One of the problems atheists have with theism is the doctrine of double causation. This is usually demonstrated by their belief that finding efficient causes in nature excludes the need for God. Whilst they may find pause for reflection in the Big Bang, every other reference to God in the world is taken to be “the God of the Gaps.”
This attitude ultimately goes back to the mediaeval scholar Duns Scotus and his concept of univocity, which is unconsciously adopted even by many unthinking Christians today in the guise of “theistic personalism .” This view holds that God is a being like us, only infinitely greater. Hence if an action is due to a creature it can’t be due to him at the same time. Ergo God is superfluous wherever we find another cause. Or else, if God is involved, he is riding roughshod over our free-will, over the laws of nature, or whatever.
As far as science goes, the problem also goes back to Francis Bacon, whose Novum Organum removed God from the start of chains of efficient causes as being taken for granted, and removed formal and final causes altogether, on the basis that God’s purposes are hidden from mere humans. Raised and educated as a Puritan, Bacon did not doubt God’s actual involvement in every event. But this restriction of the “theological” scope of science lent itself to secularisation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thus reinforcing naturalistic materialism.
Both Deism (“God wound up the universe and lets it evolve”) and atheism fail to appreciate that the historical position of Christianity, based on the Bible, is that contra Duns Scotus God’s very mode of being is different from that of his creatures. The best analogy I’ve found for this, as I’ve written before, is that God is the author of creation much as Charles Dickens is the author of Oliver Twist. If we ask who turned young Oliver into a pickpocket, the obvious answer is “Fagin, a very bad man.” But it is equally, and more fundamentally, true to say the answer is “Dickens, a good man.” We see no paradox in that double causation, because Dickens and Fagin exist in different ways.
Humans, made in the image of God, have the unique ability within creation to invent worlds, albeit imaginary worlds. The strength of a good novel is that we buy into it as truth. Fagin’s character is thoroughly evil, and Oliver’s fundamentally innocent. We not only suspend disbelief as we read the story, but enrich our understanding of the human condition by the experience. Yet both Fagin and Oliver are products of the same mind, that of Charles Dickens, who constructed both characters purposefully from his own understanding of humanity, in order to benefit humanity (and pay the bills, of course!).
This analogy makes good sense of double causation in nature: the God who creates and upholds Creation moment by moment does so through the secondary causes he has spoken into being in a lower mode of existence. For the Christian, to think of physical causes making God redundant ought to be as absurd as suggesting that the self-contained world of Oliver Twist renders Dickens unnecessary.
This can also go a long way towards giving us a handle on the interaction between God in eternity, and ourselves in a temporal universe. The “theistic personalist” will tend to revert to the deistic thinking that God set off the Big Bang, and thereafter gets a kick out of keeping his hands off nature – except for miracles, perhaps. To them, it’s as if God is demoted from eternal being to watching the world play out in time. To the Open Theists that’s overtly the case, as God is held not only to be ignorant of the future, but to be changed by it, as if a novel could write Charles Dickens.
A brilliant young American scholar, Ellie Paley, started her PhD studies on Job at Tyndale House by memorising the entire book in Hebrew. Consequently the book sits entire in her mind, if you like as one thought, whereas the average reader has to struggle chronologically through the abstruse arguments made by the philosophical friends as well as the unfolding of the events, to glean its meaning.
The same gestalt understanding is also true, of course, for the authors of Job or Oliver Twist, who may well have written their endings first and the introduction last, but (all being well) see the whole work as one thing, and not as an unfolding tale whose next page might surprise them.
But, you will rightly think, the actions of a fictional character may seem very real to us (think of those who send hate-mail to film or TV villains, or just of the tears in our own eyes when fictional lovers are torn apart). But they are only “free” in the context of the reader’s imagination. Evil in the real world is actual, so how can it also be caused by a righteous God? Could other analogies help resolve this dilemma?
I’m very sympathetic to George Berkeley’s immaterialist view of reality, as I explain here. The broad idea is that we can resolve the spirit-matter duality problem by subsuming matter to (God’s) mind, whereas mind cannot be reduced to matter. In other words, we literally do live and move and have our being in God. The whole creation is, as it were, words spoken within the mind of God as Spirit, rather than a conceptually problematic “matter outside God.” Read the linked blog before you think I’m being heretical!
But this philosophical position would seem to make the problem of human evil worse, as it implies that true wickedness exists within the mind of God, which appears a more serious concern than Fagin’s fictional wickedness existing in the mind of Dickens.
It occurs to me that the “authorship” analogy might be helpfully extended to encompass the world of dreams. I remember, when I was about seven or eight, my mother telling me one morning that she’d looked into my room as I slept, finding me evidently dreaming and murmuring, “My men! My men!” I felt rather embarrassed by the disclosure.
Now, as a child I had no pretensions to becoming a military leader. Nor did I read many war stories, so I’ve no idea where the dream came from. Dreams are ubiquitous, but still rather mysterious. I had no memory of that dream even the next morning. But assuming it was sent neither by God nor demons, my own mind somehow must have not only cast me as an infantry officer, but invented a platoon of subordinates for who I evidently cared, and some malevolent enemy that was wiping them out.
Yet unlike Dickens with Fagin, I created the evil enemy entirely unconsciously. The same remains true in the recent dreams I half-remember as I doze through these warm summer dawns. I have dreamed of inveterate enemies, evil criminals and even malevolent monsters and aliens, all of which, as far as my dream-experience goes, have an existence independent of my conscious mind. Indeed, the acts of these dream-characters surprise me even when I wake and remember them.
I am not, of course, suggesting that we are merely the bad dreams of the eternal God. But whereas works of art show that we can deliberately create the evil deeds of evil characters in our minds without necessarily participating in their evil, so dreams show that it is possible for characters whose evils we have not deliberately created to exist within our minds, without our thereby becoming guilty of evil. Likewise, it seems to me, God could sustain the freely chosen acts of created beings without necessarily being responsible for their choices.
Both these ideas – the novels and the dreams – are, of course, only analogies. They fall down because we cannot create free beings. As I began by saying, though we are created in God’s image, his mode of being is as different from ours as Dickens’s is from Fagins’. Even Agatha Christie’s detective writer character, Ariadne Oliver, cannot really know what it is to be an author in the real world. We, though, know what it is to be real, and to will and act with genuine freedom, and to sin against our Maker. But we cannot know what it is like to be the Author of (our) life.
My analogies may be wide of the mark, therefore. But at least they show that double causation, even the good God’s authorship of the evil acts of fallen men or angels, is not as intrinsically absurd as is often claimed.
