FRANK G. KIRKPATRICK
A NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT WAY OF
WORLD?
It has seemed to a number of recent scholars that God's
acts in the world must have the fundamental character of being ‘basic acts’.
Grace Jantzen has argued that ‘a theist wants to say that all of God's actions in the world are
direct and basic ... he does everything directly, without intervening apparatus
. . . God can perform any
physical action, and any such action on God's part is direct, basic’.1
Robert Ellis has claimed that ‘if we limit "basic" action to action
upon/within one's body then God's immediate action upon the physical universe
may qualify under such a description whether or not one holds to a view of the
world as the body of God [a view endorsed by Jantzen] ... All God's actions
would [therefore] seem to be “basic”’.2 And William P. Alston has suggested that ‘it is a live
possibility that all God's actions are basic’.3 The question to be addressed is what theological and/or
philosophical reasons can be advanced to make the case for regarding all divine
action as basic? Would there be any significant diminution in affirming divine
power if most or many of God's actions were non‑basic?
Using Alvin Goldman's analysis, we can understand a basic
act as one that an agent can do
simply and directly without doing something else in order to or as a means to doing it. A basic act is one that
an agent can perform at will. If an act is not basic, the agent must do some
other act that will generate it.4 ‘Basic actions have no components which themselves are
actions.’5 This has the important entailment that every linked
sequence of actions must originate with a basic act. ‘If S wants to perform A'
[a non‑basic act], he must perform at least one basic act that will
generate A', and perhaps some intermediate acts which are generated by the
basic act and which generate A'.’6 Different agents have different repertoires or ‘ranges’
of basic acts (e.g.
1 Grace Jantzen, God's
World, God's Body (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984), p. 87.
2 Robert Ellis, ‘The Vulnerability of Action’, Religious Studies, xxv (1989), 232.
3 William Alston, ‘Can We Speak Literally of God?’, in Divine Nature and Human Language: Essays in
Philosophical Theology, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p.
58.
4 Alvin I. Goldman, A
Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice‑Hall, 1970), p.
56.
5 Jennifer Hornsby, Actions
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 59.
6 Goldman, op. cit.
182
a
person with only one functioning eyelid can blink only one eyelid ‘basically’
while a person with two eyelids can blink both lids basically). And the range
of things we can exemplify at will, as Goldman notes, ‘grows with practice and
training’.7
Agents with limited power can perform only limited basic acts (I can move my
hands at will but not a baseball bat ‑ I need to utilize my hands in
order to move it). An omnipotent agent, it might seem, would have an infinite
range of things he could exemplify at will. But would this capability entail
that all of this agent's acts were, therefore, necessarily basic?
Clearly, some things one can do basically one can also do non-basically. I
could have someone else move my hands for me (a non‑basic act since it
requires me doing something first as a means to getting my hands to be moved).
Are there non‑basic acts of this kind that an omnipotent Agent might
choose to perform without in any way diminishing his omnipotence?
The reason often implied for claiming that God performs
only basic actions is that only such acts (as distinct from mediated or non‑basic
actions) permit God's action to avoid dependence upon something other than God
(namely the causal, organic, physical infrastructures of the world, what
Jantzen calls an ‘intervening apparatus’) that would, by virtue of this
dependence, put constraints upon the freedom and scope of divine action. If God
can bring any result about simply by willing it, bypassing in the process any
intervening apparati, then it seems to be an unnecessary limitation on God's
power if there are occasions on which God brings that result about indirectly,
mediately, or through the mechanisms of secondary causes. Why should God have
to ‘generate’ a non‑basic act by first performing a basic act if a basic
act by itself would accomplish what God wants? Why could not an omnipotent
agent perform any act basically simply by doing it (and thus, by definition,
simply by willing it)?
