William E. Carroll
Is there a fundamental incompatibility between the first principle of the natural sciences that it is not possible to get something from nothing and a primary religious belief that God creates all that is “out of nothing”? Claims that we must choose between the two suffer from a misunderstanding of both. Thomas Aquinas provides a solution to the apparent contradiction between the two.
Why do many people, both believers and non-believers, think that there is a fundamental incompatibility between science and religion? Over the past few centuries, a common narrative in the West argues that modern science was born in the 17th Century when scientists like Galileo began the liberation of science from both domination by theology and control by ecclesiastical authorities. In the 19th Century the narrative received canonical expression in the two-volume work of the founding president of Cornell University, Andrew Dickson White, History of Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). The book has been translated into all major languages and is still in print. The story often embraces the philosophical judgment that science tells us all we need to know about the world and ourselves. Several years ago, Christopher Hitchens, in God is Not Great, wrote: “Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”
Recent discoveries in cosmology, evolutionary biology, and the neurosciences are often integrated into the narrative of the incompatibility of religion and science. Or consider the wide range of ethical questions about how one should act, especially in the realms of sexual morality, gender identity, abortion, environmental issues, and the like. Think of the phrase “follow the science.” These ethical questions are different from, but dependent upon, the prior theoretical questions concerning what religion and science tell us about the world.
There are many chapters in this narrative of conflict, but one fundamental feature that underlies its acceptance is the confusion concerning the relationship between the doctrine of creation-out-of-nothing (creatio ex nihilo) and the first principle of the sciences that it is not possible for something to come from absolutely nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit). It seems that there is a clash of first principles.
Central to religious belief in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is the view that all that is is created by God. Why must creation be out-of-nothing? God does not work on or with anything in producing all that is; for, if there were some primal material – even formless stuff, then that material would exist independently of God. But, for the traditional religions of the West, there can be no reality whatsoever which is truly independent of God.
At the core of all the natural sciences, as well as of the philosophical assumptions that inform them, is that from nothing, nothing comes. To abandon this principle or to call into question its truth would be to abandon the natural sciences themselves. Even though some contemporary cosmologists speak of the universe’s coming to be in terms of “quantum tunneling from nothing,” the “nothing” in this and related theories has an existential status. The cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin describes it as “a rather bizarre state in which all our basic notions of space, time, energy, entropy, etc. lose their meaning.”1 Thus, it is not the same as the “nothing” in the principle that “from nothing, nothing comes.” For both the principle of the natural sciences and the doctrine of creation, “nothing” is the radical absence of any existing stuff out of which things come to be.
Divine Omnipotence, the Intelligibility of Nature, and the Denial of Creation ex nihilo
Already in the Middle Ages, scholars in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam wrestled with the apparent dilemma of the relationship between creation and science. Averroes, for example, the great Muslim commentator on Aristotelian science and philosophy, rejected the doctrine of creation-out-of-nothing because he thought that if you admitted that something could come from nothing, then anything whatever could come from anything else. Science discovers the causes that exist in nature, causes that reliably produce specific effects. So, to defend the intelligibility of nature – and hence the possibility of science – one cannot accept the doctrine of creation-out-of-nothing. Averroes was responding to some Muslim theologians who, in affirming divine omnipotence (expressed in the doctrine of creation), located all causal power in God and none in creatures. Hence, what came to be known as “occasionalism” proposes that what happens in the world are simply occasions in which God is the only true cause.
In our own day, philosophers and theologians working in the tradition of “process thought,” associated with thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead, also reject the doctrine of creation-out-of-nothing for reasons similar to those advanced by Averroes. Theologians in this tradition argue that the doctrine of creation-out-of-nothing involves a commitment to divine omnipotence that is incompatible with the discovery of any kind of causality or power inherent in nature. As Whitehead noted, the “extreme voluntarism” that sees God “as the one supreme reality, omnipotently disposing a wholly derivative world” is absolutely incompatible with a true science of nature.2 Either one affirms divine omnipotence or real causes in nature: the former made manifest in the doctrine of creation, the latter in the sciences of nature.
In the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas confronted this dilemma and his analysis can be appropriated today to avoid the alleged need to choose between the doctrine of creation and the claims of the natural sciences. As is often the case, Thomas helps us to distinguish between the two in such a way that we can affirm both together.
Change and Creation
The natural sciences have as their subject the world of changing things: from subatomic particles to acorns to galaxies. Wherever there is a change there must be something that changes. This is true with respect to changes in the quantity, quality, or location of existing entities. But it is also true with respect to the more radical kind of change when new entities themselves come into existence: for example, when the union of hydrogen and oxygen results in water, or the sperm and ovum of mammals come together to produce a new mammal. The first principle of the natural sciences is a first principle for any and all change. It expresses a fundamental truth about the world of change: all change is from something to something.
