certain other truths. In the first, unconditioned moment, God knows all possibilities, not only all the creatures he could possibly create, but also all the orders of creatures that are possible. Molina calls such knowledge “natural knowledge” because the content of such knowledge is essential to God and in no way depends on the free decisions of his will. By means of his natural knowledge, then, God has knowledge of every contingent state of affairs that could possibly obtain and of what any free creature could freely choose to do in any such state of affairs that should be actual.
In the second moment, God possesses knowledge of all true counterfactual propositions, including counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. Whereas by his natural knowledge God knew what any free creature could do in any set of circumstances, now in this second moment God knows what any free creature would do in any set of circumstances. This is not because the circumstances causally determine the creature’s choice, but simply because this is how the creature would freely choose. God thus knows that were he to actualize certain states of affairs, then certain other contingent states of affairs would obtain. This so-called middle knowledge is like natural knowledge in that such knowledge does not depend on any decision of the divine will; God does not determine which counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are true or false. Thus, if it is true that “If some agent S were placed in circumstances C, then he would freely perform action a,” then even God in his omnipotence cannot bring it about that S would freely refrain from a if he were placed in C. On the other hand, middle knowledge is unlike natural knowledge in that the content of his middle knowledge is not essential to God. True counterfactuals are contingently true; S could freely decide to refrain from a in C, so that different counterfactuals could be true and be known by God than those that are. Hence, although it is essential to God that he have middle knowledge, it is not essential to him to have middle knowledge of those particular propositions that he does in fact know.
Intervening between the second and third moments of divine knowledge stands God’s free decree to actualize a world known by him to be realizable on the basis of his middle knowledge. By his natural knowledge, God knows what is the entire range of logically possible worlds; by his middle knowledge he knows, in effect, what is the proper subset of those worlds that it is feasible for him to actualize. By a free decision, God decrees to actualize one of those worlds known to him through his middle knowledge. In so doing he also decrees how he himself would act in any set of circumstances, so that counterfactuals of divine freedom become true coincidentally with the divine decree.
Given God’s free decision to actualize a world, in the third and final moment God possesses knowledge of all remaining propositions that are in fact true in the actual world, including future contingent propositions. The content of such “free knowledge” is clearly not essential to God, since he could have decreed to actualize a different world. Had he done so, the content of his free knowledge would be different.
Molina’s scheme is a doctrine of remarkable theological fecundity that resolves in a single stroke most of the traditional difficulties concerning divine providence and human freedom. Molina defines providence as God’s ordering of things to their ends, either directly or mediately through secondary agents. But he distinguishes between God’s absolute intentions and his conditional intentions concerning creatures. It is, for example, God’s absolute intention that no creature should ever sin and that all should reach heaven. But it is not within God’s power to determine what decisions creatures would freely take under various circumstances. In certain circumstances, creatures will freely sin, despite the fact that it is God’s will that they not sin. If then God for whatever reason wants to bring about those circumstances, he has no choice but to allow the creature to sin, though that is not his absolute intention. God’s absolute intentions are thus often frustrated by sinful creatures, though his conditional intention, which takes into account the creatures’ free actions, is always fulfilled. Now obviously in this world it is God’s providential plan to permit sin to occur. But even sin serves God’s conditional intentions in that it manifests his overflowing goodness in the incarnation of Christ for the purpose of rescuing humanity from sin, his power in his redeeming people from sin, and his justice in punishing sin.
While God’s providence, then, extends to everything that happens, it does not follow that God wills positively everything that happens. God wills positively every good creaturely decision, but evil decisions he does not will, but merely permits. Molina explains,
All good things, whether produced by causes acting from a necessity of nature or by free causes, depend upon divine predetermination . . . and providence in such a way that each is specifically intended by God through His predetermination and providence, whereas the evil acts of the created will are subject as well to divine predetermination and providence to the extent that the causes from which they emanate and the general concurrence on God’s part required to elicit them are granted through divine predetermination and providence—though not in order that these particular acts should emanate from them, but rather in order that other, far different, acts might come to be, and in order that the innate freedom of the things endowed with a will might be preserved for their maximum benefit; in addition evil acts are subject to that same divine predetermination and providence to the extent that they cannot exist in particular unless God by His providence permits them in particular in the service of some greater good. It clearly follows from the above that all things without exception are individually subject to God’s will and providence, which intend certain of them as particulars and permit the rest as particulars. (Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge 4.53.3.17)
Everything that happens, therefore, occurs either by God’s will or God’s permission and thus falls under his providence.
