Maverick Philosopher

On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

Top o' the Stack. 

This entry examines Richard C. Potter's solution to the problem of reconciling creatio ex nihilo with ex nihilo nihil fit in his valuable article, "How To Create a Physical Universe Ex Nihilo," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, (January 1986), pp. 16-26. (Potter appears to have dropped out of sight, philosophically speaking. PhilPapers shows only three articles by him, the last of which appeared in 1986. )

What I argue is that similar Potterian moves can be used by an atheist to argue that the universe caused itself to exist.  The upshot is that we remain stuck with the problem of reconciling the two principles.

A technical post, not for the faint of heart or weak of mind. You will have to put on your 'thinking caps' as Sister Ann Miriam said back in the first grade.

If Someone is Walking, is He Necessarily Walking? DDS and Modal Collapse

In an article I am studying by Daniel J. Pedersen and Christopher Lilley, "Divine Simplicity, God's Freedom, and the Supposed Problem of Modal Collapse," (Journal of Reformed Theology 16, 2022, 127-147),  the authors quote Boethius:

. . . if you know that someone is walking, he must necessarily be walking. (Consolation, v. 6)

They then paraphrase and endorse the point as follows:

That is, supposing a man is walking, so long as he is walking, he must necessarily be walking.

This strikes me as interestingly false. Suppose Tom is walking at time t. Surely he might not have been walking at t. So it is not necessarily, but contingently, the case that Tom is walking at t. For although he is actually walking at t, it is possible that he not be walking at t. Of course, a man cannot walk and not walk at the very same time. For that would violate the law of non-contradiction (LNC). But that is not the issue. The issue is whether the following could be true: Tom is walking at t & it is possible that Tom is not walking at t. And of course it could be true.

Boethius, lately quoted, mentioned knowledge. Is my knowing that Tom is walking at t relevant to the question? Right after the sentence quoted, Boethius writes, "For what a man really knows cannot be otherwise than it is known to be."  Suppose I know (with objective certainty) that Tom is walking at t.  Would it follow that Tom is necessarily walking at t? No. Boethius appears to have committed a modal fallacy.  While it it true that 

1) Necessarily (if S knows that p, then p)

it does not follow that

2) If S knows that p, then necessarily p.

To think otherwise is to commit the modal fallacy of confusing the necessity of the consequence (necessitas consequentiae) with the necessity of the consequent (necessitas consequentis).  (1) is true; (2) is false; hence the inferential move is invalid. Most of the propositions we know are contingent. For example, I know that I was born in California, but this is a contingent fact about me.  I might have been born elsewhere. I might not have been born at all. One cannot know what is false, and so it follows that whatever one knows is true; it does not follow, however, that what one knows is necessarily true.  For again, most of what we know is contingently true.  In the patois of 'possible worlds,' most of what we know is true in some but not all possible worlds.

So we can set aside knowledge that a man is walking as a good reason for believing that a man walking is necessarily walking. Back to walking Tom. He cannot walk and not walk at the same time. But if he is walking at a given time, it is possible that he not be walking at that time, which is to say: Tom's walking at t is contingent, not necessary.  Don't confuse possibly (p & ~p) with p & possibly ~p.  Mind the scope of the modal operator.

The authors do not agree. They follow Boethius, Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles I,  67), and other scholastics. While they grant that  it is not absolutely or unconditionally necessary that a man walk, on the ground that there is nothing in the concept human being or the essence human being  to require that an instance of this concept/essence walk, it is hypothetically or conditionally necessary that a particular man walk on condition that he is in fact walking. I will argue against this distinction in a moment. But first:

Modal collapse and DDS

Why is this so interesting? One reason is because it is relevant to the problem of modal collapse that bedevils classical theism. (Classical theists, by definition, are committed to the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS).)  Here is (one aspect of) the problem in brief compass. God exists of absolute metaphysical (broadly logical) necessity. The ground or source of this necessity is the divine simplicity. On DDS there are no distinctions in God, hence no distinction between God and his creating of our (presumably) contingent universe U.  Since God is omnipotent, his creating of U ex nihilo is efficacious: he cannot fail to 'pull off' what he intends. It is presumably also deterministic: divine efficient agent-causation of U is not probabilistic or 'chancy.'  It would seem to follow that God, his free creating of U, and U itself are all three absolutely necessary.  Now everything is either God or created by God, including so-called abstract  objects. It follows that everything is absolutely necessary and thus that nothing is contingent.  The distinction between necessity and contingency collapses.  The senses of the modal terms, no doubt, remain intact and distinct on the intensional plane; the collapse occurs on the extensional plane. Hence the dreaded modal collapse. This is unacceptable if you believe, as most classical theists do, that creation is contingent, both the action of creating and its effect, the ensemble of creatures. (Note the process-product ambiguity of 'creation.') A separate problem in the immediate vicinity, one that I will not discuss here, concerns whether the contingency of creation requires a libertarian model of divine free agency. 

A response via the distinction between absolute and hypothetical necessity

One among several responses to the threatened collapse of the contingent into the necessary is to say that there is no modal collapse, no reduction of everything to absolute necessity,  because, while God is absolutely necessary, his creatures are not absolutely but only hypothetically necessary.  This distinction is supposed to avert the collapse. I do not believe that this distinction, despite its distinguished pedigree, stands up to close scrutiny.  Let me explain.