I believe there is a confusion at the heart of this
insistence on divine basic acts as necessarily linked with divine omnipotence. The
resolution of this confusion will make it clear that all sequences of acts
(what Goldman calls ‘projected act‑trees’)8 begin with a basic act at their root or ‘bottom’. The
act‑tree then ramifies through the appropriate causal infrastructures of
the world utilizing a whole complex of related non‑basic actions and
events to bring about the intended result. According to one common
understanding in the philosophy of action, ‘[b] aspic actions are ... the
source of agency; they transmit agency to other things we do’.9
The theological question is whether God's utilization of an act‑tree (as
well as but distinct from a basic act that stands at its bottom) in order to
get the divine purpose accomplished significantly limits God power. If it does
not, the notion of basic acts as the exclusive form of divine action may be
appropriate only to one particular view of God's
7 Goldman, ibid. 89.
8 Goldman, ibid.
9 Carlos Moya, The Philosophy of Action (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1990), p. 14.
183
relation to the world, namely the view of the world as God's
body, a view associated most prominently with process theology (e.g. Grace
Jantzen's treatment). If, on the other hand, some of God's actions involve an
act‑tree, then not all God's acts need to be basic. Under what
conditions, therefore, would it be more appropriate for God to act basically or
non‑basically? At the heart of this question is the notion of God's
intervention into the causal order, i.e. God's use of intervening apparati.
I believe an argument can be generated to show that if
God chooses to achieve some divine purposes by intervening in, but
without violating, the causal infrastructure (in the same way human
agents usually act), then the notion of divine basic acts (appropriate on some
occasions) must be supplemented by a notion of divine non‑basic acts (or
act‑trees). In fact, there appear to be two different notions of a basic
act that often appear in references to divine basic action. Failure to
distinguish them leads to unnecessary confusion. Notion one (I) (the notion
sketched for example by Goldman and most philosophers of action) holds that a
basic act is the first step (the one that requires no previous action as
a means by which it is initiated) at the bottom of the act‑tree, the act‑tree
itself including sub‑acts, non‑basic acts, and causal events that
are brought into being by the basic act and that culminates in the full
realization of the agent's intention. This notion (I) is related to the second
notion (II) but does not entail it.
Notion two (II) holds, in effect, that a basic act is one
that utilizes no causal infrastructures at all in the enaction of its
intention. In sense II a basic act brings about its result ‘directly’ without
having to use any causal intermediaries. It assumes notion one in the sense
that the agent simply wills the action and it happens but the realization of
the intention does not require an act‑tree or a sequence of non‑basic
actions and their underlying causal infrastructure. If I could intend to be on
the moon one second from now and as a direct result of that intention find
myself there exactly one second from now, I would have acted basically and
apparently without using any intervening apparatus of secondary causes. It is
clearly this second sense of a basic act that seems to be implied by some
theologians in defence of the claim that God acts basically in all instances of
divine action because it is assumed that God, as omnipotent, must be free from
dependence on any and all causal means in the accomplishment of divine
purposes. The implicit assumption seems to be that if God can bring about any
result God wishes simply by willing it then God does not need to use any causal
infrastructure as a means to the realization of that result and that
there is no reason for God to do so.
In most discussions of human basic acts, it is not denied
that the outcome of my intention requires a causal infrastructure. Even the
example of my turning a door handle as a basic act still requires a door handle,
a hand with fingers, and the clutching of the handle by the fingers. The point
of the basic act is not that I can accomplish my intention without that
structure but that
184
in
order to begin the enactment of my intention, I simply need to do one thing
directly and that first act (the basic act ‑ notion I) begins the process
of utilizing the various parts of the infrastructure (through the act‑tree)
in order to reach the desired result. I can raise my arm without first doing
something else in order to get the arm to rise, but the rising requires the
causal mechanism of the contraction of my muscles. If, however, as a matter of
empirical fact, in order to get my arm to rise, I must first intend to
contract my muscles, and then perform the action of muscle‑contraction,
the act of intentional muscle‑contraction becomes the basic act by means
of which the arm rises. This makes the initiation of the rising of my arm a
basic act in a way that using the risen arm to signal someone would not be
(since the signalling is an act done by means of the prior action of
raising my arm). (The issue is whether God can ‘signal’ us directly without
having to utilize any part of the causal order, and if so, how?)
