Maverick Philosopher

Creation out of Nothing or out of Mere Possibles?

I wrote:

On an Avicennian scheme, creation is actualization of the merely possible.  If so, God does not create ex nihilo, but ex possibilitate. He doesn't create out of nothing; he creates out of possibles. This does not comport well with divine sovereignty. If God is sovereign, he is sovereign over all orders, including the order of the merely possible.  On the Avicennian scheme God is constrained by the ontologically prior order of mere possibles. 

I get this understanding of Avicenna from Gilson and Wilhelmsen. F. D. Wilhelmsen (1923-1996) must have been a successful teacher: he has a knack for witty and graphic comparisons.  To wit:

Avicenna's God might be compared to the Queen of England, to a figurehead monarch.  No law in England has validity unless it bears the Queen's signature.  Until that moment the law is merely "possibly a law."  But Parliament writes the laws and the Queen signs them automatically.  Avicenna's order of pure essence is the Parliament of Being.  Avicenna's God gives the royal signature of existence; but this God, like England's majesty, is stripped of all real power and liberty of action.  (The Paradoxical Structure of Existence, Preserving Christian Publications, 1995, p. 43.  First published in 1970 by U. of Dallas Press.)

The Gilsonian-Wilhelmsenian line is that God's role in creation is merely to give existence to pure essences which, in themselves, do not exist, either in things or in minds, and which are 'already there' and 'waiting' for actualization

 Khalil Andani, Islamic Neoplatonist, responds: 

You said God for Ibn Sina does not create ex nihilo but creates from preexisting possibilities. I do not think this is truly the case. Possibilia as distinct essences do not pre-exist in God's Essence. Rather, in the very act of creation, God conceives the possibles as the effect of His Essence and they manifest as ideas or natural universals in the First Intellect. Yes, Ibn Sina sees creation as eternal and necessary - all of the Islamic Neoplatonists do - but we still see it as creation ex-nihilo because there is no uncreated form or matter within God that God merely manipulates or transforms. We still characterise God's eternal origination of the First Intellect as a creation ex-nihilo because the Intellect depends upon God for its existence even though it is eternal and timeless.

The idea, I take it, is that God's creating of the material world in in fact ex nihilo inasmuch as God creates ex nihilo the First Intellect which is the repository of the pure possibles. So, pace Gilson and Wilhelmsen, God is sovereign over both orders, the order of existing essences and that of pure essences. The rub, of course, is that on this Neoplatonic emanationist scheme, God creates ex nihilo by the necessity of his nature, and so it is at least arguable that God, though not constrained by pure essences, is constrained by his nature, a nature which entails the impossibility of his not creating.

I suppose the response to this would be to say that, since God is not required to create by anything external to him, what I called a constraint is not really a constraint.  

Is Existence Completeness?

Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662:

. . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds.  The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark of existence or reality.  This is entirely in the Meinong-Twardowski tradition.

In other words, existence is complete determinateness or completeness: Necessarily, for any x, x exists if and only if x is complete, i.e., satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).  Now I have long maintained that whatever exists is complete, but I have never been tempted by the thesis that whatever is complete exists.  By my lights, there has to be more to existence than completeness. If I am right, existence cannot be reduced to, or identified with, completeness.

Reader Grigory Aleksin just now reports that the late Dale Jacquette to whom I pay tribute here has a similar view:

Definition of Existence:" For any object O, O exists, has being or is an entity, if and only if O has a maximally consistent property combination."

 

Definition of a Maximally Consistent Property Combination:" A property combination PC for any logically possible object O is maximally consistent if and only if, for any logically possible extraontological property F, either F is in PC or non-F (the complement of F) is in PC, but not both"

 

Thus he holds that:

 

" A combinatorial ontology holds that existence is nothing more or [nor] less than completeness and consistency, or what is also called maximal consistency. The definition, properly understood and applied, provides a unified analysis of the concept of being for all entities, including existent objects, actual states of affairs and the actual world. "

 

"An extraontological property, as the name implies, is a property that by itself does not entail anything about an object’s ontic status, and that is not instantiated unless the relevant property combination is maximally consistent. To maintain that existence does not characterize any object says, in short form, that the object’s property combination is maximally consistent with no predicational gaps only if, for any extraontological property or property complement, the combination includes either the extraontological property or its complement, but not both."

 

The existence-is-completeness doctrine has a interesting consequence which, to my mind, amounts to a reductio ad absurdum:

What Jacquette is telling us is that any maximally consistent combination of properties or states of affairs exists just in virtue of being maximally consistent.  I see two problems with this. 

 

The first problem is that his view entails that every possible world is actual, in which case no possible world is absolutely actual.   Accordingly, every possible world is at best actual-at-itself and not actual, full stop. We end up with a view very much like David Lewis's. Why do I say this? Well, if we consider all the possible combinations of states of affairs, there will not just be one that is maximally consistent and complete and thus existent, but many. 

 

The second problem for Jacquette is that every maximally consistent combination of states of affairs  is necessarily actual.  So not only is every possible world actual at itself, but every such world is necessarily actual at itself.

 

Are these two problems really problems? (Are they bugs or features?)  They are problems for me because I have contrary intuitions. By my lights, there can be only one actual world, and that world is both absolutely actual and contingently actual.  Furthermore, there is no necessity that any world be actual. There might have been no world at all as Jacquette understands 'world': Possibly, no maximally consistent combination of states of affairs exists.  It might have been like this: there is God, who exists of metaphysical necessity, and an infinity of maximally consistent combinations of states of affairs, but none of these combos exists in reality outside the divine mind. 

 

This is equivalent to saying that, while existence entails completeness, completeness does not entail existence. Something must be superadded to a maximally consistent and complete combination of extraontological properties to make it exist.  That something is existence.  The superaddition to a complete essence of existence is what is known in theological terms as creation, at least on one view of divine creation.

 

I say that there is more to existence than completeness; Jacquette denies what I affirm.  Is there any way to decide this rationally?  

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind.  The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality.  God creates potential rebels.  He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus.  He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway.  Lucifer as the father of all perversity.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom.  He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?  

We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right.  How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?

This is a mystery of divine creation.  It is is above my pay grade.  And yours too.

God can do it but we can't.  We can't even understand how God could do it.  A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility.  Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.

Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:

The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought -- yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.

On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157, emphasis added)

And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory!  What's the solution to the paradox?

If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation.  The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.

On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective [objectified] mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective [objectified] mind is the product of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.)  So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God.  Therein lies the difficulty.

Is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?

Related: Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism