9.9 Some Comments on SCG 2,1–29
9.9 Some Comments on SCG 2,1–29
You will obviously want to dismiss much that Aquinas says in SCG 2,1–29 if you think that he has not previously shown that God exists as first mover and first cause, or if you reject his claim that God is entirely simple. Yet even if you agree with Aquinas on God’s existence as first mover and first cause, and even if you agree with what Aquinas says about divine simplicity, you might have reservations with SCG 2,1–29. You might, for example, think that there has to be something wrong with its claim that, while creatures are really related to God, God is not really related to creatures. Or you might think that Aquinas is wrong to speak of God as omnipotent. In concluding this chapter, therefore, let me briefly say something about Aquinas on God and relations and God as omnipotent.
It would seem to be absurd to suggest that, among the relations that there are, some are real while some are not. But I do not think that this is what Aquinas suggests in the SCG. He does, however, say that, while creatures are really related to God, God is not really related to creatures. And this suggestion makes sense if we focus on how it can be said that something undergoes change without undergoing what we might call a “real” change.
Let us suppose that I come to hate you. My coming to hate you would, surely, amount to a real change in me. But would it amount to a real change in you? Surely not. You would certainly be affected by my trying to strangle you because I hate you. But my coming to hate you need have no impact on you at all. Indeed, I might come to hate you while doing nothing that might show by my behavior that I am anything other than well disposed to you. So we can distinguish between what Peter Geach calls “real change” and “merely Cambridge change.”
By “merely Cambridge change,” Geach means what is flagged by assertions like “John has come to be hated by Mary” or “Mary has come to be loved by John.” Both of these could well be true assertions, and they seem to imply “Mary has come to hate John” and “John has come to love Mary.” But “John has come to be hated by Mary” and “Mary has come to be loved by John” do not signify any real process of change in John or Mary. John may know nothing of Mary and may be entirely unaffected by the fact that she has started to hate him. Similarly, Mary may know nothing of John and might be changed in no way by the fact that John has begun to love her. On the other hand “Mary has cut her finger” and “John has broken his leg” do ascribe real changes to Mary and John.
So we can think of a merely Cambridge change as “a matter of contradictory attributes holding good of individuals at different times.”34 And we can distinguish merely Cambridge changes from real ones. Armed with these thoughts, we can now note that we might have perfectly true statements relating one thing to another without it being true that both things undergo real change, which is what Aquinas seems to be supposing when he says that, though creatures are really related to God, God is not really related to creatures. Aquinas certainly seems to think that, for example, both (1) “God has brought it about that Moses has a beard” and (2) “Moses has a beard brought about by God” can be true. Yet he does not think that the truth of (1) and (2) here entails that God undergoes any change, though Moses certainly does so as his beard grows. Aquinas thinks that “some relational propositions latch onto reality in a way that others do not.”35 And I think that he is right to do so. You may think that he is not since you may think that God has to undergo real change. On the supposition that God is changeless, however, what Aquinas says about how God is not related to creatures, while creatures are related to God, makes sense. For, as Geach observes:
If we may after all regard a relational proposition as making predications about the related things A and B,36 then it will make sense (whether it is true or not) to suppose that when we take the proposition as a predication about A, there is some actuality in A answering to the predication, but that when we take the same (or a logically equivalent) proposition as a predication about B, there is no actuality in B answering to the predication. And in concrete examples we can make it plausible that this is true. Take “Edith envies Herbert,” for example: if Edith comes to envy Herbert, it is natural to regard this as a change in Edith rather than a change in Herbert (his “coming to be envied”); and it is very natural to regard a state of envy as an actual condition of Edith, but very unnatural to regard a “state of being envied” as an actual condition of Herbert. This gives a plausible content to the statement that, when Edith envies Herbert, this involves a “real” relation on Edith’s side but not on Herbert’s.37
Yet what if we focus not on causal propositions, like “God came to give Moses a beard” or “Moses came to have a beard by virtue of God,” but on propositions like “God knows that Moses is asleep” or “God wills that Moses is sleeping”? Should we not suppose that propositions such as these, if they are true, are not always true, and that their truth implies that a real change can come about in God?