But in a basic act I, as agent, do not first bring about
the firing of the neurons or muscle contractions utilized in my directly
raising my arm. On this agent-causation view no specification of the ‘internal
machinery by which an agent exercises its causal efficacy’ is necessary since
the ‘whole thrust of the position is that when I bring about a bodily movement
in performing a basic action, I am not bringing about that movement by
initiating certain other events which, in turn, bring about the movement by
"event causation"’.10 I raise my arm and these causal mechanisms, activated by
the intention to raise it, permit the intention to be carried out.
More recently Edward Pols has argued from an agent‑hierarchy
or systems point of view that an act is ‘originative’: it initiates and unifies
(holds together as an irreducible unit) a series of subacts and a causal
infrastructure (e.g. the human body) through which the act manifests
itself.11 The act unifies the elements in its infrastructure: it
‘orders, disposes, uses, deploys, shapes, binds together, [and] wields the
multiplicity of the spatiotemporal elements that make up its infrastructure’.12 As the unification of less basic elements which it is
utilizing toward its end, the act is a basic unit, not to be further broken
down by analysis into even more elemental, constituent parts.
This view implies that all acts (basic and non‑basic)
are, in a sense, an agent's interference or intervention into the
‘regularities’ of the causal order which, in the absence of that interference,
would not have produced the result that the agent intends to accomplish by
means of the intervening act. The intention behind the act initiates a causal
sequence other than that
which
would otherwise have obtained (nature's normally predictable course
10 Alston, op. cit., 59. This is consistent with
Goldman's claim that a basic act, while necessarily intentional and while
causally dependent on certain processes, does not require the agent to know
about these processes in order to exemplify the act ‘at will' (Goldman, op.
cit. p. 69).
11 Edward Pols, Meditation on a Prisoner
(Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1975), p. 103.
12 Edward Pols, ‘Human Agents as Actual Beings’, Process
Studies, VIII, 2 (1978), 111.
185
of events having been interrupted in the case of an act by agent
intervention) in order to accomplish that intention. The act enters the causal
infrastructure, as it were, in order to deploy it toward a particular end and
would not have entered it without the agent intending the intervention. My arm
would not have risen (except as a sheer coincidence) unless I intended it at
that moment to rise. But the entry of the act into the infrastructure, or again
more precisely, the act's utilization of the infrastructure beginning at a
certain moment in time and space, is not itself capable of being fully
explained in terms that are exhaustively reducible to the causal factors and
regularities of the infrastructure taken in and of themselves and with
reference to nothing else. The initiation of the causal sequences, if that
initiation is a basic act, is explained only in agent‑causation terms
which refuse to be reduced to causal language alone (though causal language is
appropriate to describing the execution of the act following its initiation). I
intend the rising of my arm, the intention initiates a sequence of occurrences
which then take shape over a period of time and by means of the material
infrastructure of my body, the whole sequence (except its initiation) taking
place in accordance with natural, causal law.
According
to this way of understanding a basic act, if I as a human agent can raise my
arm basically then surely there are actions which God can perform which are
equally basic. (I am assuming, for the sake of argument, that God is an agent
and has as much, and obviously far greater, voluntary control over the world as
I apparently have over much of my own body, both my control and my body being
the necessary `causal' conditions for my performing basic actions.)
Bodies
seem to be a necessary requirement for most human basic action. ‘Descriptions
of actions that take one inside the body are more basic than their bodily
movement descriptions.’13 Or, in the words of Max Weil, ‘Our skin is the limit for
our actions’.14 But a divine agent may not need to be restricted to the
use of some body in some divine actions. Alston argues that ‘it is conceptually
possible for any change whatsoever to be the core of a basic action. Movements
of an agent's body are only what we happen to be restricted to in the human
case. Just what changes are within the basic action repertoire of a given
incorporeal agent would depend upon the nature of that agent ... a subject's
bodilessness is not a conceptual bar to the performance of basic actions by
that subject.’15 What Alston is suggesting, I think, is that the
repertoire of an agent's basic acts is determined by those things (mechanisms,
structures) over which the agent can exercise direct, not mediated, control.