This serves to bring into focus Molina’s doctrine of simultaneous concurrence, which together with middle knowledge supplies the underpinnings of his doctrine of providence. Since God is the first cause, medieval theologians traditionally held that God not only conserves the universe in being, but that he concurs with the operation of every secondary cause in the universe so that he is quite literally the cause of everything that happens. Aquinas interpreted the notion of divine concurrence to mean that God not only supplies and conserves the power of operation in every secondary cause, but that he acts on the secondary causes in order to produce their actual operations, a view that came to be known as the doctrine of pre-motion. With regard to contingent acts of the will, this doctrine meant that the free decisions of creatures are produced by God’s causing a person’s will to turn itself this way or that.
Molina, however, rejects this interpretation of divine concurrence in terms of pre-motion as in reality utterly deterministic and incompatible with the existence of sin. Instead he proposes to regard divine concurrence as simultaneous concurrence; that is to say, God acts, not on, but with the secondary cause to produce its effect. Thus, when a person wills to produce some effect, God concurs with that person’s decision by also acting to produce that effect; but he does not act on the person’s will to move it to its decision. In sinful decisions, God concurs by acting to produce the effect, but he is not to be held responsible for the sinfulness of the act, since he did not move the creature’s will to do it. Rather, out of his determination to allow human freedom, he merely permitted the decision to be made. In thus either willing or permitting everything that happens, God acts to produce every event in the actual world.
In reconciling divine sovereignty and human freedom, Molina appeals both to middle knowledge and simultaneous concurrence. By his middle knowledge God knows an infinity of orders that he could create because he knows how the creatures in them would in fact respond given the various circumstances. He then decides by the free act of his will how he would respond in these various circumstances and simultaneously wills to bring about one of these orders. He directly causes certain circumstances to come into being and brings about others indirectly through causally determined secondary causes. Free creatures, however, he allows to act as he knew they would when placed in such circumstances, and he concurs with their decisions in producing in being the effects they desire. Some of these effects God desired unconditionally and so wills positively that they occur. Others he does not unconditionally desire, but he nevertheless permits due to his overriding desire to allow creaturely freedom, knowing that even these sinful acts will fit into the overall scheme of things, so that God’s ultimate ends in human history will be accomplished. God has thus providentially arranged for everything that happens by either willing or permitting it, and he causes everything that does happen, yet in such a way as to preserve freedom and contingency.
Molinism thus effects a dramatic reconciliation between divine sovereignty and human freedom. What account of divine providence can be given in the absence of middle knowledge? Advocates of revisionist views, such as the openness view of God that denies divine middle knowledge and foreknowledge, freely admit that without middle knowledge a strong doctrine of divine providence becomes impossible. But such a viewpoint consequently has real difficulty in making sense of the scriptural emphases summarized above. The Augustinian-Calvinist perspective interprets divine providence in terms of predetermination. God knows what will happen because he makes it happen. It is hard to see how this interpretation can avoid making God the author of sin, since it is he who moved Judas, for example, to betray Christ. But how can a holy God move people’s wills to commit moral evil, and moreover, how can he then hold these people morally responsible for acts over which they had no control? The proponent of simple foreknowledge in the absence of middle knowledge has difficulty making sense of God’s providential planning of a world of free creatures. For on this view, logically prior to the divine decree, God has only natural knowledge of all possibilities but no knowledge of what would happen under any circumstances. Thus, logically posterior to the divine decree, God must be astonished to find himself existing in a world, out of all the possible worlds he could have created, in which mankind falls into sin and God himself enters human history as a substitutionary sacrificial offering to rescue them! Of course, one is speaking anthropomorphically here; but the point remains that without middle knowledge, God cannot know prior to the creative decree what the world would be like. Thus none of Molinism’s competitors seem equipped to offer so robust a doctrine of divine providence and human freedom as Molinism.
What objections might be raised against a Molinist account? Surveying the literature, one discovers that the detractors of Molinism tend not so much to criticize the Molinist doctrine of providence as to attack the concept of middle knowledge on which it is predicated. These objections, however, have been repeatedly answered by defenders of middle knowledge. What objection, then, might be raised, not to middle knowledge per se, but to a Molinist account of providence?
