14.2 What Divine Providence Does Not Exclude (SCG 3,71–74)
14.2 What Divine Providence Does Not Exclude (SCG 3,71–74)
Given what Aquinas has so far been saying about God’s providence, should we, perhaps, suppose that certain real things cannot exist? More precisely, should we not conclude that if Aquinas is right about God’s providence there could not be, as there appear to be, (1) instances of evil, (2) contingency in things, (3) freedom of choice, and (4) fortune and chance? Aquinas thinks not. In SCG 3,71–74 he maintains that (1)–(4) here are not excluded by divine providence.
As I noted in chapter 12, Aquinas agrees that some things are bad or evil, but in SCG 3,71, he maintains that this fact does not conflict with belief in God’s providence. God’s governing of things, he holds, is quite compatible with some things failing in certain respects. Such governing, he says, does not rule out secondary causes that are defective in their action, or secondary causes that bring about defects in other things. Nor is it contrary to there being evil in one thing resulting from the flourishing of another, or there being degrees of goodness in things (implying the existence of what is less than perfect). Again, Aquinas reasons, “Many goods are present in things which would not occur unless there were evils.” He continues:
For instance, there would not be the patience of the just if there were not the malice of their persecutors; there would not be a place for the justice of vindication if there were no offenses; and in the order of nature, there would not be the generation of one thing unless there were the corruption of another. So, if evil were totally excluded from the whole of things by divine providence, a multitude of good things would have to be sacrificed.22
Indeed, Aquinas goes on to say, certain human goods would be lacking if there were no evils. He writes:
If no evils were present in things, much of the good of people would be diminished, both in regard to knowledge and in regard to desire and love of the good. In fact, the good is better known for its comparison with evil, and while we continue to suffer certain evils our desire for good grows more ardent. For instance, how great a good health is, is best known by the sick; and they also crave it more than do the healthy.23
In this connection Aquinas goes so far as to say that if someone says “God does not exist since there is evil,” one might reasonably reply “If evil exists, God exists” since “there would be no evil if the order of good were taken away, since its privation is evil.”24
By “contingency” Aquinas means “what is able to be or not to be, what is not there by absolute necessity, what is not guaranteed always to exist.” As I have shown, he accepts that some things come about that are not intrinsically necessary or causally necessitated by other things in the universe. So he finds no difficulty in saying in SCG 3,72 that a world governed by God can contain what is not causally necessitated. His view is that God makes things to be what they actually are.25 He therefore reasons that if some things or processes are contingent, they have been established as such by God. He agrees that if God has willed to create something, the something in question cannot but exist. Yet, he suggests, the something in question need not be necessary given the operation of various created causes. Why not? Because some creatures can be impeded in their activity by others and because some things can come about that are not determined by the activity of any secondary cause (secondary to God, that is). “Since there are many things among proximate causes that may be defective,” says Aquinas, “not all effects subject to providence will be necessary, but a good many are contingent.”26
One might, of course, think that a truly provident God would create a world lacking contingency. Yet, observes Aquinas, such a world would lack diversity when it comes to ways of being and would not be a world in which things of different kinds interact while reflecting the power of the creator to make things of different kinds with different abilities. “Every necessary thing,” he says, “as such, always exists in the same way. It would be incompatible, then, with divine providence, to which the establishment and preservation of order in things belongs, if all things came about as a result of necessity.”27 Here Aquinas seems to be saying that a world containing nothing but what is necessary would hardly be a world that could be thought to be governed at all. It would be something that always has to be just what it is.
14.2.3 Freedom of Choice (SCG 3,73)
In SCG 3,73 Aquinas is considering the view that, given God’s providence, no creature can be said to act freely. He rejects this view in the light of his idea that secondary causes can be genuine causes and that not all secondary causes are necessitated by things in the world to bring about certain effects. Nonintelligent agent causes, he notes, operate in a regular way and invariably bring about certain effects unless something interferes with them. But, he adds, reasoning creatures (i.e., human beings) can deliberate and decide between alternatives, even though they act as governed by God and even though their very being is God’s doing. And, says Aquinas, freedom to choose is a good that is utterly compatible with God’s governing of creatures to good ends. “Whatever pertains to perfection,” he argues, “is to be preserved by providence rather than what pertains to imperfection and deficiency.”28 He goes on to say: “The fact that the will is a contingent cause arises from its perfection, for it does not have power limited to one outcome but rather has the ability to produce this effect or that; for which reason it is contingent in regard to either one or the other.”29 In general, Aquinas reasons in SCG 3,73, freedom of choice is a reality, and it is good that it should exist in a world governed by God.
14.2.4 Fortune and Chance (SCG 3,74)
There is fortune or fortuitousness (fortuna) and chance (casus), thinks Aquinas, when something comes about that is not directly the result of a single cause or a set of causes working together for one end. It is not, he would have said, fortuitous or a matter of chance that arsenic administered in large doses kills people, or that carts move when people push them; but it would be fortuitous or a matter of chance if two people who had not seen or thought about each other for years suddenly bumped into each other in a place that neither of them had visited before, or if I missed an appointment because I inadvertently took a wrong turn on the way to it. Aquinas does not deny that fortuitous or chance events lack causes, but he thinks of such events as not necessitated by a single cause or a group of causes exercising their power in a typical way. And in SCG 3,74 he claims that fortuitous or chance events can occur in a world governed by God. Indeed, he argues, “it would be contrary to the essential character of divine providence if all things occurred by necessity.”30 Things that happen rarely, he says, can be just as much present in a world made by God as can things that happen with regularity (see SCG 3,72); and things can come about apart from what agents aim at. In short, Aquinas reasons that there being what is, to us, unexpected, and there being what is unintended, is what we might actually expect in a world made by a God who is not bringing about a scenario in which every event is rigidly determined by prior ones.