“Who Am I?” Project 7 - Moderate Divine Creation: Part I

The last post argued that we should not affirm a maximalist understanding of divine creation because it destroys any possible sense of self that a person could have and makes God responsible for everything, including our own bad “choices” and the very, very bad things that happen in the world.  So, perhaps the better position is that God has what might be called a “moderate” influence on the design and outcomes of creation.

Moderate divine creation tries to suggest that God has considerable influence on the planning of creation, mostly by designing the things in the world and by influencing but not determining their actions.  Moderate is different from maximalist insofar as there is understood to be some level of freedom, at least for human beings, in the way the world unfolds.  Moderate is different from minimalist divine creation because there is still a lot of divine planning regarding what things are and what they should become, whereas minimalist divine creation waits to see what creation will become rather than planning many of the details in advance.

Before continuing, I want to emphasize that the difference between affirming “moderate” divine creation and “minimalist” divine creation is probably the single most important philosophical and theological fork in my answer to the question “Who Am I?”  The moderate view of divine creation usually includes the idea that each of us has a soul, or essence.  I do not think souls or specific essences exist.  The massive bias in favor of the idea that we each have a divinely crafted identity is easily the most important bias we have to overcome to think clearly about God and the world.

As just suggested, the idea of moderate divine creation introduces the idea of essences.  Essences are both descriptive and normative.  In a world defined by essences, each thing has as essence, a way of being.  This essence identifies both what something is and what it should become.  Thus, something might be a horse, which would differentiate it from dogs, amoebas, trees and tin cans, and it can become more and more (or less and less) of what a horse should be, whatever that is.  In moderate divine creation, God both designs essences and gives them out in the process of creation.

The most famous version of essence thinking in Western philosophy is Plato’s theory of the forms.  For Plato, the forms are eternal, not created by God.  For many Christians, especially those influenced by the writings of Thomas Aquinas, essences are both eternal and created.  They are eternal in the eternal mind of God, and they are created insofar as they come to be in the material world.

There are many problems with the idea of essences.  I want to break them down into two kinds: metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical.  The remainder of this post will consider the first two types problems.  The next post will reflect on the ethical problems.

The biggest problem with essences is the problem of differentiation.  Consider dogs.  If we suggest that there is a dog essence, why not also a poodle essence, and then also an essence for each kind of poodle, and then also an essence for each actual poodle?  The more essences differentiate, the closer we get to a maximalist understanding of divine creation.  Nothing is left for the world to do but to unfold exactly as God has planned it.

If there is no good way to know how detailed essences get, we also have no reason to have any confidence that we have figured out what defines a specific essence.  This is the epistemological problem with essences.  We can think essences exist, but we cannot be sure that we have ever identified one.  As we shall see in the next post, this has not stopped countless claims, usually by people with a vested interest in promoting a certain vision of society, from insisting they know what defines this or that essence, especially when considering the essence of human beings.  I think the problem of knowing and so identifying essences is an insurmountable problem for moderate divine creation.  If we cannot identify them, then we have no good reason to think the world is made out of them.

Essences also need something in which they inhere, something that they can influence.  This something is often defined as “matter.”  But matter so understood has the strange property of being nothing at all without essences, so one quickly begins to wonder why it needs to be posited in the first place.  As we will see later on, I think one can make sense of non-essential qualities that are simply conditions, and so powers, in reality.

There is a “top-down” bias in most understandings of essences suggesting that a blueprint of some kind is required to explain how things in the world come to be what they are.  This bias is understandable for at least four reasons.  First, essentially everything we create we do so with a plan of some kind in mind beforehand, so it stands to reason that God creates this way, as well.  Second, God is usually understood as all-knowing and perfectly wise, so it seems natural to assume that God’s relation to creation would be that of a perfect planner.  Third, essences would seem to explain the various forms of order in the world.  This top-down dimension of creation has become especially popular in recent years by those who present so-called cosmic fine-tuning arguments where the physical parameters of the universe are said to fit so well together that only a divine planner could explain this fit.  Finally, biblical accounts of both creation and God’s action in general portray a God who plans.  Essences are just an obvious way to explain this divine planning.

As we shall see two posts from now, I think this top-down bias in our understanding of divine creation is mistaken.  For the moment, however, I want to highlight one final metaphysical problem with moderate divine creation understood in terms of essences, the problem of explaining exactly what creation is in the first place.

Many philosophically inclined Christians affirm that all essences are perfectly and eternally realized in God.  They do this to protect God’s perfection.  They want to avoid the idea that God lacks anything and so avoid suggesting that God is somehow imperfect or can somehow “need” to grow in goodness.  But this leaves the status of the created world in doubt.  If the reality of the world can add nothing to God, then the world is nothing at all.  This is basic algebra.  If G (God) + W (World) = G, then W = 0.

There are many philosophical and religious traditions that claim the world as we know it is some kind of illusion.  Given how much suffering and evil exists in the world, I can understand why someone might think this way.  But the world is also filled with a tremendous amount of goodness, and I hesitate to affirm any worldview suggesting that this goodness is just an illusion.  I don’t think God creates illusions.