Perhaps the most compelling objection to what revisionists sometimes call “meticulous providence” is that the Molinist account makes the problem of evil all the more intractable. For we must then say that God planned even the most horrendous evils that occur in the world. For example, he planned down to the last detail that the brutal beating and rape of a small child should take place. The problem of innocent suffering might seem less difficult if we adopt the revisionist view that God is ignorant of future contingents and so did not plan that such horrors should occur.
A little reflection reveals, however, that the objection cannot stand. For on the revisionist view, God, so to speak, sits idly by wringing his hands while allowing horrendous evils to occur without intervening to stop them. Any reason to which the revisionist might appeal for God’s allowing such evils to go on is also available to the Molinist. In fact, the Molinist is better positioned to defend the claim that God has morally sufficient reasons for allowing horrendous evils to occur. For given his middle knowledge, God knows all the myriad consequences throughout the rest of human history of any given evil. The revisionist’s God can only take into account such consequences as are immediate and predictable. Those might well be insufficient to justify his inaction in permitting the evil to go on. But as we saw in our discussion of the problem of evil, given divine middle knowledge, we are not in a good position to claim that God has no morally sufficient reasons for permitting any given evil to occur. God’s reasons for permitting the evil might involve consequences that lie centuries into the future and are inextricably intertwined with other events in other parts of the world. For the same reason, our willingness or obligation to prevent or to stop certain evils that we observe does not automatically translate into God’s obligation to prevent them. Hence, while we can rightly question the goodness of the revisionist’s God for his lack of intervention, we are not in a position to judge a truly omniscient God. Molinism thus seems to provide the most illuminating and biblically faithful account of divine providence available today.
3—Miracle
It hardly needs to be demonstrated that the biblical narrative of divine action in the world is a narrative replete with miraculous events. God is conceived to bring about events that natural things, left to their own resources, would not bring about. Hence, miracles are able to function as signs of divine activity. “Here is an astonishing thing!” exclaims the man born blind, when confronted with the Pharisees’ skepticism concerning Jesus’ restoration of his sight: “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (Jn 9:30, 32-33).
In order to differentiate between the customary way in which God acts and his special, miraculous action, theologians have traditionally distinguished within divine providence between God’s providentia ordinaria (ordinary providence) and his providentia extraordinaria (extraordinary providence), the latter being identified with miracles. But our exposition of divine providence based on God’s middle knowledge suggests a category of nonmiraculous, special providence, which it will be helpful to distinguish. We have in mind here events that are the product of natural causes but whose context is such as to suggest a special divine intention with regard to their occurrence. For example, just as the Israelites approach the Jordan River, a rockslide upstream blocks temporarily the water’s flow, enabling them to cross into the Promised Land (Josh 3:14-17); or again, as Paul and Silas lie bound in prison for preaching the gospel, an earthquake occurs, springing the prison doors and unfastening their fetters (Acts 16:25-26). By means of his middle knowledge, God can providentially order the world so that the natural causes of such events are, as it were, ready and waiting to produce such events at the propitious time, perhaps in answer to prayers that God knew would be offered. Of course, if such prayers were not to be offered or the contingent course of events were to go differently, then God would have known this and so not arranged the natural causes, including human free volitions, to produce the special providential event. Events wrought by special providence are no more outside the course and capacity of nature than are events produced by God’s ordinary providence, but the context of such events—such as their timing, their coincidental nature and so forth—points to a special divine intention to bring them about. Such events seem to deserve more appropriately than miracles the appellation providentia extraordinaria.
If, then, we distinguish miracles from both God’s providentia ordinaria and extraordinaria, how should we characterize miracles? Since the dawning of modernity, miracles have been widely understood to be violations of the laws of nature. In his Philosophical Dictionary article “Miracles,” for example, Voltaire states that according to accepted usage, “a miracle is the violation of mathematical, divine, immutable, eternal laws” and is therefore a contradiction. Voltaire is in fact quite right that such a definition is a contradiction, but this ought to have led him to conclude, not that miracles can thus be defined out of existence, but that the customary definition is defective. Indeed, an examination of the chief competing schools of thought concerning the notion of a natural law reveals that on each theory the concept of a violation of a natural law is incoherent and that miracles need not be so defined. Broadly speaking, there are three main views of natural law today: the regularity theory, the nomic necessity theory, and the causal dispositions theory.
