The Eternal View of God
First Thoughts on Theodicy, Univocity, Evolution and Cartesianism for Curt Doolittle
This is a commentary/response piece written for an ongoing conversation with the philosopher Curt Doolittle that I hope is the first step to writing an appendix on evolution and theodicy to accompany a book he is working on that will offer a Catholic perspective on the question.
It was prompted by a response I made to his recent post for which he invited me to write a longer reply:
Theodicy, the problem of how evil exists with a good and omnipotent God, is most difficult to solve if you have the false assumptions of (1) univocal understanding of God’s being, (2) no evolution over time within the world, (3) if time and space are more fundamental than being(s).
How could God be omnipotent, omnibenevolent and there yet be evil within created being under these assumptions? Hence the problem of theodicy, as a good God does not seem possible under these conditions:
(1) Because of univocity, God’s being being univocal and not different in any way from created being, either God is not really different from creation, and is just the highest being amidst beings or God is different from created beings but in such a way that the being of the beings he has created is determinate and clockwork. In the first case, we have a demiurge God who is not necessarily benevolent and probably not omnipotent. In the second, there is no room for free will amidst created beings or of anything novel originating within the world. For any creation by such a God admits of no novelty within it. Creation by such a God is a two way real relationship in both the cause and in the effect involving a real change in both, that of the cause becoming an active cause and in the effect moving from non-being to being. But this sort of relationship makes the nature of the effect determinate according to the nature of the cause as the cause, meaning that there is nothing new under the sun within the created order and all is determined by the cause, directly, and if you use a Cartesian temporal perspective, at the start. This “block universe” of determinate physical causality is not only boring, but so entirely fixed that there is no room for real free will.
(2) Because of a lack of evolution (strictly speaking and broadly) the present state of affairs and past actions are all we can point to as effects of God and all that we can judge him by. Looking at the present state of affairs in the world we see a lot of evil and when we look at the past we see at least some of that evil not leading to good. Therefore we can’t seem to have a good God if we see any unresolved evil around us. Particularly in the case of the evolution of living beings, we see a lot of evil, as Darwin’s famed closing of his Origin of Species called nature “red in tooth and claw.” How, in particular, could a good God proceed by way of a nasty, brutish process in the generation of living things? Therefore, God does not seem to be good and also does not seem to be omnipotent. Why would he have used a path of randomness to create living beings? Furthermore, if he chose an evolutionary pathway to living beings anyway, this seems to be an even better proof that God is not good.
(3) Placing time and space as more fundamental in the categories than being(s) is the Cartesian worldview and is implicitly in all of us whereby space and time are seen as the background or stage rather than a set of accidental characteristics defining limitations on the interaction of beings. In such a Cartesian worldview we implicitly ascribe some version of temporality to God and to our judgments of his effects and his world. Omnipotence and omnibenevolence for God again make little sense for a God who acts and responds in such a state, by acting in time, reacting to events, etc., as is best demonstrated in the story of Job, where God takes interest in Job, allows evil to befall him after a challenge that he himself initiated with the devil, and then later reacts. Such interactions of God within time seem to prove a temporarility that argues against both God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence. For why did God launch the situation with Job when he knew the outcome? Why did he later respond to Job’s prayers? Why does God allow evil things to happen in time at all and then sometimes and only sometimes react to them later? Where is God’s Divine providence in time? We often don’t see it on certain parts of our Cartesian stage in both space and in time so it seems that God’s omnibenevolence is not omnipresent, and therefore perhaps non-existent.
There are several simple responses to theodicy, all of which I admit I have imperfect arguments against, but reject because I don’t like the answer. This is not sufficient reason to dismiss them, yes, but is part of what constitutes to me what faith is, as a form of trust, going slightly beyond but not in contradiction to the evidence presented by the world.