But there is more to be explained than change itself. As Thomas Aquinas notes: “Over and above the mode of becoming by which something comes to be through change or motion, there must be a mode of becoming or origin of things without any mutation or motion, through the influx of being.”3 The “influx of being” is what the act of creation is. It is a concept grasped in metaphysics, that branch of philosophy that concerns what it means for things to exist. Creation is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. Creation is not a change. To cause completely something to exist is not to produce a change in something, is not to work on or with some existing material.
As Thomas observes: “Creation is not a change, but the very dependency of the created act of being upon the principle from which it is produced. And thus creation is a kind of relation.” Thomas notes that it is a mistake to confuse creation with change: one should not deny creation-out-of-nothing with “arguments derived from the nature of motion or change—the contention, for example, that creation, like other motions or changes, must take place in a subject, or that in creation non-being must be transmuted into being.”4
To be caused to be by God means to be dependent upon God for the fact that one is. God does not change “nothing” into something. Creation is not primarily some distant event; rather, it is the ongoing, complete causing of the existence of all that is. At this very moment were God not causing all that is to exist, there would be nothing at all. “Out of nothing” is a way of affirming the complete dependence of all that is upon God. Creatures are “out-of-nothing” in that without God’s causing them to be they would be nothing at all.
As Thomas says, creation means “the procession of all being from God” and “it is impossible for anything to be made [in this way – creation] from some other preexisting thing; otherwise, this procession would not consist in the making of all created being.” In creation, that is, “the origination of all being from one first being, the transmutation of one being into another is. . . inconceivable. And on this account it is the business not of the philosopher of nature [the natural scientist] to consider that origination, but of the metaphysician, who considers universal being and things existing apart from motion [or any change].”5
For Thomas all of this embodies a philosophical sense of creation disclosed in the discipline of metaphysics. He incorporates the philosophical sense into a distinctively Christian theological understanding of creation. Thomas is first of all a theologian, but he is also a philosopher because he is a theologian, and the philosophical sense of creation has an intelligibility of its own. An interesting point here is that Thomas notes that the philosophical sense of creation tells us nothing about whether or not the universe has a temporal beginning. For him an eternal universe would be just as much a created universe as one which has a beginning. Following the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the traditional interpretation of the opening of Genesis, Thomas believes that the universe has a beginning. Questions concerning the universe’s temporal finitude concern the kind of universe that is created, not whether or not it is created.
The failure to distinguish between creation and the changes that occur within the created order results in the failure to recognize that the natural sciences have nothing to tell us about the ultimate cause of the existence of things. No explanation of change, no matter how radically random or contingent such an explanation claims to be, challenges the metaphysical account of creation, that is, of the dependence of the existence of all things upon God as cause. The first principle of the natural sciences that requires there be something that changes is limited to explanations of change, and does not challenge metaphysical and theological explanations of the cause of existence. It does not call into question the intelligibility of creation-out-of-nothing. It refers to operations in and among the world of changing things. To create is an altogether different category of explanation.
Creation and the “Brute Fact” of Existence
The philosophical core of the doctrine of creation refers to the metaphysical dependence of being/existence. Does existence as such really require an explanation? Also, how can one affirm both the robust notion of divine omnipotence evident in God’s creative act and the existence of real causes in nature?
If we think of the natural sciences as fully sufficient, at least in principle, to account for all that needs to be accounted for in the universe, then any appeal to a metaphysical understanding of the cause of existence would be meaningless. In such a view, existence itself is a “brute fact” that does not call for any explanation beyond itself. This is a philosophical claim and one that does not express profoundly enough what it means for something to exist. Indeed, Thomas refers to existence as actus essendi, the act or actuality of being: an actuality that requires a cause to make it actually what it is.
Could we speak of God, the Uncaused Cause, as simply a kind of Supreme Brute Fact, not so different from the conclusion that the universe is a brute fact without the need for a cause? If so, there would appear to be little difference with respect to which brute fact one affirms, the universe or God. But, there really is quite a difference. God, who is Uncaused Cause, is not a fact or thing at all. He transcends these categories. Even the word “cause” when applied to divine agency has a very special sense because God is an agent who differs radically from all created agents.
God as Cause and Creatures as Causes
Creation as the ongoing, complete causing of all that is, in whatever way or ways it is, seems to imply that there is no causal power left over, so to speak, for creatures to exercise. Thus, it seems that to preserve the integrity of nature one must deny this expression of divine omnipotence. On the contrary, God’s causation does not compete with the causation of creatures but rather supports and grounds it.
