Most people agree that one cannot have circularity in the order of explanation when one keeps the type of explanation fixed. Some like me think one cannot have circularity in the order of explanation at all. I argued for this thesis in my previous post today. Now I want to draw an interesting application.
On one influential (and I think exegetically correct, pace Eleonore Stump) reading of Aquinas, God decides what our free choices will be. Our free choices cannot be determined by created causes, but they are determined by God. This is because God’s causation is primary causation which is of a different sort from the secondary causation which is creaturely causation. God can primarily cause you to freely secondarily cause something, and this is how providence and free will interact. Often the analogy between an author and a character is given: the author decides what the character will freely do and this does not infringe on the character’s freedom.
But now observe this (which was brought home to me by a paper of one of our grad students). On this picture, God will presumably sometimes providentially make earlier actions happen because of later ones. Thus, God may want you to perform some heroic self-sacrifice in ten years. So, right now God prepares you for this by having you freely engage in small self-sacrifices now. In the “because” corresponding to the explanatory order of providence and primary causation, we thus have:
- You engage in small self-sacrifices because you will engage in a great self-sacrifice.
However, divine primary causation does not undercut secondary causation, and we have the standard Aristotelian story of habituation at the level of secondary causation in light of which we have:
- You will engage in a great self-sacrifice because you are engaging in small self-sacrifices.
These explanations form a heterotypic explanatory loop (i.e., we have explanations of two different sorts in opposite directions). But if I am right that no explanatory loop is possible, the above story is not possible. However, there is nothing to rule out the above story if the above Thomistic account of primary and secondary causation’s role in providence is correct. Hence, I think we should reject that account.
14 comments:
Do you think that Thomism as a whole can work without the primary / secondary causation model? It seems that if God is truly pure act and all things have their existence only because of God then it is difficult to see how anything could occur without God primarily causing it. If I freely choose to do something that God does not cause then it seems that I am influencing Gods knowledge in a way. I choose A because God knows (caused) my choice of A. It seems unfitting to say that God knows I chose A because I chose A. Perhaps it would be less costly to simply say that primary and secondary explanations are not in fact circular?
I think it's perfectly fine to say that our choices are influencing God's knowledge, as long as we have an extrinsic model of God's knowledge so that this does not mean God is intrinsically affected. It's interesting to note that at Summa Theologiae I.14.13 when Thomas discusses divine knowledge of contingent things, his primary model is Boethius' vision model on which God from eternity "glances" at creation and sees how it is. This model suggests that God sees what he sees because creation is what it is rather than the other way around as on the production model of divine knowledge. I don't deny that the production model may be present elsewhere in Aquinas, but it's not so central that when he addresses the precise question of knowledge of contingents he feels obligated to bring it up.
It also seems that without the primary / secondary model God has less control over creation. Maybe God can set initial conditions and then make adjustments throughout history in order to steer events towards the outcome he wants, but with free will and quantum indeterminacy it seems that there is always the chance that Gods desire is frustrated. Do you think it is better to keep primary / secondary causation model and make an exception for circularity between primary and secondary explanations, or to get rid of the primary / secondary causation model and rule out all circular explanations?
God can always override a chancy event. Thus, quantum indeterminacy is not a problem. God can also override free will, but the cost is higher--loss of freedom. I could imagine that sometimes God's plan requires you to do A. First God gives you a chance to do A freely. If you don't, God gives you some additional motivation, and more and more motivation. If you keep on freely not doing A, God makes you do A.
Yes, that's a disadvantage.
But a big advantage is being able to make use of free will theodicies. And it is very, very uncomfortable to think that God primarily decides on people performing sinful actions, even if God doesn't cause the actions qua sinful (i.e., God causes their positive aspects).
What do you think of the idea that primary causation and secondary causation are different enough to make an exception to the rule that there cannot be any sort of circles of explanation? It seems that if primary and secondary causes are very different things then maybe their explanations are very different things as well and the circularity wouldn’t be a problem.
That might be an OK move if that was the only problem.
But losing free will components to theodicies is a really big problem.
Another one is this. If Necessarily(p if and only if q), then the probability of p = the probability of q. But on the model, for any chancy quantum event E, Necessarily(God wills E iff E occurs). Thus, the probability that God wills E = the probability of E. But the probability of E is given by physics. So, the probability that God wills E is that which is given by physics! And it's just wrong to think that God's actions have numerical probabilities, especially ones science discovers.
I see how the free will component helps with evil but I’m not so sure that it bothers me if God chooses all of our free actions. If we are all limited imitations of gods perfect being then it seems necessary that we would all be lacking in some way or another. If God chooses to create limited creatures perhaps it is unavoidable that those creatures will suffer due to their imperfect natures. This doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with God but is simply a part of what it is to be a limited being. Regarding the problem with chancy events and Gods actions having numerical probabilities, Dr Koons has an interesting paper about that called Reconciling Meticulous Divine Providence with Objective Chance.
OK, let me push harder on the sin side. Suppose Alice intends that Bob suffer pointlessly (and hence tortures him). Intending something is a positive act of thought. Any positive act is chosen by God on this view. Thus God chooses that Alice intend that Bob suffer pointlessly. But there is something quite bad about deliberately making someone form an intention that one knows to be intrinsically wicked. And the intention that someone suffer pointlessly is intrinsically wicked.
Granted, it is possible to intentionally make someone form an intention that is in fact intrinsically wicked without intending the intrinsic wickedness of the intention. But it seems that both are wrong.
Alex,
How do you make sense of divine causality and human freedom? Even if God doesn’t decide our free decisions, does He still create them ex nihilo or cause them?
Don’t you think that God causing positive aspects of sinful actions is more in line with plane-reading of, say, Romans 9?
God concurrently cooperates with us, giving causal oomph to our causal power. I don't know more than that!
Daniyal:
It fits well with Romans 9, but poorly with texts about God's goodness and rigtheousness. So everybody has to do some exegetical work.
It occurs to me that it might not make sense to suppose there is explanatory priority within God's plan on the primary/secondary causation approach. Instead, it seems likely that the whole plan is willed as a single unit, for the sake of its holistic goodness.
This would help with the problem I offered in this post as follows. If A secondarily causes B and God wills both A and B on account of the holistic value of A and B, then anything that contributes to that holistic value is explanatorily relevant. But one of the things that contributes to that holistic value is that B is being fitting given A (since the effect is a fulfillment of a teleology in the cause). Thus, A is explanatorily relevant to B. On this story, we wouldn't say that A explains B, but that A partly explains B. But that is probably what every theist who believes in divine concurrence has to say, since the causal oomph of causes requires God's cooperation.
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