One could first say that God is not omnipotent. But then this severely induces paradoxes in your conception of God. If God is not omnipotent but yet created the world and is omnibenevolent but yet there is still evil you could simply say as did Leibniz in the 18th century, that God did as best as he could, and we live in a determinate block universe that was the best of all possible worlds. Again, there is not really any room for free will within this world, and this itself induces problems with God’s goodness, as it seems to postscribe a form of Calvinist predestination that, at the very least, looks bad for God’s omnibenevolence as well. Also, if God is not omnipotent, what is He? Who created Him?
One could also deny God’s goodness. I attempted to answer this several years back in a response to a question to my oration on why God created the world, but I admit that this is a difficult objection that probably sits under the surface in the mind of many a believer. But if God is not good, well, there’s nothing you could do about it and no reason to do anything because there’s no hope for necessarily fair treatment. I again choose to reject this answer, again mostly out of faith, but also because it ends any philosophical or theological discussion as there’s no way you could know anything for sure because God perhaps could have purposely set up the world to confuse. This is generally core to Gnostic thinking, but I again reject it because I don’t like it and it’s depressing.
Lastly one could attempt to deny or obfuscate that evil exists, or to be precise, is manifest within reality, but no one really can hold this position rationally as we all can at least imagine some possibly better world in at least one way. At least we all have to be able to imagine a world without Hitler.
But if we invert or abandon these fundamental claims from above, we can, at the very least, help make the problem of theodicy easier:
(1) If God’s being is not univocal with the beings that he created, that is, if his being is analogical to ours, what some call super-being, an existence as above our existence as the characters in a story are to its authors. Such a God, as Christian theology, has always held, is so radically different from and above the beings He has created that His effects induce no change in His infinity. There is no one-to-one correspondence between His being and what He has created. He could have created multiple potential possible worlds with no change or difference in Himself. There can be real novelty and free will within these worlds because their being and actions are not fully determinate in their particularity by the unchanging nature of God. In this, I struggle to be clear, as God is still the cause of everything done by everything within creation, but there is a form of dependent independence within the created world whereby the created world and beings within it, unlike Leibiniz’s universe of a micromanaging God, have a real room to act (free will and quantum wave collapse, or as Aristotle termed it: potentia) and their actions have real consequences for the future development of the universe. Such a position helps with theodicy as God’s omnipotence is of such an exalted and distinct nature that it does not destroy the natural operations of created beings but permits them within a limited range known as the physical laws of the universe, that these laws are oriented to good and improvement of order within created beings but not of any change in the Creator Himself. Finally evil still exists, but only within the created order, as a deficiency from a higher state of perfection that the order of the universe permits, but has not yet achieved.
(2) Evolution helps far further. Evolution in general, that the state of the world and the kinds of beings and the relationships between them that are possible changes at very different times in the word, as Lee Cronin’s assembly theory does most masterfully, suggests that the perspective of any one time is insufficient for a fair assessment of the world and its creator. The temporal perspective where we judge one moment independent of all the rest leads us falsely to see evil and then stop with it rather than looking further. With an eternal or atemporal perspective, however, even a process that seems to involve struggle and evil could lead to good, but a good that we cannot see at an earlier time. Since our temporality freezes us into a perspective of irresolution where we do not see future conclusions, we necessarily will see irresolution, decay, and regression and not a higher and more perfect state of affairs between beings. The evolution of living beings in particular examples this well, whereby evil in the process is directed towards good in the form of higher beings. I see John 12:24: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” as the Biblical epitome of this. Christ is here talking about His own life, and the call of complete self-giving charity that is to be demanded of his followers, but he is also recounting the central process of Being, both revealing the nature of Eternal Being, Christ showing us God the Father, but also revealing that which is central to created being. God’s eternal charity is manifest internally to the Trinity in His nature and the procession of the Holy Spirit. This manifestation is an eternal and unchanging, fixed orientation or “towardness.” But this also is manifest in time in a temporal manner, both through the Incarnation and Redemption