According to the regularity theory, the “laws” of nature are not really laws at all, but just generalized descriptions of the way things happen in the world. They describe the regularities we observe in nature. Now since on such a theory a natural law is just a generalized description of whatever occurs in nature, it follows that no event that occurs can violate such a law. Instead, it just becomes part of the description. The law cannot be violated, because it describes in a certain generalized form everything that does happen in nature.
According to the nomic necessity theory, natural laws are not merely descriptive, but tell us what can and cannot happen in the natural world. They allow us to make certain counterfactual judgments, such as “If the density of the universe were sufficiently high, it would have recontracted long ago,” that a purely descriptivist theory would not permit. Again, however, since natural laws are taken to be universal inductive generalizations, a violation of a natural law is no more possible on this theory than on the regularity theory. So long as natural laws are universal generalizations based on experience, they must take account of anything that happens and so would be revised should an event occur that the law does not encompass.
Of course, in practice proponents of such theories do not treat natural laws so rigidly. Rather, natural laws are assumed to have implicit in them certain assumptions about all things being equal, so that a law states what is the case under the assumption that no other natural factors are interfering. When a scientific anomaly occurs, it is usually assumed that some unknown natural factors are interfering, so that the law is neither violated nor revised. But suppose the law fails to describe or predict accurately what happens because some supernatural factors are interfering? Clearly the implicit assumption of such laws is that no supernatural factors as well as no natural factors are interfering. If the law proves inaccurate in a particular case because God is acting, the law is neither violated nor revised. If God brings about some event that a law of nature fails to predict or describe, such an event cannot be characterized as a violation of a law of nature, since the law is valid only on the assumption that no supernatural factors in addition to the natural factors come into play.
On such theories, then, miracles ought to be defined as naturally impossible events, that is to say, events that cannot be produced by the natural causes operative at a certain time and place. Whether an event is a miracle is thus relative to a time and place. Given the natural causes operative at a certain time and place, for example, rain may be naturally inevitable or necessary, but on another occasion, rain may be naturally impossible. Of course, some events, say, the resurrection of Jesus, may be absolutely miraculous in that they are at every time and place beyond the productive capacity of natural causes.
According to the causal dispositions theory, things in the world have different natures or essences, which include their causal dispositions to affect other things in certain ways, and natural laws are metaphysically necessary truths about what causal dispositions are possessed by various natural kinds of things. For example, “Salt has a disposition to dissolve in water” would state a natural law. If, due to God’s action, some salt failed to dissolve in water, the natural law is not violated, because it is still true that salt has such a disposition. As a result of things’ causal dispositions, certain deterministic natural propensities exist in nature, and when such a propensity is not impeded (by God or some other free agent), then we can speak of a natural necessity. On this theory, an event that is naturally necessary must and does actually occur, since the natural propensity will automatically issue forth in the event if it is not impeded. By the same token, a naturally impossible event cannot and does not actually occur. Hence, a miracle cannot be characterized on this theory as a naturally impossible event. Rather, a miracle is an event that results from causal interference with a natural propensity that is so strong that only a supernatural agent could impede it. The concept of miracle is essentially the same as under the previous two theories, but one just cannot call a miracle “naturally impossible” as those terms are defined in this theory; perhaps we could adopt instead the nomenclature “physically impossible” to characterize miracles under such a theory.
On none of these theories, then, should miracles be understood as violations of the laws of nature. Rather, they are naturally (or physically) impossible events, events that at certain times and places cannot be produced by the relevant natural causes.
Now the question is, what could conceivably transform an event that is naturally impossible into a real historical event? Clearly, the answer is the personal God of theism. For if a transcendent, personal God exists, then he could cause events in the universe that could not be produced by causes within the universe. Given a God who created the universe, who conserves the world in being, and who is capable of acting freely, miracles are evidently possible. Indeed, if it is even (epistemically) possible that such a transcendent, personal God exists, then it is equally possible that he has acted miraculously in the universe. Only to the extent that one has good grounds for believing atheism to be true could one be rationally justified in denying the possibility of miracles. In this light, arguments for the impossibility of miracles based on defining them as violations of the laws of nature are vacuous.
