Divine Providence and Human Freedom

 
Summa Theologiae I, Q22, and SCG III.71-74
 
God’s providence means that God is intelligently ordering all things toward their ultimate end. To do this, it is not sufficient that He simply create things—He must also order their interactions. Since God is the cause of the whole creation, He necessarily moves the whole creation to its ultimate end, which consists in good overall order.
 
Agents order their actions to some ends. Since God’s action extends all the way to every detail of creation, every such detail must be ordered to God’s ends. God’s knowledge and agency extend to particular things, and not just to general kinds of things. And, as we saw last time, His agency always produces definite effects.
 
In reply to objection 1 of article 2, Thomas embraces the radical conclusion that there is nothing that happens by chance in relation to God, since all the eventualities are foreseen by God. It seems to me that this moves too fast. It is true that all coincidences are foreseen by God, but it doesn’t seem to follow that they cannot happen by chance. If a coincidence is the result of God’s moving two or more things toward distinct ends, and neither of the ends entails the coincidence, then it seems that we could call the coincidence a matter of chance, even if God foresees that it would happen. God can foresee something as happening without intending it either as a means or an end.
 
In his reply to objection 2 in the same article, Thomas argues that God permits all of the defects in creation for the sake of some good of the universe as a whole. For example, lions would cease to exist if there were no slaying of animals. I don’t think that this entails (or is meant to entail) that this is the best of all possible worlds—merely that there must be some reason for the existence of all of the privations within creation. As Augustine said, God is able to bring (some) good from evil, but it doesn’t follow that each evil is necessary in order to maximize total goodness.
 
I question whether Thomas has established that there is such a thing as the “good of the universe.” The universe, or the totality of creation, is not a single substance. Consequently, we can’t be sure that it has its own final cause or natural end. Created things have a common end – which is God’s glory, the manifestation of His self-diffusive goodness, but that doesn’t imply that they collectively have a single end, as Thomas seems to assume.
 
There are three plausible candidates for a global good or end: justice in the distribution of benefits, the variety of modes of participating in God, and the overall beauty of the universe. On the first point, it seems plausible to think that things must already form a unity or a system of some kind, before the question of justice can even arise. If there are rational animals in the Andromeda galaxy, for example, does it make sense to ask whether God has exercised distributive justice in giving goods to them and to us? Can we ask whether God has exercised distributive justice between me and a vein of coal in Pennsylvania? On the second point, I’m not sure that variety as such is a good. It seems to like the finitude and definition that is generally required of goods—there is no maximum degree of variety that the world could contain. Perhaps it is better to say that God created each kind of thing simply because it is good for such things to exist, with variety as a mere by-product. And in the case of beauty, it seems that something must possess a certain kind of unity in order to count as beautiful. I will grant that a plurality of substances can be collectively beautiful, like the stars in the earth’s sky, but there must be at least a unified standpoint from which the collective can be considered, and I’m not sure that there is such a thing with respect to the universe as a whole.
 
The question of whether the universe as a whole has its own end or value is important. Thomas infers that God’s providence consists in a kind of unified plan or blueprint for the entire cosmos, rather than a library of plans or intentions for each substance and unified system of substances. One might respond: if God has multiple plans or intentions, must He not coordinate them, to avoid internal conflict in His intentions? Yes, but coordination isn’t the same thing as consolidation. We can imagine, I think, a plurality of divine plans existing in a degree of mutual contingency and independence from one another.
 
If God has a single, unified plan for creation, then it must have been in effect from the very first moment of creation. Since God’s plan is necessarily effective, and if (as St. Thomas teaches) the plan is complete in every detail, it is hard to see how this can be compatible with genuine contingency in the future. In contrast, if God has multiple, mutually compatible plans, then there is no reason that such plans could not come “on line” at different points in history. Such a plan goes into effect as soon as its earliest elements are actualized, but not before that point. Prior to actualization, the plan would be contingent relative to the events so far realized. Of course, all the plans are equally in effect from the perspective of God’s eternity, but that should be compatible with a changing status relative to the progress of time.
 
William of Ockham introduced a useful distinction concerning future facts. Some of these are hard facts and others are soft. So, for example, let’s suppose that it is genuinely a matter of contingency whether the Astros win their pennant this year. Let’s suppose that in fact they won’t. Then the truth of the statement ‘The Astros won’t win the pennant in 2021’ is a soft fact about the future. In contrast, let’s suppose that God has determined that one day the Anti-Christ will emerge. Then the truth of the statement ‘The Anti-Christ will emerge’ is a hard fact about the future. All facts about the present and past are now hard facts. So, it is now a hard fact that dinosaurs once lived or that the Astros won the 2017 World Series. Similarly, Ockham argues, facts about God’s will and knowledge concerning the future can be either hard or soft. As time passes, some of these facts harden. This does not involve any real change in God, since His act of will and knowledge is not internally modified by their objects.
 