Morris Weitz has noted that ‘if the criterion of a basic action shifts to what
we can and do do without doing anything else, basic
13 Hornsby, op. cit., 71..
14 Max Weil, Basic Actions: A Component Analysis
(Chicago: University of Chicago Doctoral Thesis, 1972), p. 26.
15 Alston, op. cit. p. 61.
186
actions
become coextensive with all our human abilities or powers and their particular
manifestations'.16 God, presumably, has control over the whole causal infrastructure
of the world and could, therefore, act basically upon any part of it in a way
that I could not (e.g. I cannot by a basic, act put myself on the moon 1 second
from now).
The question is whether anything theologically
significant is gained by insisting that all of God's acts are basic in
notion II's sense that they do not rely upon the causal infrastructure of the
world as the ‘act‑tree’ through which the full divine intention is
realized. Can God simply will something to happen in the world and have it
happen regardless of the causal structures of the world? Divine
intervention into these structures has been taken as a limitation on divine
power. ‘Revisionist theologians’, as Alston calls them, object to the notion
that God intervenes in history because they take such action to be ‘unworthy’
insofar as it seems to presuppose that God does not have, from all eternity,
total control over the world.17 I would suggest that this fear of intervention is also
tied in which the presumption that God acts basically and exclusively through a
notion II sense of divine basic action.
But what is unique about divine action that seems to
require (either for logical or religious reasons) that God not perform any
acts that are not basic in sense II, i.e. that are not interventions into and
utilizations of the causal structures of the world? Let us examine the alleged
parting of the waters at the Red Sea (a purely notional example) in order to
determine the need for a non‑interventionist use of basic act (II). There
are two ways in which ‘the parting’ can be understood as a basic act on the
part of God. One way is to hold that God simply wills the waters to part, and
they part, and in doing so makes no use of the causal underpinnings, the
natural infrastructure of water and wind. If God's intention is for the Hebrew
slaves to be safe on the other side of the water, God could presumably perform
a non‑interventionist basic act (II) by having them ‘de‑materialize’
at one moment and ‘materialize’ a moment later on the opposite shore (thus
bypassing what some might regard as the non‑basic act of getting them
across the water by means of having the waters part).
Either of these acts would be basic in sense I, namely
that God simply intends them to happen, and they happen. But this is really the
heart of the problem: can or must a basic act performed by a divine agent bypass
all causal mechanisms and worldly infrastructures as it is enacted, as required
by sense II ? If God has total control over the whole world, then in one sense
it is hard to know what would constitute a basic as opposed to a non‑basic
act for God. If a basic act means doing something as the root of an act‑tree,
i.e. without having to do something else first, then the Biblical narrative
seems to suggest that God's acts are primarily basic only in sense I. According
to the narrative
16 Morris Weitz, ‘The Concept of Human Action’, Philosophical
Exchange, 1 (1972), 218.
17 William P. Alston, ‘God's Action in the World’, in Divine
Nature and Human Language, op. cit. p. 210.
187
(and
all acts are embedded in narrative) God caused the winds to blow all night
prior to the waters parting at the Red Sea as a way of moving them apart even
though the origination of the use of those (or any other) causal mechanisms
is basic in sense I.
Clearly there are many things God has been credited with
intending that did not and possibly might not be able to happen without the
apparent utilization of a whole web of complex causal infrastructures. If God's
intention is the restoration of humanity to fellowship with God, then a basic
act (II) by God could simply have it be the case ‘in an instant’ that people
find themselves loving God and each other unqualifiedly. But it is questionable
whether that kind of basic act would truly be able to include the kind of
fellowship God intends, namely free and willing response by persons to God's
initiatives, not instantaneous conversion apart from their will as a direct
result of divine fiat. God's intention for universal community seems to require
an enormously long and complicated history of divine/human inter‑action
and the continual utilization by God of various means (liberation from Egypt,
covenant, exile, incarnation, etc.) to bring it to completion. Thus, why should
we regard the parting of the waters as a basic act (II) if God could have
brought the Hebrews into Palestine instantaneously simply by willing it without
utilizing any causal infrastructures (e.g. by the ‘dematerializing‑rematerializing’
route?)
