Creation and the Sovereignty of God

2010

INTRODUCTION

This book is a study of the concept of God as creator and of problems that attend that concept. In part, it represents an application of insights I hope I have gleaned from my work in the theory of human action. More importantly, it is an exercise in what is often called perfect being theology. I wish to defend the thesis that God is an absolutely perfect being, who as creator exercises complete sovereignty over all that was, is, and will be. This sovereignty, I argue, extends not only over all that comprises the physical world, but also over human decisions and actions, over what is moral and what is not, over conceptual reality, and even reaches to God's own nature. This kind of position has not predominated among philosophers of religion in recent years, and it faces significant difficulties—especially having to do with creaturely freedom and responsibility, the problem of evil, God's own freedom, and the stability of conceptual truth. But the idea that God is perfect and absolutely sovereign lies very close to the heart of the Western theological tradition. It deserves a vigorous defense. I hope to provide one, and to offer plausible solutions to the problems it encounters.

Chapter 1 presents an argument for the existence of a creator. I hold that such arguments should not aim for deductive certainty, since doing so diverts attention to fruitless disputes over infinite regresses and the principle of sufficient reason. Instead, the argument for a creator should be inductive, founded on the idea that the creative activity of a personal God counts as the best explanation for the existence of the world. The strongest competing hypothesis is that the world is self-propagating: its existence at any moment is to be explained by some causal activity through which the past is able to confer existence on the present and, thereby, on the future. I argue that there is no such process in our experience, and that the scientific laws often supposed to undergird such a process are not even diachronic. Rather, the creative activity of God is alone responsible for the existence of the world in its entire history. In short, God not only produces the world in the beginning, if it has one; he also sustains it throughout its existence. This leads to a problem that is often raised against sustenance theories, namely that they render natural causation otiose, thereby forcing us either to treat it as redundant or to adopt an occasionalist cosmology. This dilemma is addressed in chapter 2, where several efforts to resolve it are surveyed. The best solution, I argue, is to adopt a view of natural causation that treats it not as a process of existence-conferral but as consisting in the transfer of conserved quantities such as energy and momentum. God alone is the cause of the existence of things; indeed, to provide for their existence is precisely his role as primary cause.

Chapter 3 defends the thesis that God is timelessly eternal. Such an understanding of God's nature is called for if he is to have sovereignty over time rather than being subject to it. God's eternity does not, however, mean that temporal becoming is in any way illusory. Time is a legitimate aspect of the created world. The concept of a timeless God is defended against objections that such a God would be unable to cause temporal effects, and that he could not know the truth value of tensed propositions.

Chapters 4 to 7 concern the problem of evil. In chapter 4 this problem is described, along with the standard free-will defense against it. The question of God's omniscience and sovereignty in creating free creatures who sin is examined, and the two most common answers to this question are rejected. One answer, sometimes associated with Boethius, points to God's timelessness and argues that this means his knowledge of our actions is not truly ‘foreknowledge,’ so that his omniscience poses no threat to our freedom. But this view fails to accord God full sovereignty as creator, and introduces passivity into him as knower. The other solution is the Molinist one, according to which God knows of our actions in advance via middle knowledge. This, however, deprives God of omnipotence by calling for there to be some possible worlds he cannot create. It also encounters problems in the grounding of so-called counterfactuals of freedom, as well as failing to explain how such propositions could be known by God prior to creation. The overall conclusion of chapter 4 is that the standard free-will defense fails. In chapter 5 the question of creaturely freedom and its relation to divine sovereignty is examined. Freedom, it is argued, cannot consist in an exercise of agent-causation whereby we confer existence on our own actions. God alone, acting as first cause in creation, is the cause of all that exists. This includes exercises of creaturely will, over which he is completely sovereign. Yet in being creatively responsible for our actions, God does not act upon us in the way natural causes would if worldly determinism held sway over our decisions and actions. This makes it possible to uphold a notion of freedom which, I argue, renders us legitimately autonomous, but is still fully compatible with God's absolute sovereignty.

Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the theodicy first of sin, and then of suffering. The sinfulness of sin, it is argued, consists in a deficit of lawfulness; it lies in a rebellion against God that is not willed for its own sake, but occurs because we place our own perceived good above God's commands. Yet sin also sets the stage for our entering into true friendship with God. This is because in order to make an informed decision to accept God's offer of friendship, rational agents must understand what it means to be at enmity with him—something they come to know by sinning. When, however, the sinner surrenders his autonomy to God in repentant conversion, the rebellion of sin is defeated in the sense articulated by Roderick Chisholm: sin becomes part of a greater good that is conceptually impossible without its occurrence. The theme of defeat is continued in the theodicy of suffering that is offered in chapter 7. Here it is suggested that a major enterprise of creation is the defeat of evil, and that this would not be possible if suffering were minimized in the world, as proponents of the argument from evil would wish. Suffering is defeated through our efforts to alleviate it, and through the moral betterment we achieve thereby. Seemingly gratuitous suffering may be addressed in these terms also, as being conducive to the full and final surrender of the sinner's autonomy to God, when the sinner abandons any pretense even to question the divine will.

Chapter 8 addresses the claim that God cannot be free in creating the world, since his perfect goodness would drive him to create the best world. Solutions to this problem that deny that there is a single best world are rejected. The correct approach, it is argued, is to realize that God does not create the world from a plan, but spontaneously, in a manner that is analogous to human artistic endeavors. Thus, since there is no prior plan, no deliberation is involved, and motives of goodness on God's part cannot be controlling. Indeed, even to think of God's action as guided by motives of desire is to introduce passivity into him, which traditional theology would reject. All the same, God is perfectly good. But his goodness is owing entirely to the way he acts; it does not lie in prior motives or propensities.

A consequence of this approach to God's freedom as creator is that God must create the natures of things as well as things themselves. This same conclusion can be reached by another route, traced in chapter 9, where a modified version of divine-command ethics is developed. It is argued that practical rationality demands that morality be presented to us in imperatives; moreover, these imperatives must originate with God, lest he himself be subordinate to them. God's commands cannot, however, be arbitrary add-ons to creation: they must be anchored in the natures of things, and available to everyone's conative awareness. Thus, while morality is founded in commands that originate with God, those commands constitute natural laws, of which we can become aware through our experience of the world.

The claim that God is creatively responsible for the natures of things amounts to saying he is the creator of the conceptual order along with the natural and moral orders. This is because in creating the natures of things God is creating universals—and with them, the entire conceptual realm. The ramifications of this view, which is sometimes known as absolute creation, are developed in chapters 10 and 11. The first addresses abstracta having to do with things other than God. What it means to claim in this context that such entities are eternal and necessary is explained. It is further argued that Descartes was wrong to suppose that if the thesis of absolute creation is correct, then what we think of as necessary truths—for example, that triangles have three sides—might have been otherwise. Rather, triangularity itself comes onto the scene only with the creation of triangles, and its relation to three-sidedness is fixed in the act of creation itself. Prior to creation there is no triangularity to be spoken of, and consequently, there can be no prior modal facts about it. Thus, while God does indeed create triangularity, there is no possibility that triangularity could have been other than it is.

Chapter 11 extends this treatment of abstracta to those that pertain to God's own nature, in connection with developing a version of the doctrine of divine simplicity. God, it is suggested, should be viewed as an actual state of affairs consisting in a single, timelessly eternal act of willing. Among other things this act is one of willing, as creator, the existence of the world; in actuality, however, all that pertains to God—all that he is—is comprised in this act, which as an act of willing is also an act of knowing what is willed. Accordingly, God's complete omniscience and sovereignty are comprised in this act. Furthermore, as an act of will God displays the features of voluntariness that were described earlier in chapter 5. Thus, although he is not self-creating in the sense of conferring existence on himself, God can correctly be seen as voluntarily undertaking his nature—that is, as freely meaning to be all that he is. Yet although God freely undertakes his nature, it is wrong to think his nature might have been different in any way. Rather, the situation here is the same as with triangles. Prior (in the logical sense) to God himself being on hand, there is no nature of God to be discussed, and once he is on hand his nature is settled. The upshot of this is that there are no de re modal facts about God. In himself, he simply is what he is, and the necessity of the de dicto claims in which we describe his nature is consequent upon his being, not prior to it. Thus all that is, and even God's own being, falls under God's omniscient and sovereign will.

