Causality, pantheism, and deism

Agere sequitur esse (“action follows being” or “activity follows existence”) is a basic principle of Scholastic metaphysics.  The idea is that the way a thing acts or behaves reflects what it is.  But suppose that a thing doesn’t truly act or behave at all.  Would it not follow, given the principle in question, that it does not truly exist?  That would be too quick.  After all, a thing might be capable of acting even if it is not in fact doing so.  (For example, you are capable of leaving this page and reading some other website instead, even if you do not in fact do so.)  That would seem enough to ensure existence.  A thing could hardly be said to have a capacity if it didn’t exist.  But suppose something lacks even the capacity for acting or behaving.  Would it not follow in that case that it does not truly exist?

To affirm that conclusion without qualification would be to endorse what Jaegwon Kim calls Alexander’s Dictum: To be real is to have causal powers.  (The dictum is named for Samuel Alexander, who gives expression to the idea in volume 2 of Space, Time, and Deity.  Kim has discussed it in many places, e.g. here.) 

Even if one thinks this too strong -- say, on the grounds that Platonic Forms might exist but be causally inert -- one might still endorse a more restricted version of Alexander’s Dictum.  One might hold, for example, that for material objects to be real, they must have causal powers.  Trenton Merricks endorses something like this restricted version of Alexander’s principle in arguing for an eliminativist position vis-à-vis inanimate macrophysical objects (Objects and Persons, p. 81).  He argues that for a macrophysical object such as a baseball or a stone to be real, it must have causal powers.  And yet (so he claims) it is only the microphysical parts of such purported objects -- their atoms, say (though “atoms” is for Merricks just a placeholder for whatever the appropriate micro-level objects turn out to be) -- that are really doing all the causal work.  Baseballs, stones, and the like do not as such really cause anything.  Hence baseballs, stones, and the like do not really exist.  It is only atoms arranged baseballwise, atoms arranged stonewise, etc. that exist.  (Merricks does not draw the same eliminativist conclusion about living things.  At least conscious living things do in his view have causal powers over and above those of their microphysical parts, and maybe other living things do too.)

I certainly don’t agree with Merricks’ eliminativist conclusion.  (See Scholastic Metaphysics, chapter 3, especially pp. 177-84.  As longtime readers might have already noticed, it is, from an Aristotelian point of view, telling that even Merricks thinks that at least the divide between the non-sentient and the sentient, and perhaps between the inorganic and the organic, mark breaks in nature where explanations exclusively in terms of microphysics give out.)  But in my view, the problem with his position is not his commitment to a variation on Alexander’s Dictum -- a variation I think is essentially correct.

The thesis that for a material object to be real, it must have causal powers is the key to understanding how occasionalism tends toward pantheism.  Occasionalism is the view that God is not merely the First Cause -- “first” in the sense of being the source of the causal power of other, secondary causes -- but the only cause.   Common sense supposes that it is the sun that melts a popsicle when you leave it on the table outside; in fact, according to occasionalism, it is God who melts popsicles, ice cubes, and the like, on the occasion when they are left in the sun.  You blame fungus for the dry rot that destroyed the wall in your garage; in fact, according to occasionalism, it is God who causes dry rot, on the occasion when fungus is present.  And so forth.  Neither the sun, nor fungus, nor anything other than God really has any causal power, on this view.  It is only God who is ever really doing anything.  Thus, the activity that we attribute to material objects must really be attributed to God. 

But if this is true, and if it is also true that for a material object to be real, it must have causal powers, then material objects aren’t even real.  Only God is real.  So, if occasionalism is true, then there is a sense in which, when you think you are observing the sun melting a popsicle, or a baseball shattering a window, or what have you, what you are really observing is just God in action, and nothing more than that.  Compare Merricks’ view that what we call a baseball shattering a window is “really” nothing more than just atoms arranged baseballwise causing the scattering of atoms that had been arranged windowwise.  Just as, on Merricks’ view, baseballs and windows dissolve into arrangements of atoms, so too on occasionalism the world essentially dissolves into God, which leaves us with a kind of pantheism.  You might say that, given occasionalism, “the sun,” “fungus,” “stone,” “baseballs,” etc. are really just nine billion names of God (with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke).