According
to Alston, if the parting of the water was ‘directly under God's voluntary
control’ then ‘all God's actions might be basic actions. If any change
whatsoever could conceivably be the core of a basic action, and if God is
omnipotent, then clearly, God could exercise direct voluntary control
over every change in the world which he influences by his activity…’18 But Alston does not tell us specifically whether in this
instance the divine influence uses the infrastructures of the world or
dispenses with them. Voluntary control could apply to both basic and non‑basic
actions if the latter are dependent upon the former as an act‑tree is
dependent upon its basic‑act root. Alston seems to be quite open to the
possibility that God's voluntary control can include non‑basic actions
because he acknowledges that God ‘chooses to influence some situations indirectly
...I am quite willing to leave the decision on this one up to God’.19
If it does dispense with all intervening apparati, the
divine intention cannot even utilize something akin to telekinesis (as the
mechanism for executing the divine intention, since such a reliance upon means
defeats the purpose of appealing to a basic act). I intend to raise my
arm, and it rises ‑ God intends to part the waters, and they part. As
Alston points out, utilizing telekenesis is not necessarily a basic action
since it is the doing of something by doing something else (i.e. thinking about
doing it). 20
18 Alston, Ibid. pp. 61‑2.
19 Ibid. p. 62.
20 Ibid. p. 61.
188
But this raises the question of
whether we have a criterion for determining which acts of God are basic in
sense I and not basic in sense II and which are not basic in either sense. If
all of God's acts are basic (I), then there are no non‑basic divine acts.
But that seems a trivial truth, since all action sequences or act‑trees
begin with at least one basic act. Any agent can begin a sequence of
acts/events by simply starting it off with a basic act. In fact, every sequence
of subsequent acts/events must have its origin in a basic act (I) if we
are to avoid either an infinite regress or the denial of intentional action
entirely. But if all of God's acts are basic (I), we still have to deal
with the fact that God performs many different basic divine acts (I),
even though, in theory, any one divine act (if it were a basic act in sense II)
could accomplish the divine purpose without any further occurrences in the act-tree
(events or non‑basic acts) by means of which it is accomplished.
It seems as if God has different (though not mutually contradictory) purposes
behind His many distinct actions. In one instance God's purpose is to put the
Hebrews out of harm's way (the Exodus); in another instance, it is to give them
a law by which to live their lives in response to God (the covenant at Mt.
Sinai); in still other instances it is to encourage them to live rightly ( by
sending prophets). In many of these cases it seems the divine basic acts are
followed by divine non‑basic acts, i.e. acts that God brings about by
utilizing multiple intermediary means.
But if we assume that God has different purposes at
different times and places, then we are committed to the notion that God's
actions take account of different situations in the world. To accomplish God's purposes
requires God to act in specific ways at different times and places, usually in
response to human actions and natural events. Now, does the notion of a divine
basic act (II) help us to explain these different divine actions in a way that
explaining them simply as different non‑basic or mediated divine actions
does not?
Every act‑sequence begins with something that the
agent simply does without doing something else first, namely with a basic act
(I). The initiation of every new sequence of events requiring a causal
infrastructure would be, in this sense, a basic act (I) since an agent doesn't
have to do anything else in order to initiate a sequence of events other
than to intend the outcome which will be brought about by that sequence. The
initiation is the basic act (I), the sequence is the means for its enactment.
Now if this is the case, God's actions are basic but only in sense I: God, too,
must initiate causal chains that permit God to carry out different purposes at
different times and places by intervening in the causal processes and
regularities that otherwise would have culminated in a different outcome had
there been no intervention.
