Maverick Philosopher

Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo?

Classical theists hold that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This phrase carries a privative, not a positive, sense: it means not out of something as opposed to out of something called ‘nothing.’ This much is crystal clear. Less clear is how creation ex nihilo (CEN), comports, if it does comport, with the following hallowed principle:

ENN: Ex nihilo nihit fit. Nothing comes from nothing.

 The latter principle seems intuitively obvious. It is not the case that something comes from nothing.  Had there been nothing at all, there would not now be anything.  (ENN) is not, however, a logical truth.  A logical truth is one whose negation is a formal-logical contradiction.  Negating (ENN) yields:  something comes from nothing.  This is logically possible in that no contradiction is involved in the notion that something come to be out of nothing.  Logical possibility notwithstanding, that is hard to swallow.  Rather than explain why -- a fit topic for yet another post -- I will assume for present purposes that (ENN) is a necessary truth of metaphysics.  It is surely plausible.  (And if true, then necessarily true.) Had there been nothing at all, there would have been nothing to 'precipitate' the arisal of anything.  (But also nothing to prevent the arisal of something.)

You are not philosophizing until you have a problem.  My present problem is this:  If (ENN) is true, how can (CEN) be true? How can God create out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? It would seem that our two principles form an inconsistent dyad.  How solve it?

It would be unavailing to say that God, being omnipotent, can do anything, including making something come out of nothing. For omnipotence, rightly understood, does not imply that God can do anything, but that God can do anything that it is possible to do.  But there are limits on what is possible. For one thing, logic limits possibility, and so limits divine power: not even God can make a contradiction true. There are also non-logical limits on divine power: God cannot restore a virgin. There are past events which possess a necessitas per accidens that puts them beyond the reach of the divine will. Nor can God violate (ENN), given that it is necessarily true. God's will  is subject to necessary truths. Necessary truths, like all truths, are accusatives of the divine intellect and so cannot exist unless the divine intellect exists. The divine intellect limits the divine will.

Admittedly, what I just stated, though very plausible, is not obvious.  Distinguished philosophers have held that the divine will is not limited in the way I have described.  But to enter this can of worms would take us too far afield, to mix a couple of metaphors.  So we add to our problem the plausible background assumption that there are logical and non-logical limits on divine power.

So the problem remains: How can God create the world out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? How can we reconcile (CEN) with (ENN)?

One response to the problem is to say that (CEN), properly understood, states that God creates out of nothing distinct from himself. Thus he does not operate upon any pre-given matter, nor does he bestow existence on pre-given essences, nor create out of pre-given possibles.  God does not create out of pre-given matter, essences, or mere possibilia.  But if God creates out of nothing distinct from himself, this formulation allows that, in some sense, God creates ex Deo, out of himself. Creating the world out of himself, God creates the world out of nothing distinct from himself. In this way, (CEN) and (ENN) are rendered compatible.

In sum, ‘Creatio ex nihilo’ is ambiguous. It could mean that God creates out of nothing, period, in which case (CEN) collides with (ENN), or that God creates out of nothing ultimately distinct from himself. My proposal is that the Latin phrase be construed in the second of these ways. So construed, it has the sense of ‘creatio ex Deo.’

But what exactly does it mean to say that God creates out of God? A critic once rather uncharitably took me  to mean precisely what I do not mean, namely, that God creates out of God in a way that implies that the product of the creative operation (creation in the sense of created entities) is identical to its operator (God) and its operand (God). That would amount to an absurd pantheism in which all distinctions are obliterated, a veritable "night in which all cows are black," to borrow a phrase from Hegel.

When I say that God creates ex Deo what I mean is that God operates on entities that are not external to God in the sense of having existence whether or not God exists. I build a rock cairn to mark the trail by piling up otherwise scattered rocks. These rocks exist whether or not I do. My creation of the cairn is therefore neither out of nothing nor out of me but out of materials external to me. If God created in that way he would not be God as classically conceived, but a Platonic demiurge.

