9.7 What Can Create? (SCG 2,20–21)
9.7 What Can Create? (SCG 2,20–21)
From all that Aquinas says in SCG 1 and SCG 2,1–19, you will, presumably, be assuming that he holds that only God can create, and, in concluding his discussion in SCG 2,20-21, he makes it perfectly explicit that this is indeed what he thinks.
Could it be that something material is able to create? In SCG 2,20 Aquinas argues that no body is capable of creative activity in the sense that he has been discussing it. He says, for example, that bodies only act as moved, and they are only moved in time: that bodies only bring things about that come to be as a result of successiveness, while creation is successionless. Again, Aquinas argues that bodies act by changing other bodies, while creation is not the bringing about of a change in anything.
In SCG 2,21, Aquinas maintains that only God can create by making these points:
1. Creation is the first action that depends on no other action, while all other action depends on things being created. But God is the first agent.
2. There is nothing not caused to be by God, so only God can create.
3. The cause of existence in things has to be the first agent acting in all things, and this is what God alone is as making the difference between there being something rather than absolutely nothing.
4. The existence of everything other than God is caused, so nothing other than God could cause the existence of something other than itself except by acting as an instrumental cause. Yet instrumental causes always cause as things that are caused in some way by other things, and they cause by bringing about change. To be created, however, is not to have undergone a change. And instrumental causes act on things, while creation is “from nothing.” Also, instrumental causes act so as to carry out what they are caused to do, while God is not caused to do anything by anything.
5. Nothing that is acted on causally as having a nature is the cause of the nature it has; otherwise it would be the cause of itself. But such a thing can account for something else having a nature, as, for example, parents bring it about that their children exist as human beings. Parents, though, do not bring it about that human nature exists. They communicate to others a nature that all of them share. But to create is to bring things to be from nothing. It is not to pass on something that already exists in some way. So nothing created can cause something else by creating it.
6. Finite causes produce effects that flow from them as the particular kind of things that they are, and their effects have a particular form.23 But to create is to produce something common to everything, namely, existence. So only God, who belongs to no genus or species, can create because he is pure being by nature or essence.
7. Only the first being causes being as being, as opposed to being in a certain way. And God alone is the first being who makes things to be from nothing preexisting.