Exercises in philosophical theology often face the problem that although they can be valuable and even inspiring to believers of a reflective bent, they tend to characterize God in ways that are challenging. The resultant danger is that some readers may be left wondering what has happened to the personal, loving, interactive God of common piety. To the extent that my own efforts court this danger, I can only apologize. I have never thought that religion is held in place by a few arguments for the existence of God, a handbook of apologetics, and some timely invocation of the traditions of formal theology. These can help, but what holds religion in place is above all the experience of believers—who, I have become more and more convinced, do not live in the same world that unbelievers inhabit. Believers understand things differently, and their outward and inward experience are alike felt to manifest the presence of a personal God. The aim of the present work is to consider what lies beneath the surface of that experience, in an effort to understand how the God of the believer can also be the God of the philosopher and theologian. I hope it can be seen that a God who sustains every instant of our existence can also treat us with complete love and providence. My claim is that he does. Nothing comes to us apart from God's will; he offers us an autonomous opportunity to partake of his friendship, and with it to share in the work of creation through the defeat of evil. Nothing in this takes away the need for faith. But our faith, if my argument succeeds, is in a God who is the foundation of all that is right and good, who as creator is responsible not only for our existence but for our very nature, and who is himself the act of a knowing will that at once transcends and provides for all that is. The reader must of course judge whether this can be the God of simple, pious believers. I think he is.

One

THE CASE FOR A CREATOR

This book is about the concept of a creator as it has been usually construed in the Western theological tradition, broadly speaking. I wish to explore the idea that the world and all that pertains to it—indeed, anything that exists in any way—owes its being and sustenance to the act of an all-powerful being whose own existence requires no explanation, and whose nature is as perfect as we can conceive it to be. I shall argue that the existence and act of such a creator dovetails perfectly with a properly scientific conception of the world, that it supports a robust conception of human free agency, that it permits a satisfying theodicy, and that it ultimately leads to the classical conception of God as a perfectly simple yet personal being. This project is best begun by arguing that the world is indeed a product of creation. Efforts to demonstrate that this is so tend to fall under two major headings. Cosmological arguments cite as evidence the sheer existence of things, and contend that it may be accounted for by the activity of an all-powerful creator. Teleological arguments dwell on the structure or design of the world, holding that this is to be accounted for by postulating an intelligent designer. I will have an occasional remark on teleology in this chapter, but my main purpose here is to develop an argument of the first kind: I maintain that the best—indeed, to our knowledge, the only—adequate explanation for the existence of the world is the creative action of an all-powerful, personal being of the sort we call God.

Self-Existence

What is essential to cosmological arguments is their contention that the existence of the world is owing to the creative activity of a being whose existence requires no explanation, and who has certain other attributes called for in a creator. At the least, the list of such attributes must include overwhelming power; but it usually includes much else as well, in particular certain features associated with personality. Above all, the creator is supposed to have a will, and the capacity for knowledge and intention that goes with its employment. What ‘the world’ means in such arguments may vary. In the fullest sense, it means everything other than God: the physical universe that we inhabit—along with any other universes that are actual, if that happens to be the case—as well as at least some non-physical realms of being, such as heaven and hell. Eventually, I shall argue that the creative activity of God also gives rise to moral right and wrong, and to the realm of abstracta: numbers, universals, propositions, and so forth. But it is best to begin simply, with the world of everyday experience. What is important about that world, according to the cosmological argument, is that nothing about its descriptive nature explains its existence. That is, the world of our experience is in no sense self-derived or self-existing. If its existence is to be explained at all, that explanation must proceed in terms of something that transcends it and causes it to be.

This is not to suggest that no one has ever inclined toward the opposite view. It has been suggested, perhaps most famously by Hume,¹ that the world might exist necessarily, or of its own nature. And of course, the entire project of the cosmological argument would be derailed if this were so—if, that is, it were actually inherent in the nature of things that there be a world, and that it have the character our world does. But the suggestion that this might be so is usually no more than a suggestion. I know of no plausible argument that it belongs to the nature of the universe of our experience to exist, or that the proposition that it exists is in any way necessary. There are, of course, scientific laws of conservation; but those, if helpful at all in this context, have more to do with the continuance of physical being (and non-being) than with the world's sheer presence or absence. And nothing else we know—or for that matter, even suspect—about the descriptive nature of things would make their existence self-evident or self-explanatory. Nothing prevents our imagining that the world might not have existed, or exposes any contradiction in the idea.² If this is correct, then there is at least logical space for an argument that the world owes its existence to a creator.

