14.8 Is Aquinas Right about Divine Providence?
14.8 Is Aquinas Right about Divine Providence?
If we are not just concerned to arrive at an accurate understanding of what Aquinas says about providence in SCG 3,64–110 (a commendable aim in itself), we shall want to consider whether it has anything useful or believable to offer. Does it?
As I have noted at the end of several previous chapters, our evaluation of various sections of the SCG will depend on what we make of what Aquinas says prior to them. And so it is when it comes to SCG 3,64–110. We shall reject almost all that he says here if we reject his reasons for belief in God given in SCG 1,13, or if we think that God does not or cannot exist. We shall do the same if we adopt a notion of God at odds with Aquinas’s defense of divine simplicity as presented in SCG 1,14–27 or if we think of God’s creative activity in a way that is different from what Aquinas presents in SCG 2,1–29.
Even so, however, there are questions that can be raised concerning SCG 3,64–110 without reference to truths that Aquinas might be thought to have established previously in the SCG. I shall say something about three of them.
14.8.1 Creaturely Causality and Human Choosing
If I seem to close a door, but if God actually causes me to close it, how can I have really closed the door? Should it not, instead, be said that God has closed the door? As I have shown, Aquinas is conscious that questions like this might be raised against his account of divine providence. Yet does he deal with them successfully? Does he show that created causes can be real causes? And does he show that God’s providence does not rule out creaturely free choice?
You may say that he does not since it is obvious that if something brings something about while acting under the influence of a cause that is making it do what it does, then the thing in question is being pushed around and is not doing anything of itself. Yet it would surely be wrong to say that what is being pushed around so as to effect some change or whatever is not acting causally even if it does not initiate its movements. Even if I am being pushed into water by someone, it still remains that I cause effects in the water. It is, of course, with thoughts like this in mind that Aquinas holds that secondary causes are still real causes. So I think we have good reason to think, as does Aquinas, that secondary causes are real causes. In thinking this, Aquinas seems to be saying that secondary causes that are secondary to one or more agent cause can be genuinely causal, which seems obviously true since if X, an agent cause, causes Y, an agent cause, to cause Z, it has to remain that Y causes Z.
Yet what about people choosing to do things? If I am coerced to close a door, I still act causally so as to get the door closed. But do I get it closed willingly? Well, I surely do not if I am forced to close the door by someone manipulating my body or by someone holding a gun to my head. So how can it be that if, as Aquinas says, all creatures do what they do by virtue of God’s causality, there is any such thing as human freedom? Many philosophers have denied that people have freedom since they have thought that all that we do is the result of physical events of some kind, whether external to us or internal to us. In doing so, they seem to be assuming that causation always amounts to necessitation, which is not obviously true, as Aquinas says and as some recent philosophers have argued.72 Yet let us, for the sake of argument, allow that people have freedom of choice, as Aquinas argues they do in SCG 2,48. In that case, how can their freedom not be abolished by God acting in them by virtue of providence?
This question seems to be an odd one since if people actually do have freedom of choice, then God’s providence cannot abolish it. If it is the case that such and such is so, then it is so regardless of what else we might want to enter into the equation for purposes of discussion. Now, Aquinas has argued that people have freedom of choice, so he can hardly allow that considerations concerning God’s providence should lead us to conclude that they do not. Yet we might think that, given that people have freedom to choose, God is not operative in all things, as Aquinas says that he is. Why might we think this? Some would say that we should do so because if an action is performed freely, it cannot be caused by anything, not even God.
One can see the force of this suggestion on the supposition that God exists alongside creatures while acting on them so as to move them in this or that direction. For if God is like that, then he would seem to be always coercing creatures. If I move a jug, the jug has no say in its move. If I slip on the ice, I have no say in my slipping. So one might think that if God always causes me to act as I do, then I have no say in my action and that all of my actions are determined by God. Yet, of course, Aquinas does not conceive of God as something alongside creatures acting on them so as to move them in this or that direction. He thinks of God as creating creatures to be whatever we truly take them to be without reference to God. In a serious sense, Aquinas thinks that God makes no difference to things.