The more interesting question concerns the identification of miracles: whether it is possible to identify any event as a miracle. On the one hand, it might be argued that a convincing demonstration that a purportedly miraculous event has occurred would only succeed in forcing us to revise natural law so as to accommodate the event in question. But as Richard Swinburne has argued, a natural law is not abolished because of one exception; the anomaly must occur repeatedly whenever the conditions for it are present. If an anomalous event occurs and we have reason to believe that this event would not occur again under similar circumstances, then the law in question will not be abandoned. One may regard an anomalous event as repeatable if another formulation of the natural law better accounts for the event in question and if it is no more complex than the original law. If any doubt exists, the scientist may conduct experiments to determine which formulation of the law proves more successful in predicting future phenomena. In a similar way, one would have good reason to regard an event as a nonrepeatable anomaly if the reformulated law were much more complicated than the original without yielding better new predictions or if the law predicted new phenomena unsuccessfully where the original formulation predicted them successfully. If the original formulation remains successful in predicting all new phenomena as the data accumulate, while no reformulation does any better in predicting the phenomena and explaining the event in question, then the event should be regarded as a nonrepeatable anomaly. Hence, the admitted occurrence of a miraculous event would not serve to upset the natural law.
On the other hand, it might be urged that if a purportedly miraculous event were demonstrated to have occurred, we should conclude that the event occurred in accordance with unknown natural causes and laws. The question is, what serves to distinguish a genuine miracle from a mere scientific anomaly?
Here the religio-historical context of the event becomes crucial. A miracle without a context is inherently ambiguous. But if a purported miracle occurs in a significant religio-historical context, then the chances of its being a genuine miracle are increased. For example, if the miracles occur at a momentous time (say, a man’s leprosy vanishing when Jesus speaks the words, “Be clean!”) and do not recur regularly in history, and if the miracles are numerous and various, then the chances of their being the result of some unknown natural causes are reduced. In Jesus’ case, moreover, his miracles and resurrection ostensibly took place in the context of and as the climax to his own unparalleled life and teachings and produced so profound an effect on his followers that they worshiped him as Lord.
The central miracle of the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus, was, if it occurred, doubtlessly a miracle. In the first place, the resurrection so exceeds what we know of the productive capacity of natural causes that it can only be reasonably attributed to a supernatural cause. The more we learn about cell necrosis, the more evident it becomes that such an event is naturally impossible. If it were the effect of unknown natural causes, then its uniqueness in human history would be inexplicable. Second, the supernatural explanation is given immediately in the religio-historical context in which the event occurred. Jesus’ resurrection was not merely an anomalous event, occurring without context; it came as the climax to Jesus’ own life and teachings and serves as the divine vindication of Jesus’ allegedly blasphemous claims for which he was crucified. We therefore have good reason to regard Jesus’ resurrection, if it occurred, as truly miraculous. Thus, while it is, indeed, difficult to know in some cases whether a genuine miracle has occurred, that does not imply pessimism with respect to all cases.
But perhaps the very natural impossibility of a genuine miracle precludes our ever identifying an event as a miracle. As Hume notoriously argued, perhaps it is always more rational to believe that some mistake or deception is at play than to believe on the basis of testimony that a genuine miracle has occurred. This conclusion is based on Hume’s principle that it is always more probable that the testimony to a miracle is false than that the miracle occurred. But Hume’s claim is doubly erroneous. First, it fails to take into account all the probabilities involved. Stimulated by Hume’s original argument against miracles, there arose a discussion among probability theorists over what evidence is required in order to establish the occurrence of highly improbable events. It was soon realized that if one simply weighed the probability of the event against the reliability of the witness, then we should be led into denying the occurrence of events that, though highly improbable, we reasonably know to have occurred. For example, if on the morning news you hear reported that the pick in last night’s lottery was 7492871, this is a report of an extraordinarily improbable event, one out of several million, and even if the morning news’s accuracy is known to be 99.99 percent, the improbability of the event reported will swamp the probability of the witness’s reliability, so that we should never believe such reports. In order to believe the report, Hume’s principle would require us to have enough evidence in favor of the morning news’ reliability to counterbalance the improbability of the winning pick, which is absurd.