With God, of course, the situation is just the opposite. For the cosmological argument, the connection between existence and essence in God is ex hypothesi: it is stipulated from the outset that he exists a se, or of his own nature, so that it is impossible to separate the fact that God exists from the kind of being he is. Without this feature of aseitas or aseity, the God hypothesized in the cosmological argument would not be qualified for the role he is to fulfill: that of explaining the existence of entities such as we find in the world—entities that lack aseity, whose existence can only be explained, if at all, as deriving from elsewhere. It would do no good to argue that a creator is needed to account for the existence of the world, only to face the objection that some further agency is required to account for the creator's existence. Postulating aseity in God renders that objection futile. If such a being exists, then to ask what causes him to exist is like asking what makes water H2O. Nothing makes water H2O; it simply is H2O by nature. And in the same way, a being possessing aseity exists by its own nature. No further explanation can coherently be demanded, because it is part of the essence of God that none is needed. In short, the nature of God is defined in such a way that if he exists his existence cannot be a matter of mere happenstance, as the existence of the world would be if it were not created. Accordingly, our overall understanding of things is improved if the world owes its existence to a God who exists a se.

A word of caution is in order concerning this point. The claim that God exists a se is often treated as interchangeable with the assertion that he exists necessarily—a usage that is perhaps harmless enough in most cases. The problem, however, is that the latter assertion can be taken to mean that there is some sort of logical or metaphysical necessity associated with God's existence—which in turn might be taken to suggest that an a priori demonstration that there is a God is possible. This led to the complaint classically expressed by Kant: that the cosmological argument rests upon or presupposes the ontological argument.³ I shall have more to say on this at the end of this chapter, and again in chapter 11 where God's relationship to his own nature is discussed. For the present, suffice it to say that I postulate no connection between the claim that a creator God would exist of his own nature, and claims that the existence of such a being would in some sense be metaphysically compelled or logically necessary. Nor do I understand it to be the strategy of cosmological arguments to trade on some implicit premise of necessity.⁴ Just the opposite: it is taken for granted in such arguments that the existence of God is to be demonstrated from contingent facts, facts drawn from the world of our experience.

A Cosmological Argument

A complete explanation for the existence of the world would account for two facts. The first is that we have a world at all—that there is something rather than nothing. The second is that we have this world instead of some other—for example, a world described by different natural laws, or one in which no one sinned. The best way to achieve such an explanation is to utilize what amounts to the inductive method of hypothesis familiarly employed by science. Hypothetico-inductive arguments are in essence very simple: they state first that if the hypothesis under study were true, then certain phenomena ought to be observed. If they are in fact observed, then the existence of those phenomena counts as confirming evidence—that is, evidence that favors the truth of the hypothesis.⁵ A classic example of the method of hypothesis can be found in the work of Kepler, who reasoned that if his first two principles of planetary motion were true, then the observed motions of the planets, Mars in particular, would be accounted for—and concluded on that basis that his principles were correct.⁶ A cosmological argument for the existence of a creator may be given in similar terms: just as it counts in favor of Kepler's first two laws that if they are true then the motion of Mars is accounted for, so also it counts in favor of the hypothesis that there exists a very powerful, self-existent creator that if there were such a being then the existence of the our universe would be accounted for. In short, belief in the hypothesis of a creator God is supported by the evidence of experience, by the existence of a world that, unlike the God postulated by the cosmological argument, is not self-existing.

It is important to realize that this kind of argument is essentially a posteriori in character. It does not, nor should it, aspire to deductive validity.⁷ Not that no such argument could do so. Any hypothetico-inductive argument can easily be transformed into one that is deductively valid, simply by adding two premises. The first is that the phenomena to be accounted for do in fact have a satisfactory explanation, whether we are aware of that explanation or not; the second is that the only satisfactory explanation is the one being proffered. And it might be thought that both of these premises should be adopted in order to supplement the argument given above. For if we do not adopt them, someone might claim that we have not proven the existence of God, that since the argument is only an inductive one its conclusion may yet be mistaken. And then, so the worry goes, our argument will be a failure. But it will not be a failure, any more than Kepler's argument for his first two laws based on the motion of Mars was a failure. It is true that with inductive arguments there is always the possibility that the conclusion will be false, even if the premises are true. But the mere possibility of being wrong is never a good reason for believing one is wrong.⁸ If it were, then the mere possibility of being right—that is, that one would be mistaken to believe one was wrong—would be a good reason for believing one is right after all, and we would be contradicting ourselves all the time. We reject the scientific method outright if we suppose that it is a sufficient refutation of an inductive argument to point out that it is not deductively valid, and I know of no legitimate reason for taking a different stance when it comes to philosophical theology. Furthermore, adding premises such as the two suggested here will, if anything, deflect attention from the cosmological argument's main thrust without enhancing that argument's overall persuasiveness.