Of course, he thinks that God makes all the difference since God accounts for there being something rather than nothing. But he does not regard God’s doing that as involving a modification of anything. As I have shown, in SCG 2,17–19 he argues that for God to create is not for him to change something preexisting his creative action. The whole drift of Aquinas’s philosophy of God in the SCG pulls away from the view that God exists alongside things as something able to interfere with them in some way. For Aquinas, God makes things to be what they truly are.
In his discussion of God’s providence, therefore, Aquinas claims that if some things do not come about as causally necessitated by other things, they are not causally necessitated even though they come about by God’s power at work in them. You may say that if God accounts for something coming about, then God is rendering it to be necessitated. Yet that view surely has to mean that God is compelling or forcing it in some way, and Aquinas would reply that God cannot force or compel anything by creating it to be what it is. He would claim that things are what they are, whether necessitated or not necessitated, not in spite of God but because of God. And one can, I think, readily see why he arrives at this view given the account of God, God’s nature, and the notion of creation that Aquinas takes himself to have defended prior to his discussion of providence.
If you start with the idea that providence is a matter of God messing around with all things, then you will naturally conclude that providence is a threat to freedom or contingency in any form. But Aquinas does not start with that idea of providence because he takes it to be incompatible with a true understanding of God. His point is that God from eternity has willed to make a world in which some things come about of necessity (e.g., as when death inevitably occurs following a massive trauma) while others do not (e.g., as when I freely decide to go on holiday). You may say that when we act freely, we act independently of God. Consistently with his understanding of God in the SCG, however, and consistently with his understanding of providence, Aquinas would reply that we can never act independently of God even though we can act independently of certain creatures. Would he be right to reply in this way? I suggest that he would since if all creatures owe their existence to God, then God must be the source of free human actions and other contingencies since these exist as opposed to there being nothing at all. Whatever freedom or contingency means, it cannot mean not depending on God considered as the maker of things in the way that Aquinas argues that he is.73
If we want to reject what Aquinas says about God working in all creatures by providence, we are going to have to abandon the considerations that lead him to speak of God as the creator of the universe. We shall have to settle for the view that God is just one more thing among the things that exist. Aquinas, of course, does not deny that God exists. Nor does he deny that God is distinct from creatures. But he does deny that God is an individual thing having a nature deriving from anything (this is the drift of his teaching on divine simplicity). He also denies that God is spatiotemporal. So he does not think of God as something alongside creatures. In other words, we might say that he denies that God and the universe can be added up so as to make for a number of beings plus God as an additional one. For he clearly does not think of “being” as a word specifying a kind of thing, and he would deny that God can be included in a list of things belonging to different kinds members of which can be thought of as able to coerce things like or unlike them.
14.8.2 God’s Knowledge and What It Might Be Thought to Necessitate
In SCG 3,94 Aquinas, as I have shown, denies that God’s knowledge poses a threat to his view of providence. Is he right to do so, however? For is it not clear that if God knows what is the case, then it has to be the case?
Actually, it is not clear that this is true. In fact, it is evidently false since “X knows that-p” does not entail that p is something that could not fail to be. It is true that if I know that you are painting a wall, then you are painting a wall. But it does not follow that you cannot but be painting a wall. “X knows that-p” guarantees that-p, not because of something determining the truth of p, but because of the meaning of “know.” We cannot know that-p if it is not the case that-p (though we might believe that-p without it being the case that-p). But, though “Fred knows that I am painting a wall” cannot be true if I am not painting a wall, nothing follows as to whether or not I am constrained to paint the wall.