Just to be clear, Merricks does not even discuss occasionalism and pantheism, much less defend them.  But the parallel between his argument for eliminativism about inanimate macrophysical objects and occasionalism is instructive.  Consider now another aspect of Merricks’ position, and a parallel with another view about God’s relation to the world.  Merricks argues that if (say) a baseball played any causal role in the shattering of a window over and above the role played by its atoms, then the shattering would be “overdetermined,” insofar as the atoms alone are sufficient to bring about this effect.  But we should assume that no such overdetermination exists unless we have special reason to affirm it.  The baseball would be a fifth wheel, an unnecessary part of the causal story.  So we should eliminate it from the story.  Only the atoms are real.

Once again, I certainly don’t agree with Merricks’ eliminativist conclusion.  But the problem has to do with his assumption that the microphysical level is metaphysically privileged (an assumption I criticize in Scholastic Metaphysics).  We need not take issue with Merricks’ rejection of overdetermination.  (Note that the issue of “overdetermination” has nothing to do with causal determinism.  The idea is just that if a cause A suffices all by itself to explain an effect E, the assumption that there was some further cause B involved would make E overdetermined in the sense of having more causes than are necessary to account for it.  Whether the relationship between A and E is one of deterministic causation, specifically, is not at issue.)

Now, consider deism, which in its strongest version holds that God brought the world into existence but need not conserve it in being.  Any view which allows that the world could at least in principle exist apart from God’s continuous conserving action essentially makes of him something like the baseball in Merricks’ metaphysics.  In Merricks’ view, the atoms that make up the purported baseball are really doing all the causal work, and the baseball is a fifth wheel that would needlessly overdetermine the atoms’ effects.  Similarly, if the natural world is, metaphysically, such that it could in principle carry on apart from God’s sustaining causal activity, then God is a fifth wheel.  His sustaining the world in being would be an instance of overdetermination.  Hence, just as the baseball should in Merricks’ view be eliminated from the causal story, so too is God bound to drop out of the causal story given the view that the world might in principle carry on from moment to moment without him.  Just as occasionalism tends toward pantheism, deism tends toward atheism.  If God does everything, then everything is God; if God does nothing, then nothing is God. (Once again, Merricks himself doesn’t address any of these theological issues.  I’m just using his views for purposes of comparison.)

So, the theist is well advised to steer a middle course between occasionalism and deism, and that is of course exactly what concurrentism -- defended by Aquinas and other Scholastics -- aims to do.  According to concurrentism, natural objects have real, built-in causal power, but it cannot be exercised even for an instant unless God “concurs” with such exercise as a cooperating cause.  Some analogies: Given its sharpness, a scalpel has a power to cut that a blunt piece of wood does not; still, unless the surgeon cooperates in its activity by pushing it against the patient’s flesh, it will not in fact cut.  Given its red tint, a piece of glass has a power to cause the wall across from it to appear red; but unless light cooperates by shining through it, the glass will not in fact do so.  Similarly, created or secondary causes cannot exercise their powers unless God as First Cause cooperates.  Because these powers are “built into” natural objects (as the sharpness is built into the scalpel or the tint built into the glass) occasionalism is avoided.  Because the powers cannot operate without divine concurrence, deism is avoided.

Not all models of God’s relationship to the world adequately convey this middle ground concurrentist position.  For example, comparing God’s relationship to the world to the soul’s relationship to the body would have obviously pantheistic (or at least panentheistic) implications.  As I have argued many times, thinking of the world as a kind of machine and God as a machinist is also a very bad model.  Of course, the world is in some ways like a machine.  For example, machines can be very complex, and the world is very complex.  And God is in some ways comparable to a machinist.  For example, machinists are intelligent and God is intelligent.  But that does not suffice to make the machine/machinist analogy a good one, all things considered.  After all, God is also in some ways comparable to a soul, and the world is in some ways comparable to a body.  For example, like a soul, God is spirit rather than matter; like a body, the world is an integrated system.  But the soul/body analogy is still a very bad analogy for the relationship between God and the world (at least from a classical theist point of view), and the machine/machinist analogy is also a very bad one.