This is perhaps less true of the second premise, which is the more benign of the two. The persuasiveness of hypothetical arguments is blunted if there are other contending explanations—other hypotheses that could equally explain the phenomenon at issue. It is important therefore that such arguments be accompanied by efforts to show that alternative explanations are inadequate, and I shall do so later in this chapter for the most commonly invoked alternative to the hypothesis of a creator God. But the door to alternative accounts cannot be closed completely; other hypotheses may yet be discovered or developed which will compete with the favored one. Trying to shore up a hypothetical argument by claiming to have eliminated all alternatives is likely, therefore, to be self-defeating. Doubts about the original conclusion will simply reemerge as doubts about the new premise, and the supposedly damning claim that the conclusion has not been proven will be renewed.

Similar difficulties attend the first of our suggested additional premises. This premise is, of course, a version of the principle of sufficient reason: the principle that every phenomenon has an adequate accounting or explanation. And it is true that some version of this principle is often involved, implicitly or explicitly, in cosmological arguments. We might, for example, begin our argument by claiming that any contingent being, any being that lacks aseity, must derive its existence from another. But what reason is there for thinking such claims are true? It is not self-evident that every phenomenon must have an adequate explanation. In fact, the present state of particle physics may well be claimed to offer evidence that this principle is false, at least as far as natural causes are concerned—and whether our world has another sort of cause, a supernatural one, is precisely what we are trying to decide. Nor is it obvious that the search for adequate explanations must always proceed on the assumption that they are available. No doubt, such a belief may encourage us to persist when the going gets tough. But I need not believe an explanation is available in order to find it, any more than Roentgen had to believe there were x-rays in order to discover them. Rather, if we are justified in thinking that some version of the principle of sufficient reason is true of the empirical world, this will only be because past efforts at explaining phenomena have proven successful, independently of our presuming that this principle holds. When it comes to explaining the world of our experience, then, the credibility of the principle of sufficient reason depends in the end on the success of induction, not vice versa.

This suggests that when hypothetical arguments are successful, their persuasiveness owes little or nothing to the principle of sufficient reason. And this is in fact correct. The inductive case for Kepler's first two laws lies primarily in the fact that, together with plausible empirical assumptions, they enable us to deduce a set of propositions which describe quite closely the observed movements of the planets. To be sure, that is not all there is to the matter. There is also the question of whether Kepler's laws provide the only explanation, or whether other principles would serve just as well. Answering this kind of question is seldom an easy task: it involves considerations of simplicity, comprehensiveness, predictions of new phenomena, and so forth. Above all, it involves the matter of intuitive plausibility—that is, whether we feel the principles at issue provide genuine insight into the workings of the cosmos. The important thing, however, is that these are the issues that count. If Kepler's principles pass these kinds of test, then the case for them will be as strong as it can be. Adding to this evidence the claim that every contingent phenomenon must have an explanation does not strengthen it; instead, it diverts attention from what counts. Who, after all, would reject Kepler's laws on the basis that the principle of sufficient reason may be false?

Similar considerations apply to the cosmological (and to the teleological) argument. Its persuasiveness depends on whether, if there is a creator who exists a se, the existence of contingent things will be accounted for; it also depends on how well this account stacks up against others, and on whether the hypothesis of a creator God can be so explicated that we will feel that we have gained real insight into the nature of being, meaningful solutions to other philosophical problems, and so on. To the extent that the cosmological argument can satisfy these requirements, it will have persuasive power. To be sure, it will still be possible for doubters to reject its conclusion. But this situation cannot be helped by introducing some version of the principle of sufficient reason as a premise in the argument, for that principle can itself be secured only by the success of induction generally. In effect, its plausibility depends on the extent to which demonstrations like the cosmological argument can succeed without it. Hence, what is gained by way of validity when we insert it as a premise is immediately offset by doubts about the principle itself. If the cosmological argument is to succeed, it must do so within the limitation that attends all induction: that its conclusion may be false even if its premises are true.