What would it mean, then, for some to argue that God
performs basic acts (II) that do not need causal chains (infrastructures) to
accomplish divine purposes? To be a basic divine act (II), on this argument, no
causal sequence
189
of events would have been utilized by God in order for the
waters to part. This means that relying on basic act II is relying on the
notion of miracle and thus dispensing with all causal intermediaries. If we
assume that God first caused the wind to blow in order to part the
waters at that exact time and place then the parting, as such, is not a basic
act (II) since it is the result of (or occurs by means of) a prior occurrence
(basic act I) which God employed in order to get the waters to part.
Of course if the blowing of the wind
turns out to have been caused by God's prior ‘exploitation’ of or intervention
into the causal mechanisms that constitute global wind patterns and other
atmospheric/climatic conditions, then neither is the wind gust a divine basic.
act. God may, on this view, have decided, as the Hebrew people were still miles
away from the sea, to disturb the climatic causal mechanisms which, without
God's disturbance of them, would have resulted in only a mild breeze flowing
across the water as the Hebrew people approached, leaving them still stranded
on the Egyptian shore. (I may have chosen to take a drug some hours before I
want my arm to rise knowing that the drug will eventually cause the firing of
appropriate neurons necessary and sufficient to cause my arm to rise just when
I intend it to rise. The rising is not, therefore, a basic act though it may
appear as such to someone who watches the arm rise without knowing about the
drug ingested earlier. The ingestion of the drug is the basic act in this
sequence.)
It is not impossible, of course, to
push the explanation of the parting back to God's decision (given his ‘well justified
belief’ that the Hebrew people would be escaping Egypt in response to God's
prior acts) to intervene in the causal structures of the world at any previous
historical/ natural point in order to begin a process by which eventually the
waters at the sea would be blown apart at just the right time. God has enough
control over these structures that the whole sequence could be understood as a
basic act. Goldman has pointed out that ‘no temporal restrictions have been
placed on the length of basic acts ... [if] it is possible for an agent to have
a single occurrent want to exemplify this act‑type, and to proceed to
exemplify it without further occurrent wants.12 But at some point we
will have to find some moment in time when the very beginning of the act or act‑tree
was agent‑initiated (in sense I), an initiatory moment of intervention
into a causal infrastructure from which the entire sequence of subsequent
events then followed in strict causal order (provided no further agent interventions
(sub‑acts) occurred to disrupt this order). At some point God would
simply have had to do something without doing something else (i.e. perform a
basic act (I)) in order to get the sequence started so that the waters would
(eventually) part and the Hebrew slaves get safely to the other side.
If God did utilize the causal mechanisms of the world in
order to produce a result which God intended, does it really matter, with
respect to defending
21 Goldman, op. cit. pp. 88‑9.
190
God's
omnipotence, whether God did this as a basic act (II) without utilization of
intermediaries or through a series of events that were initiated by a basic act
(I)? In other words, as long as the initiation of at least one act falls within
the meaning of the concept ‘basic act’ (I), is it necessary (for religious as
well as philosophical reasons) to insist that all of God's acts are
basic (II) ? If the initiation of all action sequences begin with a basic act
(I), then it is trivial and non‑informative to say that all of God's acts
are basic because every agent's action sequences have to begin with a basic act
(I). If the parting alone (no prior causal conditions issuing in the parting)
was a basic act (II) one would have to say that what happened was a miracle in
the sense of a violation of, not an intervention into, the causal
order.
But would it be any less awesome and worship‑inspiring
for God to have begun a sequence of events (the causal mechanisms behind which
God can control at will), each of which was in conformity with normal causal
conditions, that culminated in a strong wind blowing the waters apart? The
parting would no longer be a miracle (since winds parting waters is perfectly
consistent with causal law, as is an agent's utilization of those things over
which he/she has control). A recent article by two oceanographers establishes
the natural, and likely, causal conditions necessary for an explanation of the
parting of the Red Sea.22 But the initiation of the sequence of events could now
be seen simply as a basic act in sense I, the sense in which the initiation of all
acts is basic.
