“Who Am I?” Project 5 - Theism vs. Deism
The most common misunderstanding I encounter when I talk about Divine creation is what might be called the domino fallacy. It is sometimes assumed that the only thing a necessary reality needs to do in order explain the existence of everything else is to get the process of the world going, just like knocking down the first in a very long chain of dominos. This idea even has an impressive pedigree in Aristotle’s appeal to God as the “Prime Mover” or “uncaused cause” of all that exists.
When conditions and causes are confused, it can seem that conditions have only a temporal rather than a defining (ontological) relationship to the realities of the world. When an unconditioned reality is understood as an uncaused cause it can seem at least possible to imagine that the unconditioned reality no longer has any necessary relationship to the world that was set in motion. This is the defining feature of deism. Here God designs the universe, sets it in motion, and need have no further involvement with it. Deism has frequently been the position of those who are not ready to get rid of God altogether but who think that God is not involved in our daily lives.
Additionally, thinking about God as the first cause of all things raises the conundrum of explaining why the so-called uncaused cause does not itself need a causal explanation. Even as astute a thinker as the Dalai Lama seems think this is a compelling argument against the existence of God.
Causes can change what conditions exist. In fact, there really is nothing else to causation other than a change in conditions. Conditions simply are or are not the case. Science is excellent at describing causes because it describes relative changes over time. Conditions are perhaps best described as powers, powers that enable particular states of affairs. An unconditioned conditioned is a power that does not depend on any other power to exist. An unconditioned condition enables all other things to exist. However, it does not need another power in order exist. This makes it necessary and everlasting. If you think the idea of an unconditioned power is nonsensical, you need to explain why. I do not find it to be so.
Conditions can also have different levels of simplicity. Here, simplicity does not mean the opposite of complexity; instead, it means inclusivity. A quantum field is more simple than either an electron or a proton because it is compatible with both and is a condition for the possibility of both. Quantum fields include both protons and electrons, but protons and electrons exclude each other (this is an example I have drawn from Robert Spitzer, S.J.’s writings).
The simplest of all realities would also be the most inclusive of all realities. The unconditioned condition is exactly such a reality. It is compatible with all other things because it makes all other things possible.
Some who have heard me make arguments for divine creation quickly assume that I am a deist. This is emphatically not the case. I am a theist who understands God as the power than enables all other things to exist. Thus, God is constantly present in every nook and cranny of reality.
Here is the really important part. As the condition of all other things, God is not merely present with other realities, God is present in all realities. God is the essential foundation of everything. As a condition, God is a power within everything. When people ask me to explain why thinking God exists matters, the first answer I sometimes give is that the world floats on God, but this is misleading as it suggests a separation between that which floats and that on which something floats. The world does not float on God, the world floats within God.
As I will explain later, in addition to floating within God, I also think the world is guided by God (think lighthouse) and encouraged by God (think wind). But those posts are down the road.
The world is a gift from God. Without God, the world does not exist. I am an emergent product of this world. My life is therefore not possible without God. My life, like the rest of the world, is a gift from God. This is the first answer to the question, “Who am I?”
Some might object that they can consider their lives to be gifts without God. This is certainly true, but I think adding God to the discussion is important, and not doing so is an oversight. First, when we get gifts, we like to know who gave us the gift. Even anonymous gifts are understood to come from someone caring about us. To say that our life is a gift and then to be uninterested in where that gift came from seems strange.
Second, what it means to call our lives a gift with or without God is that it enables us to live, and to live is to pursue purposes. If we are uninterested in where the gift of our life came from, then we tend to think that our life has no purpose as such. We can do with the gift of our life as we please. This is no doubt descriptively true; we can be indifferent to the purpose of our life. However, it is not clearly normatively true and I think, in fact, it is not true. We should not be indifferent to the purposes we pursue. We should want to pursue good purposes, not bad ones. Believing that God cares which purposes we pursue is an important consequence of understanding our lives as gifts from God and as dependent on God.
In coming posts I will consider some basic questions like why we cannot see God (short answer: physical things exclude other physical things and God excludes nothing) and why God cannot move things in the world (short answer, the world is made of nests of order not Legos). Next up, however, I want to explain how my understanding of divine creation in the tradition of creation ex nihilo is a minimalist understanding of creation and why that matters.