As I have argued elsewhere (for example, in my Nova et Vetera article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way”), the machine/machinist analogy has both occasionalist and deist implications.  The deist implications are easy to see.  Machines chug along automatically, and can continue to do so even if the machinist dies.  Hence if the world is like a machine, it is not metaphysically necessary that there be a machinist.  Naturally, “design arguments” for the existence of the machinist are at best merely probabilistic inferences.  And naturally, one can, like Laplace, make the case that the machinist hypothesis is unnecessary.  Whether it is or not, though, such a machinist would not be the God of classical theism, since for the classical theist the world could not even in principle exist for an instant apart from God’s conserving activity.

To see the occasionalist implications requires introducing a further concept.  For many Scholastic theorists of causal powers, and for many non-Scholastics too, the notion of a causal power goes hand in hand with the notion of immanent finality.  That is to say, a causal power is inherently “directed toward” some particular outcome or range of outcomes as to a final cause.  To appeal to some of my stock examples, the phosphorus in the head of a match is inherently “directed toward” generating flame and heat, an acorn is inherently “directed toward” becoming an oak, and so on.  If this were not the case, the fact that efficient causes exhibit the regularity they do -- the fact that their effects are typically of a specific sort rather than random -- would not be intelligible.  In short, efficient causality presupposes final causality.   Hence if a material thing had no inherent finality or “directedness” toward an end, it would have no inherent or “built-in” causal power either.  (Once again, see Scholastic Metaphysics, especially pp. 92-105, for the full story.) 

Now the “mechanical world picture” of the early moderns was more than anything else a rejection of Aristotelian immanent or “built-in” finality or teleology.  There is, on this picture, no directedness or finality inherent in the material world.  Any final causality or teleology we might attribute to it is really only in the mind of some observer (whether human or divine), extrinsic to the material world itself.  Unsurprisingly, the early moderns also tended toward what Brian Ellis has called a “passivist” view of nature -- that is to say, a view of natural objects as passive or devoid of any intrinsic causal power.  On this view, natural objects behave in the way they do not because of any intrinsic tendencies but because God has simply stipulated that they will so behave, where his stipulations are enshrined in “laws of nature.”  The view of the world as a kind of artifact -- as, for example, a watch, with God as watchmaker -- is suggested by, and reinforces, this non-teleological and passivist conception of nature.  Just as the time-telling function of a watch is entirely extrinsic to the bits of metal that make up a watch, so too is all teleology or finality entirely extrinsic to the natural order.

This picture of things is implicitly occasionalist.  If the finality or directedness is really all in God and in no sense in the world, then (given the thesis that causal power presupposes immanent finality) causal power is really all in God and in no sense in the world.  And thus the view is also implicitly pantheist.  For if a material thing has no causal power, then (given the variation on Alexander’s Dictum we’ve been considering), it isn’t real.  In short: No immanent finality, no causal powers; no causal powers, no material objects; so, no immanent finality, no material objects.  To abandon an Aristotelian philosophy of nature is thus implicitly to abandon nature.  What we take to be nature is really just God in action.  (Homework exercise: Relate this absorption of the world into God to the tendency in modern theology to absorb nature into grace.) 

And so, unsurprisingly, while some of the moderns went in a deist or even atheist direction, others went in a radically anti-materialist and even pantheist direction.  Hence the occasionalism and near-pantheism of Malebranche, the outright pantheism of Spinoza, the idealism of Leibniz and Berkeley, and the absolute idealism of post-Kantian philosophy. 

Of course, the machine analogy is often used by people who have no deist, occasionalist, or pantheist intent -- for example, by Paley and other defenders of the “design argument,” and by contemporary “Intelligent Design” theorists.  And the analogy has an obvious popular appeal, since the “God as watchmaker” model is much easier for the man on the street to understand than the Scholastic’s appeal to act and potency, essentially ordered causal series, and so forth.  But metaphysically the analogy is superficial.  Indeed, it is a theological mess.  Its implications are not more widely seen because those who make use of it typically do not think them through, being satisfied if the analogy serves the apologetic needs of the moment.  (As I have pointed out many times, it is the metaphysical and theological problems inherent in this analogy, rather than anything to do with evolution per se, that underlie Thomistic misgivings about ID theory.)

To reason from the world to God is to reason from natural substances to their cause.  If the reasoning is to work, one had better have a sound metaphysics of causality and a sound metaphysics of substance.  The machine analogy, and other views which explicitly or implicitly deny inherent causal power to natural substances, reinforce a bad metaphysics of causality and of substance.