as well as through material and biological evolution, processes whereby individual beings give up their own being that other beings may be. To me, evolution is the manifestation of self-giving charity in time and dignifies the beings and creatures that participate in it by making them real causes. It is not without deficiencies and particular apparent evils, but these are actually dignified by being oriented towards higher perfection to come, and the fact that deficiencies such as negative mutations are part of the process helps dignify the causes as real causes, making evolution not a puppet-show conducted by God, but a cooperative effort with real causality imparted to the beings which are part of it, almost as if creation itself is a sandbox working upon itself to build up to higher states of perfection (although for theological clarity we must admit that God is also in a higher and non-contradictory way also the cause of the entire process).1
(3) Related to (2) if time and space are not fundamental but accidental, and beings and Divine being most of all are fundamental, then a theodicy can also only be presented through a being-focused rather than space or time-focused perspective. Space and time, rather, are both types of quantitative relationships amidst beings, space being the particular type of interval or quantitative limitation on interactibility between two beings, or between the parts of one being, time, on the other hand, is the interval or gap relating states of potency and act. Every created being, if seen in an atemporal way, is at once both potency and act within itself. When we perceive things, however, we see them temporally and see a distinct slice of what is really a continuous whole encompassing both potency and act. This temporal perspective obfuscates the perfection of things as the all-encompassing good of the entire being of a being across all “time.” Just as a piece of music is in reality a total whole that ought to be judged in its entirety, even if it can only be experienced within the small slices of individual moments of experience, so also ought all things individually and the universe as a whole to be judged in their entirety. Theodicy is a problem for us because our temporal perspective blinds us in our inquiry about evil amidst things by forcing us to judge both moments and segments of the entire being of beings apart from their totality. This would be judging Arvo Part’s Credo by the last fifteen seconds alone, or by the first eleven minutes alone, each of which leads to different interpretations or understandings than looking at the entire piece as a whole. Rather, we ought to judge things as a whole in an atemporal way that is not yet revealed to us. In one way, from our temporal perspective, the fullness of all things yet to come do not yet exist, that is to us. But in another way, viewed from a Divine perspective, what might call “beyond the veil” all things are a symphonic piece of perfection and goodness, all evil leading to some good within the piece, but also in another way not even really existing, as the proper goodness of each thing that is capable of imperfection is not really its state at any one moment, but it in its atemporal entirety.
The problem of theodicy is made easier by these three shifts in perspective, but we are also somewhat forced to modify or at least clarify our view of God. God is often imagined and understood as a temporally reacting being who responds to things within creation as they happen. We have little way of truly understanding the opposite, God, as a an eternal being, or of understanding what it is like to have an atemporal perspective, but I believe that the character of the protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet begins to offer some metaphorical insights as I wrote about several years ago. One thing at least that we must change is that God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence are atemporal and eternal. This leads our limited perspective to frequent confusion about God’s goodness and evil in the world as with the Biblical story of Job. Similarly, the Crucifixion and death of Christ also seems to argue against God’s goodness, as most prominently with the Lutheran theology that God took out vengeance and anger upon His Son. A more proper way of beginning to analyze all these questions is to remind ourselves to reimagine Divine goodness as being something very different from anything we can imagine and yet still good, in both its ultimate object and in its entirety. Similarly, while Divine causality seems often hidden from us and obfuscated by physical laws that seem to be able to answer every question about why things happen, we need to reimagine Divine causality and God’s omnipotence as occurring also in a way that we can never fully imagine, a higher and non-univocal, mostly hidden but yet all-encompassing way. Beyond the veil.
P.S.
When considering biological evolution, Romans 8:18-30 also seems quite interesting
18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; 21 because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. 27 And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
28 We know that in everything God works for good[d] with those who love him,[e] who are called according to his purpose. 29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. 30 And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.
See Fr. Joseph Bolin, Creation and Evolution from a Catholic Perspective.