So I say that God creates out of ‘materials’ internal to him in the sense that their existence depends on God’s existence and are therefore in this precise sense internal to him. (I hope it is self-evident that materials need not be made out of matter.) In this sense, God creates ex Deo rather than out of materials that are provided from without. It should be obvious that God, a candidate for the status of an absolute, cannot have anything ‘outside him.’

To flesh this out a bit, suppose properties are concepts in the divine mind. Then properties are necessary beings in that they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds just as God does. The difference, however, is that properties have their necessity from another, namely God, while God has his necessity from himself. (This distinction is in Aquinas.) In other words, properties, though they are necessary beings, depend for their existence on God. If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then properties, and indeed the entire Platonic menagerie (as Plantinga calls it) would not exist.

Suppose that properties are the ‘materials’ or ontological constituents out of which concrete contingent individuals – thick particulars in Armstrong’s parlance – are constructed. (This diverges somewhat from what I say in A Paradigm Theory of Existence, but no matter: it is a simplification for didactic purposes.) We can then say that the existence of contingent individual C is just the unity or contingent togetherness of C’s ontological constituents. C exists iff C’s constituents are unified. Creating is then unifying. (We have a model for this unifying in our own unification of a sensory manifold in the unity of one consciousness.)  Since the constituents are necessary beings, they are uncreated. But since their necessity derives from God, they are not independent of God.

In this sense, God creates out of himself: he creates out of materials that are internal to his own mental life. It is ANALOGOUS to the way we create objects of imagination. (I am not saying that God creates the world by imagining it.) When I construct an object in imagination, I operate upon materials that I myself provide. Thus I create a purple right triangle by combining the concept of being purple with the concept of being a right triangle. I can go on to create a purple cone by rotating the triangle though 360 degrees on the y-axis. The object imagined is wholly dependent on me the imaginer: if I leave off imagining it, it ceases to exist. I am the cause of its beginning to exist as well as the cause of its continuing to exist moment by moment. But the object imagined, as my intentional object, is other than me just as the creature is other than God. The creature is other than God while being wholly dependent on God just as the object imagined is other than me while being wholly dependent on me. 

A  critic thinks  that "The notion of total dependence, dependence in every respect, entails identity, and therefore no dependence at all. If a is dependent on b in all respects, then a ‘collapses’ into b, taking dependency, and difference, with it." So if the creature is dependent on God both for its existence and for its nature, the creature collapses into God. And of course we can’t have that. It is obvious that the manifest plurality of the world, the difference of things from one another and from God, must be maintained. We cannot allow a pantheism according to which God just is the world, nor one on which God swallows up the plural world and its plurality with it. 

The  principle lately quoted is refuted by every intentional object qua intentional object. The object imagined is totally dependent in its existence on my acts of imagining. After all, I excogitated it: in plain Anglo-Saxon, I thought it up, or out. This excogitatum, to give it a name, is wholly dependent on my cogitationes and on the ego ‘behind’ these cogitationes if there is an ego ‘behind’ them. (Compare Sartre’s critique of Husserl on this score in the former’s Transcendence of the Ego.) But this dependence is entirely consistent with the excogitatum’s being distinct both from me qua ego, and from the intentional acts or cogitationes emanating from the ego and directed upon the excogitatum. To press some Husserlian jargon into service, the object imagined ist kein reeller Inhalt, it is not "really contained" in the act. The object imagined is neither immanent in the act, nor utterly transcendent of the act: it is a transcendence in immanence. It is ‘constituted’ as a transcendence in immanence. 

The quoted  principle may also be refuted by more mundane examples, examples that I would not use to explain the relation between creator and creature. Consider a wrinkle W in a carpet C. W is distinct from C. This is proven by the fact that they differ property-wise: the wrinkle is located in the Northeast corner of the carpet, but the carpet is not located in the Northeast corner of the carpet. (The principle here is the Indiscernibility of Identicals.) But W is wholly (totally) dependent on C. A wrinkle in a carpet cannot exist without a carpet; indeed, it cannot exist apart from the very carpet of which it is the wrinkle. Thus W cannot ‘migrate’ from carpet C to carpet D. Not only is W dependent for its existence on C, but W is dependent on C for its nature (whatness, quiddity). For W just is a certain modification of the carpet, and the whole truth about W can be told in C-terms. So W is totally dependent on C. 