Is success possible? I think the chances of it are in fact enhanced when the cosmological argument is cast as strictly inductive. The idea that in the absence of absolute certainty no argument can be persuasive is a fiction. Science virtually never offers such certainty, yet its arguments tend to be quite convincing. There is no reason natural theology cannot hope at least to approach such persuasiveness, provided the theistic hypothesis has explanatory power other theories cannot equal. To accept the burden of providing absolute certainty deflects attention from that issue, and reinforces the further fiction that if only principles like that of sufficient reason can be shown to be dubious, the argument will itself have been refuted.⁹ In fact, absolute certainty has little or nothing to do with the issue. The real question is whether the cosmological argument, and the account of the origin of things associated with it, can give us better reason for thinking the world is the work of a creator than we have for thinking otherwise. If it does, then the fact is that this argument will tend to persuade us—perhaps even if we are not very open to being persuaded. We can, of course, reject its conclusion, persuasive or not; but the same holds for any argument.¹⁰

What Sort of Creator?

In its simplest outlines, the cosmological argument is not at all sophisticated. It simply holds that if a creator with divine attributes undertook to produce or give rise to this world, then it would surely exist. And of course, the world does exist. The existence of the world therefore counts as evidence in favor of the act of creation, and of the creator whose act it is. By contrast, when we begin to examine the nature of this creator the discussion can become very sophisticated indeed. The expectation is that it will turn out to be the personal God of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions of Western theism. This however is no clear characterization, if only because there is significant debate about the nature of God within those traditions. But we can make a beginning at describing the divine nature by considering what the cosmological argument itself requires the creator to be. The most important property he must have has already been mentioned: that of aseity. If the creator is to ground the existence of contingent beings, he himself must exist of his own nature; there can be no distinction in him between essence and existence. This characterization of God has scriptural support (Exodus 3.14), and so is not entirely ad hoc theologically speaking. Still, it is difficult to comprehend: the thought is that, were we sufficiently cognizant of the divine nature, we would see in it complete self-sufficiency and fullness of being—so that there could be no question of its depending on anything else, no question of how or why such a being should be. That is a sublime conception: short, at least, of mystical awareness, nothing in our present experience answers to it. It is to be expected, therefore, that we would struggle to grasp such a notion. Still, there are things we can learn about such a being.

One of them is that there can only be one such entity. The reason is that in order for there to be more than one entity of a given kind, it has to be possible to distinguish essence from existence in such entities. There can be two chairs at the table, or two eggs in the basket, because what it is to be a chair or an egg is different from whether there are such things. Because that is so, what makes each chair a chair at all is different from what makes this chair, and similarly for the eggs. This gives us a basis for counting beyond one. Multiplicity is possible because existence does not belong essentially to ordinary natures such as chair and egg, and so can be conferred repeatedly upon them.¹¹ But with God this is not so. For a being that exists a se, essence and existence are indistinguishable: what it is and that it is are the same thing. But then there can be no basis for counting beyond one, because what makes God a God is also what makes him this God, one God.¹² Instead of being the subject of conferred (and hence, not-self-derived) being, God is his own existence, and his fundamental nature is being itself; God is not repeatable, because God is not limited to any particular kind or manifestation. So if there is a creator at all, there is only one creator.

The other feature of God that is crucial to the cosmological argument is, of course, that he be a creator. This makes him responsible for a great deal, even if we confine ourselves to the (largely) physical world of familiar experience. That world is composed not only of substances but also of the states and events in which they are involved. So besides atoms and molecules, books and chairs, plants and animals, the world includes such things as the book's being red, the motion of Mars, and Blochwitz's singing Der Musensohn. Now substances are involved in states and events because they have various characteristics, and at times exchange certain characteristics for others. To say, therefore, that a creator is responsible for the existence of the world is to imply that he is responsible not just for the existence of substances, but also for the existence of their characteristics. He creates not bare substances only, but their attributes as well, and so is responsible for the events and states that make up the universe, as well as for its population of substantial individuals. This has considerable implications, as will begin to emerge in the next chapter.