Certainly human basic acts are not miracles. I do not
violate causal law in raising my arm even though the initiation of the raising
is not caused by anything other than my intention to raise it. However,
causal law as such cannot predict or exhaustively explain
(without remainder or reductively) the initiation of the sequence of causal
events which permits (but does not cause) the arm to rise. Without my intention
to raise my arm, it will not go up (in this instance). By definition, an
intention is not causally predictable if I am a free agent (though it may be
reliably anticipated for other reasons, such as being in keeping with my
character as this particular type of agent, as the result of a promise I made
earlier to do just this thing, etc.) And if the initiation of the sequence of
events is not itself solely the result of prior causal sequences, then its
explanation cannot be complete or adequate solely in causal terms.
But this fact seems to suggest that the real issue here
is whether God can initiate a sequence of events that culminates in what God
intends, and that in turn suggests that God must be able to intervene in
the otherwise regular pattern of predictable causal occurrences (a pattern that
God must have both created and sustained). All action is intervention.
The regularities of the causal pattern are always predicated on the proviso,
‘provided nothing interferes’.
22 See Doron Nof and Nathan Paldo, ‘Are There Oceanographic
Explanations for the Israelites' Crossing of the Red Sea?’, Bulletin
American Meterological Society, LXXIII, 3 (1992).
191
But
interference is precisely what agents do when they initiate actions through
basic acts (I) by utilizing the causal infrastructure to carry out their
intentions. Interference neither contradicts causal law nor is subsumable under
it, since it stands ‘above’ it, capable of exploiting it in the carrying out of
intentions.
Might it not make more sense biblically and
philosophically if we think of God's acts as the utilization of various
segments of the causal order in order to achieve divine ends? Why is it
necessary or desirable to insist that God only acts by overriding, not by
utilizing, the causal mechanisms of the world? Is there anything about the
uniqueness of divine acts which is at stake here?
Is there anything God could not do in the world simply by
utilizing its causal infrastructures (total control over which God presumably has)?
If there are such limits on divine action, then one might want to appeal to
divine basic acts that would cause things to happen in the total absence of any
causal conditions or infrastructures. But what would those limits be? If God
has total control (except where God permits human freedom to function) over the
entire causal infrastructures) of the universe, then God could achieve any end
which those infrastructures permit (namely, those which are not logically or
ontologically impossible. And, remember, what those infrastructures permit must
be consistent with God's intention in creating and sustaining them). But could
God do what is now considered empirically impossible, e.g. cause a clinically
dead person to come alive after three days of biological death? Before we deny
that such a ‘miracle’ can occur, we would have to have incontrovertible grounds
for claiming that no utilization of the extraordinarily complex laws of
physics/biology by forces beyond even our capacity to imagine can bring this about.
We simply do not have such grounds. We have only just begun to penetrate the
intricate, complex, mysterious worlds of the sub‑atomic and the cosmic.
The ‘simple’ laws of the old Newtonian block‑universe have proven not to
be so simple after all. The kind of events which take place at the sub‑atomic
level as well as at the origins of the universe (in the micro‑seconds
after the initial ‘big‑bang’) are so far beyond the older ‘laws’
determining how causal structures work, that we would be well‑advised not
to claim too much for what is or is not possible in the empirical world. If
this is so, then we cannot rule out that even a ‘resurrection’ from the dead is
a utilization of causal structures (though one which we at present have no way
of understanding given the limits of contemporary empirical knowledge).
The point is that it may not be possible or necessary to
reserve space for divine basic acts (II) which override or bypass the
intervening apparati of causal mechanisms provided that God has total control
over them. Apart, then, from the necessity for each divine act having a
beginning which does not depend upon anything other than God's intention to
begin it (and intentional beginnings of this kind (I) are a necessity for all
acts, divine or
192
human), divine
acts need not all be basic in sense II with the possible exception of the
original creative act that brings into existence all the causal mechanisms by
which all future acts will be carried out.
Department
of Religion,
Trinity
College,
Hartford,
Connecticut
06106‑3100