Probability theorists saw that what also needs to be considered is the probability that if the reported event has not occurred, the witness’s testimony is still the same as it is. Thus, to return to our example, the probability that the morning news would announce the pick as 7492871 if some other number had been chosen is so incredibly small, given that the newscasters had no preference for the announced number, that it counterbalances the high improbability of the event reported. What Hume would have to say in the case of the resurrection, for example, is that if Jesus did not rise from the dead then it is highly probable that we should have exactly the testimony we do to the facts of his empty tomb, postmortem appearances, and the disciples’ belief in his resurrection. But clearly if Jesus had not risen, then the testimonial evidence, rather than being what it is, might be to any of a wide range of envisionable scenarios. A further factor neglected by Hume is the remarkable increase in probability that results from multiple, independent testimonies to some event. Charles Babbage, in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, points out that if two witnesses are each 99 percent reliable, then the odds of their both independently testifying falsely to some event are only 1 out of 10,000; the odds of three such witnesses’ being wrong is 1 out of 1,000,000; and the odds of six such witnesses’ being mistaken is 1 out of 1,000,000,000,000, which, he points out, is five times as great as the improbability that Hume assigns to the resurrection of Jesus. In fact, the cumulative power of independent witnesses is such that individually they could be unreliable more than 50 percent of the time and yet their testimonies combine to make an event of apparently enormous improbability quite probable. With respect to Jesus’ resurrection, it is difficult to know how independent some of the witnesses are—though in the cases of people like Peter, James, and Saul independence is well-established—but we have a similar accumulation of probability from the fact that the evidence of the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances, and the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection are themselves three independent lines of evidence pointing to the fact of the resurrection.
In order to show that a miracle M has probably occurred on the basis of specific evidence E and our background information B, we shall need to show that Pr (M|B & E) > Pr (¬M|B & E). Even this needs some finessing, however. If we let M = the resurrection of Jesus, then we need not even show that the probability of the resurrection on the evidence and background information is greater than the probability of no resurrection on the same evidence and information. Rather, what we must show is that the probability of the resurrection is greater than any one of its alternatives. For the collective probability of all these alternatives taken together is meaningless, since the disjunction formed of all these alternatives is not itself an alternative. Thus the hypothesis of the resurrection will be preferable if it is more probable than any one of its alternatives.
The second problem with Hume’s argument is that he incorrectly assumes that miracles are intrinsically highly improbable. With respect to the resurrection of Jesus, for example, there is no reason to think that the hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” is highly improbable relative to our background information. What is improbable relative to our background information is the hypothesis “Jesus rose naturally from the dead.” Given what we know of cell necrosis, that hypothesis is fantastically, even unimaginably, improbable. Conspiracy theories, apparent death theories, hallucination theories, twin brother theories—almost any hypothesis, however unlikely, seems more probable than the hypothesis that all the cells in Jesus’ corpse spontaneously came back to life again. But such naturalistic hypotheses are not more probable than the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead. The evidence for the laws of nature relevant in this case makes it probable that a resurrection from the dead is naturally impossible, which renders improbable the hypothesis that Jesus rose naturally from the grave. But such evidence is simply irrelevant to the probability of the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead. There is no reason a priori to expect that it is more probable that the testimony to the resurrection is false than that the hypothesis of resurrection is true.
Although it would be fair to say that the fallaciousness of Hume’s reasoning has been recognized by the majority of philosophers writing on the subject today, still a widespread assumption persists that if historical inquiry is to be feasible, then one must adopt a sort of methodological naturalism as a fundamental historiographical principle (see chap. 19). According to this outlook, historians must adopt as a methodological principle a sort of “historical naturalism” that excludes the supernatural.