If a thing exists necessarily, one may reasonably ask about the ground or source of its necessary existence. In the case of God, if there is such a ground, it would have to be God himself in his ontological simplicity. God is necessary in se, in himself, and not ab alio, from another. This is because God does not and indeed cannot derive his existence from another. In the case of so-called abstract objects such as the number 9 or the set {7, 9} the ground of necessary existence is in God. For abstracta are creatures: they derive their existence from God. Or at least this is a reasonable thing to say. Accordingly, abstracta are necessary ab alio, from another. Given that they too are creatures, they cannot exist in themselves, but are dependent on God for their existence. You might even say that they are hypothetically or conditionally necessary in that they exist only on condition that God create them, and this despite the fact that abstracta exist 'in all possible worlds' in the Leibniz-derived patois of 'possible worlds.' If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then abstract entities would not exist either, and this regardless of the fact that they 'exist in all possible worlds' just as God does.  There is no harm in speaking of abstracta as hypothetically necessary if all this means is that abstracta are necessary beings that are dependent on God for their existence. There is no harm as long as it is realized that God and the number 9, for example, are necessary in the very same sense with the difference being that God exists unconditionally whereas the number exists conditionally or dependently ('hypothetically').  But then there are not two kinds of necessity, absolute and hypothetical, as the authors seem to think, but one kind only, with however two different sources or grounds of the existence of those items that enjoy this one kind of necessity (absolute metaphysical necessity). By my lights, one must distinguish between the question whether a thing exists dependently or independently from the question whether the thing exists necessarily or contingently.  The two distinctions 'cut perpendicular' to each other. Accordingly, God exists independently and necessarily; abstracta exist dependently and necessarily; poor Socrates exists dependently and contingently.  What holds for Socrates holds for every sublunary creature, every concrete item in space and time that is created by God.  If the universe of sublunary items just exists, brute-factually, as Bertrand Russell maintained in his BBC debate with Fr. Copleston, then Socrates exists contingently but not dependently. If a thing is modally contingent, it does not follow straightaway that it is dependent on ('contingent upon') anything.  On my view, then, modal collapse remains a formidable threat to DDS and thus to classical theism which, by definition, includes DDS.  

What our authors want to say, however,  is not merely that abstracta enjoy hypothetical necessity, but that all creatures, including material creatures in time and space, enjoy this "kind" (the authors' word) of necessity. But this is the Boethian mistake all over again. If Tom is walking at t, it does not follow that he is necessarily walking at t. Likewise, if Tom is being sustained in his existence by divine action at t, it does not follow that Tom necessarily exists at t. No, our man contingently exists at t. For God could decide at t or right before to 'pull the plug' on Tom (or on the entire universe of which he is a part) in which case Tom, who had been in existence moments before, would become nothing. Despite God's ongoing creative sustenance of Tom moment by moment, at each moment he remains possibly nonexistent, which is to say, contingent. (To understand what I just wrote, you have to understand that 'possibly' is to be taken ontologically, not epistemically.)

If I am told that Tom and the rest of the denizens of the sublunary are not modally contingent,  but hypothetically necessary, I will repeat my point that there is no such  modality as hypothetical necessity. The notion is an illicit amalgam that elides the distinction between existence and modality. Everything that exists is either necessary or contingent. And everything that exists either exists dependently or independently. Hypothetical necessity is a misbegotten notion.

Linguistically, the qualifier 'hypothetical' in 'hypothetical necessity' is an alienans adjective, one the shifts ('alienates,' 'others') the sense of 'necessity. In this respect it is like 'apparent' in 'apparent heart attack.' A deciduous tree cannot fail to be a tree; an apparent heat attack, however, may fail to be a heart attack.  'Hypothetical necessity' is  unlike 'deciduous tree' and very much like 'apparent heart attack.' Some heart attacks are merely apparent while others  are apparent and real. (And still others, of course, are real but not apparent.) Similarly, some necessary beings are hypothetical in that they depend for their existence on God; other necessary beings are absolute in that they do not depend on anything.

One mistake is to think that the number 9, e.g., is only hypothetically necessary because dependent on God for its existence. No, it is just as modally necessary as God.  Another mistake is to think that if some creatures are non-contingent, then all creatures are, including the denizens of the sublunary, in plain English, those that are material, temporal, and spatial. Socrates -- our representative sublunary critter -- is a modally contingent being despite his creaturely  status.   A third mistake is to think that, because divine productive causation ex nihilo necessitates its effect, that the effect is thereby rendered modally necessary. This mistake is structurally analogous to the logical mistake of confusing the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent.  Whatever God brings into existence out of nothing cannot fail to exist, but that is not to say that the effect of the bringing-into-existence is modally necessary. No, it remains modally contingent, just as modally contingent as the divine action. If you say that the divine action is absolutely necessary, then of course the effect is modally necessary. But then you have nolens volens accepted modal collapse!

In sum, there is no evading the modal collapse objection to DDS by distinguishing between absolute and hypothetical necessity, and this for the reason that there is no such modality as hypothetical necessity. The phrase 'hypothetical necessity' can only mean that certain entities that are modally necessary, the inmates of what Plantinga has called the "Platonic menagerie," are nevertheless  dependent on God for their existence.  

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