Yet what if we change “Fred knows that I am painting a wall” to “Fred knows on Monday that I will paint a wall on Tuesday”? Then it might seem far from obvious that my painting on Tuesday is something over which I have any control. And, applying this thought when reflecting on God’s knowledge, we might be tempted to conclude that if God foreknows all that will come to pass, then all that comes to pass, including what people do, comes about inevitably. As Richard Sorabji succinctly says, echoing what many others have argued since Aquinas’s time:
If God were not infallible in his judgement of what we would do, then we might be able so to act that his prediction turned out wrong. But this is not even a possibility, for to call him infallible is to say not merely that he is not, but that he cannot be wrong, and correspondingly we cannot make him wrong. … The restriction on freedom arises not from God’s infallibility alone, but from that coupled with the irrevocability of the past. If God’s infallible knowledge of our doing exists in advance, then we are too late so as to act that God will have had a different judgement about what we are going to do. His judgement exists already, and the past cannot be affected.74
This is an interesting line of thinking, yet it is not very effective considered as a refutation of Aquinas’s conclusion that God’s knowledge does not render what comes to pass as doing so inevitably. For one thing, and as Aquinas says in SCG, if God knows that something comes about without doing so inevitably, then the thing comes about without doing so inevitably. This fact is not abolished even if we think of God knowing that something or other will come to be the case before it comes to be the case. If God knows on Monday that I will freely paint a wall on Tuesday, then what God knows is that I will freely paint a wall on Tuesday, and God cannot be knowing that my wall painting on Tuesday is somehow necessitated. As William Lane Craig observes:
The reason that God foreknows that Jones will mow his lawn is the simple fact that Jones will mow his lawn. Jones is free to refrain, and were he to do so, God would have foreknown that he would refrain. Jones is free to do whatever he wants, and God’s foreknowledge logically follows Jones’s action like a shadow, even if chronologically the shadow precedes the coming of the event itself.75
Even without relying on this argument, however, a defender of Aquinas can resist the conclusion that God’s knowledge necessitates what he knows by noting that, for Aquinas, God does not literally foreknow anything. As I have shown, Aquinas takes God to be outside time. His view is that God knows all that occurs in time by knowing himself as the eternal and nontemporal creator of all things. So his view is that if we want to cast around for an inadequate image of what God’s knowledge of creatures amounts to, we should think in terms of someone just knowing what is there before them. If I see you painting a wall, it does not follow that you could not but be painting the wall. For Aquinas, God knows the course of created history in one eternal glance that is not prior to the coming about of creatures in the sense that my knowing that Jones will mow his lawn is prior to Jones mowing his lawn. And this view of his rightly, I think, leads him to suppose that God’s knowledge cannot, by itself, impose necessity on creatures. You may think of God as being in time. You may think that we can write a biography of God given tips from God’s literary agents. In that case, you will think that the best that can be said in favor of the view that God’s knowledge does not entail that everything that happens is necessitated amounts to the obvious point that, if what God foreknows is something that does not have to be, then what God foreknows is something that does not have to be. Yet if, with Aquinas, you also think that God’s knowledge of creatures can never be constituted by what God derives from looking ahead to time future to God, if you think that what occurs in time is known to God from eternity, then you will naturally think that it imposes no necessity on creatures, just as our knowing what is before us does not impose necessity on what is before us.
The discussion of miracles in SCG 3,98–102 is a bit of a puzzle in that Aquinas does not make it clear what he is doing in it. Is he holding that miracles have occurred? You might think that he is because of the biblical allusions in SCG 3,101. But Aquinas does not specifically argue in that chapter that certain miracles have taken place. What the chapter seems to offer is a fairly thorough account of kinds of miracles that are possible, and the discussions in SCG 3,98–100 and SCG 3,101 do not seem to presume that there have been any miracles. What they argue is that miracles would not be impossible given divine providence and that, if anything is a miracle, it could only be brought about by God. This hesitancy of Aquinas bluntly to declare that certain miracles have occurred might be due to his purpose in SCG 1–3 not to go beyond what he takes rational reflection, as distinct from divine revelation, to deliver. Yet it is not obvious that the occurrence of miracles cannot be argued for independently of divine revelation, and in SCG 1–3 Aquinas is happy to cite biblical texts as backing up what he has been saying. So perhaps one might feel that SCG 3,98–101 is somewhat blurry when it comes to its aim. That said, however, it is obvious that in these chapters Aquinas is defending the possibility of miracles, and one might ask whether he has done this successfully.