This viewpoint is simply a restatement of Ernst Troeltsch’s principle of analogy. According to Troeltsch, one of the most basic of historiographical principles is that the past does not differ essentially from the present. Though events of the past are of course not the same events as those of the present, they must be the same in kind if historical investigation is to be possible. Troeltsch realized that this principle was incompatible with miraculous events and that any history written on this principle will be skeptical with regard to the historicity of the events of the Gospels.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, however, has persuasively argued that Troeltsch’s principle of analogy cannot be legitimately employed to banish from the realm of history all nonanalogous events. Properly defined, analogy means that in a situation that is unclear, the facts ought to be understood in terms of known experience; but Troeltsch has elevated the principle to constrict all past events to purely natural events. But that an event bursts all analogies cannot be used to dispute its historicity. When, for example, myths, legends, illusions, and the like are dismissed as unhistorical, it is not because they are nonanalogous, but because they are analogous to present forms of consciousness having no objective referent. When an event is said to have occurred for which no analogy exists, its reality cannot be automatically dismissed; to do this we should require an analogy to some known form of consciousness lacking an objective referent that would suffice to explain the situation. Pannenberg has thus upended Troeltsch’s principle of analogy such that it is not the want of an analogy that shows an event to be unhistorical, but the presence of a positive analogy to known thought forms that shows a purportedly miraculous event to be unhistorical. Thus he has affirmed that if the Easter traditions were shown to be essentially secondary constructions analogous to common comparative religious models, the Easter appearances were shown to correspond completely to the model of hallucinations, and the empty tomb tradition were evaluated as a late legend, then the resurrection would be subject to evaluation as unhistorical. In this way, the lack of an analogy to present experience says nothing for or against the historicity of an event. Troeltsch’s formulation of the principle of analogy attempts to squeeze the past into the mold of the present without providing any warrant for doing so. It thus destroys genuine historical reasoning, since the historian must be open to the uniqueness of the events of the past and cannot exclude a priori the possibility of events like the resurrection simply because they do not conform to his present experience. But Pannenberg’s formulation of the principle preserves the analogous nature of the past to the present or to the known, thus making the investigation of history possible, without thereby sacrificing the integrity of the past or distorting it.
Given, then, the God of creation and providence described in classical theism, miracles are possible and, when occurring under certain conditions, plausibly identifiable.
Chapter Summary
The biblical doctrine of creation may be explicated in terms of God’s bringing something into being at a certain time without a material cause. Conservation is God’s action on an entity to preserve it in being from one time to another. Both these notions involve commitment to an A-theory of time. God’s timeless or tenseless production of an entity in being may be referred to as his sustaining that entity. God’s creation of the world plausibly involved a creation of time as well. Given his real relation to the world, God undergoes extrinsic change in creating the world and is therefore temporal since the beginning of time. Without the world God is most plausibly thought of as timeless.
The most adequate reconciliation of divine sovereignty and human freedom is to be found in a Molinist doctrine of providence based on God’s middle knowledge and simultaneous concurrence. Logically prior to his creative decree God knows what every possible free creature would do in any circumstances in which God might place him. By decreeing to place particular creatures in particular circumstances God providentially orders the world and by concurring with the actions of creatures God causes everything that happens. Everything that occurs does so either by God’s will or permission. God can thus so order the world that even sinful actions of creatures, which God does not positively will, turn out for the achievement of God’s ultimate ends.
Miracles are to be distinguished from God’s special providences, which are unusually propitious events having secondary causes. Miracles are events that do not have secondary causes but are produced directly by God. On none of the current theories of natural laws should miracles be understood as violations of the laws of nature. Rather, they are events beyond the productive capacity of the natural causes extant at the time and place at which the event occurs. Given the God of classical theism, miracles are obviously possible. Hume’s argument against the identification of a miracle neglects to take into account the probability that the evidence should be just as it is in a particular case if the miracle did not occur; moreover, he wrongly assumes miracles to be intrinsically improbable. Troeltsch’s appeal to methodological naturalism in history is subverted by a proper understanding of analogy: events are deemed unhistorical, not because they are nonanalogous, but because they are analogous to present forms of consciousness lacking an objective referent.
Checklist of Basic Terms and Concepts
absolute intentions
causal dispositions theory
change
comes into being
conditional intentions
conservation
continuing creation
counterfactuals of divine freedom
creatio continuans
creatio ex nihilo
creatio originans
creation
doctrine of pre-motion
identification of miracles
material cause
methodological naturalism
miracles
natural law
naturally impossible events
nomic necessity theory
occasionalism
principle of analogy
providence
providentia extraordinaria
providentia ordinaria
real relation
regularity theory
religio-historical context
secondary causation
simultaneous concurrence
sovereignty
special providence
sustenance
universal inductive generalizations
unknown natural causes
violations of the laws of nature