So dependence in both essence and existence does not entail identity.

Somehow the reality of the Many must be upheld.  The plural world is no illusion.  If Advaita Vedanta maintains that it is an illusion, then it is false.  On the other hand, the plural world is continuously dependent for its existence on the One.  Making sense of this relation is not easy, and I don't doubt that my analogy to the relation of finite mind and its intentional objects limps in various ways.

In any case, one thing seems clear: there is a problem with reconciling CEN with EEN.  The reconciliation sketched here involves reading creatio ex nihilo as creatio ex Deo.  The solution is not pantheistic, but panentheistic.  It is not that all is God, but that all is in God.

I discuss and reject a different solution to the problem in On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit.

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Do Aquinas and Spinoza Refer to the Same God?

I put the following question to Francis Beckwith via e-mail:

Thomas Aquinas and Spinoza both hold that there is exactly one God.  Would you say that when they use Deus they succeed in referring to one and the same God, but just have contradictory beliefs about this one and the same God?  When I put this question to Dale Tuggy in his podcast discussion with me, he bit the bullet and said Yes to my great surprise. 

Professor Beckwith responded:

. . . I am accepting what each faith tradition (at least in its orthodox formulations) believes about God: he is the self-existent subsistent source of all that receives its being from another. Does that include Spinoza’s God? Yes, with a caveat.  He has the right God but the wrong universe. He gets the self-existent subsistent source right, but he gets that which receive its being from another wrong. It’s the univocal predication of the theistic personalists--God and nature are of the same order of being--except in reverse.   This is why St. Thomas is the bomb. :-) 

Before I reply to Beckwith, let us make sure we understand how the Spinozistic conception of God  differs from, while partially overlapping with, the traditional conception we find in Augustine, Aquinas, et al.  Steven Nadler in SEP writes,

According to the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of divinity, God is a transcendent creator, a being who causes a world distinct from himself to come into being by creating it out of nothing. God produces that world by a spontaneous act of free will, and could just as easily have not created anything outside himself. By contrast, Spinoza's God is the cause of all things because all things follow causally and necessarily from the divine nature. Or, as he puts it, from God's infinite power or nature “all things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles” (Ip17s1). The existence of the world is, thus, mathematically necessary. It is impossible that God should exist but not the world. This does not mean that God does not cause the world to come into being freely, since nothing outside of God constrains him to bring it into existence. But Spinoza does deny that God creates the world by some arbitrary and undetermined act of free will. God could not have done otherwise. There are no possible alternatives to the actual world, and absolutely no contingency or spontaneity within that world. Everything is absolutely and necessarily determined.

The two conceptions overlap in that for both the traditionalist and the Spinozist, there is exactly one God who is the necessarily existent, uncreated, and the ground of the existence of everything distinct from itself.  But there are important differences.  For Spinoza, God is immanent, not transcendent; not libertarianly free; not capable of existing on his own apart from nature.  There are other differences as well.

Beckwith's response implies that the orthodox Thomist and the orthodox Spinozist refer to  the same God, but that the Spinozist  harbors some false beliefs about God, among them, that God is not a libertarianly free agent who could have created some other world or no world at all. On the traditional conception, God does things for reasons or purposes while for Spinoza, "All talk of God's purposes, intentions, goals, preferences or aims is just an anthropomorphizing fiction." (Nadler) 

As I see it, there is no one God that both the Thomist and the Spinozist succeed in referring to. If the God of Aquinas exists, then the God of Spinoza  does not exist.  And contrapositively: if the God of Spinoza does exist, then the God of Aquinas does not.  This strikes me as evident even if we don't bring in the point that for Aquinas God is ipsum esse subsistens. If we do bring it in it is even more evident.