Some will think that he cannot have done so since miracles are manifestly impossible. You can find this claim presented in what is probably the most famous philosophical discussion of miracles—chapter X of David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (originally published in 1758 but revised by Hume until his death in 1776). Hume defines “miracle” as “a violation of the laws of nature,” and at one point he says that miracles cannot occur. He does this when noting certain miracles supposed to have taken place at the tomb of Francis of Paris (1690–1727). Having noted testimony to their occurrence, Hume says: “And what we have to oppose to such a cloud of witnesses, but the absolute impossibility or miraculous nature of the events which they relate. And this surely, in the eyes of all reasonable people, will alone be regarded as a sufficient refutation.”76 In chapter X of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume mostly expresses skepticism concerning miracles based on a sophisticated argument concerning testimony and probability.77 He argues that we always have good reason to disbelieve accounts to the effect that a miracle has occurred. Yet, in the passage I have just quoted, he asserts that miracles cannot happen; and others have agreed with him on this score.
If miracles are simply impossible, then Aquinas is wrong in his discussion of them. Yet it is hard to see why we should think that miracles are impossible. We might not believe that any miracles have occurred. And, like Hume, we may think that the evidence against them having occurred must always be deemed to outweigh the conclusion that they have occurred. But we surely should not therefore conclude that miracles are to be ruled out a priori. After all, miracles, as Aquinas understands them, are occurrences in the universe, albeit ones directly brought about by God. They are not events describable in terms that involve some logical contradiction. It cannot be that numbers have sprouted leaves since numbers are not things in the biological realm and since “being a number” is logically incompatible with sprouting leaves. Yet the miracles that Aquinas seems to have in mind in SCG 3,101 are not occurrences that seem to be reportable only on the condition that one is contradicting oneself while attempting to report them. One might say that miracles are not possible given the powers that creatures have. But Aquinas does not deny that. He presumes it. And even Hume says things that cohere with Aquinas’s position here. In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he observes: “Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly perceived, implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstrative argument or abstract reasoning a priori.” So, Hume continues:
It implies no contradiction that the course of nature may change, and that an object, seemingly like those which we have experienced, may be attended with different and contrary effects. May I not clearly and distinctly conceive that a body, falling from the clouds, and which, in all other respects, resembles snow, yet has the taste of salt or feeling of fire? Is there any more intelligible proposition than to affirm that all the trees will flourish in December and January, and decay in May and June?78
What Hume thinks he can clearly and distinctly perceive in this passage seems to be akin to what Aquinas has in mind when he talks about miracles. Admittedly, Hume is only saying that we cannot guarantee that nature will always operate in the same way. Yet that concession seems to leave the door open to the possibility of things occurring in the universe that cannot be ruled out given how things in nature regularly behave so far as we can determine. And Aquinas defends this possibility in his SCG discussion of miracles. Given that this discussion is to be read as, to a great extent, only arguing that miracles are possible, that is a point worth noting.
Also worth noting is that Aquinas does not claim that miracles are violations of natural laws. Those who refer to natural laws usually take themselves to be noting ways in which things have to behave given our knowledge of their natures. Thus, one might say that potatoes have to soften when placed in boiling water for half an hour. To speak in this way, however is to suppose that the natural world is a closed system on or in which nothing can act so as to bring about what does not normally happen given the natures of things in the world. Yet, as we see throughout the SCG, Aquinas does not think of the natural world in this way, and his account of miracles reflects this fact. So, one might hold, he has done something outside SCG 3,64–110 to defend what he argues there, and one need not evaluate these chapters entirely on their own.