Here, I think, Aquinas would say that God eternally knows or wills what Moses is doing at any time, though he does not know or will it in some time frame to be related to that of Moses, that he does not now know or will that Moses is now asleep. For Aquinas, God’s knowledge and will is unvarying and would exist even if there were nothing whose existence and changes could be clocked or written about in a historical book. Yet, he thinks, since God is the creator, then God can know what his creatures are in time and how what they are in time relates to what other things are in time. In Aquinas’s view, God’s knowledge and will do not stand to what God knows and wills as our knowledge and will stand to what we know and will. We know and will as creatures that interact at various times with other things in the world. According to Aquinas, however, God eternally knows and wills creatures in nonsuccessively knowing and willing himself as their creator. And, if Aquinas is right to think this, then he is right to suppose that the creaturely objects of God’s knowledge and will do not bring about any change in God as they come to be what they are as creatures of God, even though God knows and wills them, and even though they stand in a real relation to God by actually having all that they are from God.
Belief in divine omnipotence has been frequently criticized. As I have noted, some have said that if God is omnipotent, then God can do anything, while there are obviously lots of things that God, if nonmaterial, cannot do. Again, it has been suggested that there cannot be an omnipotent God because of a so-called paradox of omnipotence. Can God make something too heavy for him to lift? If he can, then it would seem that there is something that God cannot do, namely, lift the stone. If he cannot, then again it would seem that there is something that God cannot do, namely make something too heavy for him to lift.
By now, however, you will be aware of how Aquinas would reply to objections to divine omnipotence of these kinds. He would say that “God is omnipotent” should not be taken to mean that God can do anything you care to mention. He would say that God has power insofar as he can make anything to exist that could possibly exist. And, with regard to the paradox of omnipotence, he would say that God does not and cannot lift things (as we often try to do), while adding that God can bring about the levitation of anything that can rise.
You might suppose that God can hardly be omnipotent if he cannot make contradictories to be true. So you might think, for example, that God cannot be omnipotent if he cannot produce something that is both square and circular. Yet Aquinas does not think that divine omnipotence extends to making what is both square and circular. He would say, and surely rightly, that “X is both square and circular” is not a possibly true proposition, that there can be nothing producible that is both square and circular. As I have said, his view is that if “X exists” is possibly true, then God, as the source of the existence of all things, can make it to be that X exists. You might suppose that logical laws such as “Nothing can be both a square and a circle” are revisable. But can we say what a nonlogical world would be or be described to be?
Can we determine whether or not “X exists” is possibly true? This is a difficult question, and proofs of logical consistency are often hard to come by. Can there be something that has traveled through time? Can there be something that exists without a cause? Can human beings live after they have died? These are questions that philosophers have debated for centuries. Fortunately, though, when evaluating Aquinas’s account of divine omnipotence, we do not have to worry about them. When holding that God is omnipotent, Aquinas is not offering an account of what is and is not possible when it comes to X, Y, or Z as existing. All he is saying is that if it is absolutely impossible for X, Y, or Z to exist, then God cannot make it to exist. If you think that it is impossible for X to exist, and if you can prove your case, then Aquinas would say that God cannot make X to exist. And so on for Y and Z. In other words, Aquinas’s account of omnipotence in the SCG does not depend on analyses of what might or might not be. All it does is to assert that if something can be, then God can make it to be.
I find this assertion convincing if Aquinas is right in what he says in the SCG concerning God as the first cause who makes things to exist as one who does not have being but is being and is the cause of there being anything that does not have to exist because of what it is. One might think that God cannot bring about all that he brings about as existing together or at the same time, and that God is, therefore, not omnipotent. Yet there being everything that can be existing at the same time does not seem to be logically possible. For example, I cannot exist as my long dead ancestors existed since I am descended from them and since I came to be after they ceased to be. So, though “God might be able to create what he can create” is true in a trivial sense, it cannot be true as taken to imply that God can make creatures to exist without them and their actions being distinguishable from a temporal viewpoint.
You might, of course, now want to say that God can do what people can do since, according to Christian doctrine, God became incarnate and walked around and did various things that people can do, like eating. And if you want to say that, Aquinas would agree with you, as I will show when we come to SCG 4. In SCG 2, however, Aquinas is concerned with what is true of the divine essence, whether or not God became incarnate. In SCG 4 Aquinas will distinguish between what can be true of Christ as man and true of Christ as God. In his discussion of God’s power in SCG 2, however, he is focusing on what God as God can do, on what the divine nature, which might never have created at all, might be thought of as able to produce.