In the reply to objection 4, Thomas considers the problem of reconciling human freedom with divine providence. He argues that human freedom consists in the fact that human beings are not naturally determined to a unique course of action in each circumstance. This lack of determinism applies only within the created order—it does not exclude God’s unique mode of causality (primary causation). “Everything happening from the exercise of human freedom must be subject to divine providence.” God’s providence extends in a “more excellent way” to the just than to the wicked. He can be said to have “abandoned” (dimittere) them, although they are not altogether excluded from His Providence, since that would mean their annihilation.
 
Reply 5: “Since a rational creature has, through its free will, control (dominium) over its actions, it is subject to divine providence in an especial manner (speciali modo).” I think this means that God’s agency does not exclude our own “control” or dominion over our actions. Instead, as I suggested before, we exercise a kind of joint dominion, neither excluding the other. When we do wrong, this is imputed to us and not to God as fault, because of the difference in our respective intentions. Compare Genesis 50:20 (Joseph to his brothers): “But as for you, you meant evil against me [by selling me to the Egyptians], but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.”
 
In article 4, Thomas explains that at times God governs the creation through intermediaries. This reflects God’s strength and not His weakness. It is not that He needs such intermediate causes, but that He further enhances the glory of His creation by bestowing on creatures the dignity of real causality.
 
The role of secondary causes in explaining evil is explained by Thomas in SCG I, chapter 71. A defect that is produced by some secondary or instrumental cause is not always attributed to the primary cause. Think of a skilled artisan using a flawed tool.
 
But isn’t God responsible for any defect in His secondary agents? No, because all creatures are necessarily “defective” or imperfect in some respect. No rational creature, for example, can take into account every possibly relevant factor. Moreover, the excellence of creation requires that creatures exist at a variety of levels or grades of excellence.
 
The goodness of God’s government of creation requires that He allow things to work according to their own, limited nature. Otherwise, creation would be a kind of sham, a world of mere shadow-boxing.
 
It is interesting that Thomas never appeals in these articles (as far I can tell) to God’s timelessness, in the way that Boethius does in The Consolation of Philosophy. Neither does Thomas bring to bear the implications of his strong doctrine of creation—namely, the fact that the content of God’s will and knowledge are extrinsic to His own being. He does insist that God’s causality of future things does not take away their real contingency in the circumstances, but he does seem to think that future contingencies are already in some way certain and immutably fixed. However, I don’t think that this follows. From our point of view, within the flow of time, future events are really and not just apparently contingent and indeterminate. It is true that for God (in eternity) all things happen “at once”, past, present, and future, but that does not contradict that fact that at the present time the past is fixed and the future is largely “open”. If a future event is really now contingent, then so is God’s eternal knowledge and will with respect to that event. As time passes, God’s will gradually shifts (in its objects) from contingency to necessity, but this is merely a Cambridge change in God, with no intrinsic modification required.
 
God can make certain future events necessary, by promising them to us or by inspiring prophets with infallible foreknowledge of them. So, for example, Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denials were fixed in advance by prophecy, as was Cyrus’s decree to allow the Jews to return to Canaan. Similarly, the future advent of the Anti-Christ, and the Second Coming of Christ are fixed and certain. But much of the future is genuinely open to alternatives, depending on our choices and chance events.
 
To clarify this point, let’s look at Peter van Inwagen’s consequence argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. I will modify van Inwagen’s argument to make it apply to God’s Providence, conceived of as a fixed and comprehensive plan for the future.
 
1.God has (in eternity) a Plan according to which I will do x tomorrow (where x is some arbitrary free action of mine).
2.It’s not currently up to me whether God has such a plan.
3.Necessarily, if God has such a Plan, then I will do x tomorrow. (God’s providence is infallibly effective).
4.Therefore, it’s not currently up to me whether I will do x tomorrow. (By 1-3 and van Inwagen’s transfer principle)
 
I think we should deny that premise 2 is generally true. Whether I do x tomorrow can be both up to me and up to God, and there is no determinate divine Plan already in effect that settles the matter one way or the other. To think that God has to plan ahead in order to govern the creation with coherent providence is to be guilty of a kind of anthropomorphism. God is infinite in wisdom, and so He can do whatever “planning” is needed on the fly, so to speak.
 
Presumably, God has some plans about creation that are not currently up to me. For example, His eternal plans about what happened in the past are currently beyond my control. Let Plan-Minus stand for the sum total of God’s plans that are currently beyond my control. Here’s another version of the consequence argument:
 
1.It’s not currently up to me what God’s Plan-Minus contains. (By definition of Plan-Minus)
2.Necessarily, if God has Plan-Minus, then His comprehensive Plan for all of history must include my doing x tomorrow. (Any initial segment of God’s Plan entails all of its successive elements.)
3.Necessarily, if God’s comprehensive Plan for all of history includes my doing x tomorrow, then I will do x tomorrow. (God’s providence is infallibly effective).
4.Therefore, it’s not currently up to me whether I will do x tomorrow. (By 1-3 and van Inwagen’s transfer principle)
 
Once again, I think we should deny 2. This is where it is crucial to determine whether God has simply a single Plan, each part of which requires all of the other parts, or whether God has multiple partial plans that are mutually contingent. If the latter, then we can ask when a particular partial plan has become the external object of God’s will. We can ask, for example, when a particular person became elect or reprobate, and we can ask what contingent events contributed to this fact.