Also associated with the idea of God as creator is his having the characteristics of a person: an intellect and a will. That God should be thus anthropomorphized may, of course, arouse suspicion, so it is worth noting that in its simplest form, the cosmological argument does not require this. One can speak of a First Cause, or of a being that exists a se, without being committed to the idea that such a being must be personal. And we need to bear in mind the tradition according to which the ultimate nature of God is not literally definable, so that all attempts to describe him are finally analogical. Nevertheless if, as I have argued, the real plausibility of the cosmological argument depends in part on its being associated with an account of what creation is, then there are reasons for introducing elements of personality into God. In part, they involve considerations more commonly associated with the teleological argument. The world produced in creation is a structured one, with orderly principles of operation. It has to be: the idea of a universe utterly without formal organization is an idea of nothing at all. It makes sense, therefore, that the producer of such a world should have the intellect to comprehend design and the will to appreciate it.

But the most important reason for thinking a creator God would have these features has to do with the creative act itself. In creation, what is produced has to be produced from nothing. This does not mean that in order to have been created, the world must have had a temporal beginning. The present state of cosmology indicates that it did, but the cosmological argument does not depend on this being the case. It does, however, maintain that the fact that there is a world at all—that there is something, rather than nothing—cannot be viewed as an orderly development out of any prior state of affairs, or as a manifestation of the nature of any preexisting stuff. So this creation cannot receive a natural explanation. Rather, the world is created by God ex nihilo, using no prior resources, be they temporal or ontological. But it is not enough simply to say that God creates the world in this way, without offering any idea of what sort of process this is. That would be the theistic equivalent of the claim of some non-theists that the world just appears, with no accounting, no explanation of how or why. If theistic creation is to make sense of the world it has to involve some account of how creation works, and why it makes sense of things. And once it is seen that creation cannot be a natural process, the inevitably personal teleological model is all that remains. Indeed, we have no model, properly speaking, for nature to produce anything out of nothing. When it appears to do so, as with quantum phenomena, the events in question are usually understood to lack sufficient explanation, precisely because we do not understand how this can occur. Only rational beings, in our experience, can be truly creative, and rational creativity is an intrinsically purposive activity. Just how that activity is to be understood is a difficult question. The scriptural account is often taken to portray God as an all-powerful ruler, who creates through an exercise of authority: he commands, and it is done. I am not sure that this is precisely what is intended, and I want in any case to develop a somewhat different view. But the important thing for now is to see that to invoke a creator God as responsible for the existence of the world sets us on the path of accounting for things in terms of a personal being.

The Naturalistic Alternative

Is it true, however, that a natural explanation for the existence of things is out of the question? The hypothesis most often posed as an alternative to the cosmological argument is that explanation in terms of natural causation supported by scientific law is by itself sufficient to answer all legitimate questions about the existence of the world. Again, the basic idea is quite simple. In event-causation, it appears, past events give rise to future ones: the boiling of the water in the double boiler makes the béarnaise sauce become hot; the cue ball's striking the object ball results in the latter's moving toward the corner pocket. These are orderly phenomena, governed by laws of nature. And, it will be said, what is it to give rise to an event, but to be responsible for its existence? Consider, then, the present state of the universe. Ignoring quantum mechanics and, perhaps, free will, it seems to arise from the universe's past states by natural causation, according to deterministic law. So it is the operation of the laws of nature, not the action of a creator God, that is responsible for the present state of things. But of course the same may be said of any state of the universe—past, present, or future. We need only assume that the world's history is of infinite duration. And then, the argument runs, there is no need for a creator. Each state of the universe owes its existence to previous states: at any given time, all that occurs or exists is explained in terms of what went before. And if the existence of things at each point in the world's history is accounted for, there is nothing else to explain.¹³

Despite its ambition to enlist science on its side, there are strong scientific grounds for rejecting this alternative. According to what is presently the most widely accepted theory, the claim that the universe is infinitely old is untrue. The universe appears to have had its beginning in a great explosion some thirteen or so billion years ago, and seems to be expanding irreversibly. Moreover, all principles of physical explanation fail when one tries to extrapolate to anything prior to the earliest describable moments of the Big Bang. By this account, therefore, there is no empirical significance to the idea that our universe evolved from an earlier one, or even that there was such a thing as a time prior to its origin. On the contrary, the collapse of physical explanation beyond the earliest describable moments of our universe's history brings with it the loss of the very idea of physical continuity. Empirically speaking, there is nothing from which the universe springs—no space and time that antedate it—because the whole idea of the Big Bang is that on the other side of it, there is no rerum natura. Any other space or time we might imagine, and anything they might contain, would have to be construed as another universe, discontinuous with ours.