The problem which those who defend a self-sufficiency in nature and its processes often see is that any appeal to a cause outside of nature is either superfluous or contradictory to the very claim that nature is the domain of self-organizing activities. There is confusion here, however, about different orders or levels of explanation. As Thomas explains, there is no question that there are real causes in the natural order. Our knowledge of nature concerns what happens and why it happens, based on causes inherent in nature. Thomas thinks that to defend the fact that creatures are real causes, far from challenging divine omnipotence, is a powerful argument for divine omnipotence.6
God, as Creator, transcends the order of created causes in such a way that He is their enabling origin. For Thomas the distinction between God’s causality and that of creatures means that any created effect comes totally and immediately from God as the transcendent primary cause and totally and immediately from the creature as a secondary cause. In response to the objection that it is superfluous for effects to flow from natural causes since they could just as well be directly caused by God alone, Thomas writes that the autonomy and integrity of natural causes “is not the result of the inadequacy of divine power, but of the immensity of God’s goodness.” God wills to communicate His likeness to things, “not only that they might exist, but also that they might be causes for other things.”7 As he says, to ascribe to God allcausal agency “eliminates the order of the universe, which is woven together through the order and connection of causes. For the first cause lends from the eminence of Its goodness not only to other things that they are, but also that they are causes.”8 In De potentia Dei, Thomas observes:
God is the cause of everything’s action inasmuch as he gives everything the power to act, and preserves it in being and applies it to action, and inasmuch as by his power every other power acts. And if we add to this that God is his own power, and that he is in all things not as part of their essence but as upholding them in their being, we shall conclude that he acts in every agent immediately, without prejudice to the action of the will and of nature (q. 3, a. 7).
God causes creatures to exist in such a way that they are the real causes of their own operations. It is important to recognize that, for Thomas, divine causality and creaturely causality function at fundamentally different levels. It is not the case of partial or co-causes with each contributing a separate element to produce the effect.
Divine Transcendence: An Underlying Assumption
God as Creator transcends the order of created causes in such a way that He is their enabling origin. For Thomas the distinction between God’s causality and that of creatures means that any created effect comes totally and immediately from God as the transcendent primary cause and totally and immediately from the creature as a secondary cause. But how can this be?
The source of many of the difficulties in grasping an adequate understanding of the relationship between the created order and God is the failure to understand divine transcendence. The Creator transcends the created order, but not in the sense simply of being “other” than or “beyond” what is created. God transcends the ordinary categories of “transcendence” and “immanence.” Transcendence in this context is not to be contrasted with immanence such that one necessarily excludes the other. We may begin to think of transcendence as contrasted with immanence, but, as we reflect more on the radical otherness of the Creator, we come to recognize that the Creator differs from creatures in a different way from the ways in which creatures differ from one another, and different, as well, from the difference between all of the created order and nothingness. Whatever we say of God cannot mean the same thing as what we say of creatures. These special senses can only be grasped – if grasped at all – by reflecting on what they must mean with respect to God. God’s “otherness” or “beyondness” is grasped by a kind of negative dialectic, aided by an elaborate sense of analogical predication – God is not like this, or not like that. Divine transcendence does not mean beyond the realm of the material – rather it means beyond the realm of the created – beyond any sense of a created beyond.
The Creator’s transcendence is such that He is immediately active in all things. As cause, He is present at the very center of each creature’s being: more interior to things than they are to themselves,9 not as an intrinsic principle entering into their constitution, but as the abiding cause of their existence. The Creator is not the highest being in a hierarchy of beings. He is first in the sense of being the origin of all existing things. God is not a cause among causes; He is not a competing cause in the world. Rather, God causes every cause to be the cause that it is.
Conclusion
God’s causality does not diminish, distort, or deny the causality of creatures since God’s causality is the very source of the whole reality of every creature, including all their causal powers. There is no conflict here with the principles of the natural sciences. The latter concern change and cause within the created order; they do not apply to an analysis of the Creator; indeed, the natural sciences and the objects and processes they study are caused to be what they are by the creative act of God.
There is no need to choose between a robust view of creation-out-of-nothing as the constant exercise of divine omnipotence and the causes disclosed by the natural sciences. God’s creative power is exercised throughout the entire course of cosmic history, in whatever ways that history has unfolded. We need to remember the fundamental point that creation is not a change, and thus there is no possibility of conflict between the explanatory domain of the natural sciences – the world of change – and that of creation. This understanding of the doctrine of creation and its relationship to the proper venue of the natural sciences eliminates the charge that there is a contradiction between the two. There is no clash of principles once we understand what these principles are and what they explain. We can accept both that creation is out-of-nothing (creatio ex nihilo) and that nothing comes from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit) because “to come” in the natural sciences is to change and creation is not a change.
William E. Carroll is distinguished visiting professor in the School of Philosophy at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (Wuhan, China).
- Alexander Vilenkin, “The Beginning of the Universe” http://inference-review.com/article/the-beginning-of-the-universe (2016). ↩︎
- Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1967), p. 166. ↩︎
- Thomas Aquinas, On Separate Substances, c.9. ↩︎
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles II, c. 18, 2, see also Summa theologiae I, q.45, a. 2, ad 2. ↩︎
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles II, c. 37. ↩︎
- Ibid., III, c. 68. ↩︎
- Ibid., III, c. 70, n. 8. ↩︎
- Thomas Aquinas, De veritate 11, 1. ↩︎
- Cf. Augustine, Confessions III, 6, 11. ↩︎