From my point of view, Beckwith makes the following mistake.  He apparently thinks that the overlap of the Thomistic and the Spinozistic God concepts suffices to show that in reality there is exactly one God to which  both Thomists and Spinozists refer.   It does not.

Suppose the common concept is instantiated.  Then it is instantiated by something that exists.  But existence entails completeness:

EX --> COMP:  Necessarily, for any existent x, and for any non-intentional property P, either x instantiates P or x instantiates the complement of P.

What the principle states is that every real item, everything that exists, satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle.  Nothing in reality is incomplete.  So if the common God concept is instantiated, then it is instantiated by something that is either  libertarianly free or not libertarianly free.  A concept of God can abstract from this alternative.  But God in reality must be one or the other.  Since successful reference is reference to what exists, Thomist and Spinozist cannot be referring to one and the same God.

Objection.  "Why not?  if Thomism is true, they are both referring to the Thomist God, and if Spinozism is true, they are both referring to the Spinozist God."

Reply.  There are two conditions on successful reference.  First, the referent must exist.  Second, the referent must satisfy the understanding of the one who is referring.  As I said in an earlier post, successful reference requires the cooperation of mind and world.  The second condition is not satisfied for the Spinozist if Thomism is true. The Spinozist intends to refer to a being that is not libertarianly free.  His reference cannot be called successful if, willy-nilly,  he happens to get hold of the Thomist God.

Shooting analogy.  A sniper has a Muslim man in his sights, a man whom the sniper believes is a jihadi he must kill.  Next to the man is a Muslim woman whom the sniper believes is not a jihadi and whom he endeavors not to harm.  Unbeknownst to the sniper, it is the woman who is the jihadi and not the man.  The sniper, aiming at the man, gets off his shot, but misses him while hitting the woman and killing her.  Question:  has the sniper made a successful shot? No doubt he hit and destroyed a jihadi.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that he missed the target he was aiming at.  He failed to hit the target he intended to hit. 

So I say the sniper failed to get off a successful shot.  He just happened to hit a jihadi.  He satisfied only one of the conditions of a successful shot.  You must not only hit a target; you must hit the right target.  Suppose I score a bull's eye at the shooting range, but the bull's eye belongs to the target of the shooter to my right.  Did I get off a successful shot?  Of course not: I failed to hit what I was aiming at.

Same with successful reference:  You must not only hit something; you must hit the right thing.  Now what makes a thing the right thing is the intention of the one who refers.  When a jihadi screams,  Allahu akbar! he intends to refer to the voluntaristic, radically unitarian, God of Islam, not the triune God.  If he happens to latch on to the triune God, then he has failed in his reference.  He has failed just as surely as if there is no God to refer to.

Traditional Theism and Reductive Pantheism: Same God?

Suppose we define a reductive pantheist as one who identifies God with the natural world -- the space-time system and its contents -- where this identification is taken as a reduction of God to nature, and thus as a naturalization of God, as opposed to a divinization of nature.  In short, for the reductive pantheist, God reduces to the physical universe.  God just is the physical universe.  (I take no position on whether Spinoza is a reductive pantheist; I suspect he is not, but this is a question for the Spinoza scholars.)

Now do the traditional theist and the reductive pantheist believe in, worship, and refer to the same God, except that one or the other has false beliefs about this same God?  The traditional theist holds that God is not identical to the physical universe, while the reductive pantheist holds that God is identical to the physical universe.  Does it make sense to say that one of them has a false belief about the same God that the other has a true belief about?

This makes no sense.  To maintain that God just is the physical universe  is tantamount to a denial of the existence of God.  Either that, or 'God' is being used in some idiosyncratic way.

What we should say in this case is that the respective senses of  of 'God' are so different that they rule out sameness of referent. 

Someone who worships the physical universe is not worshiping God under a false description; he is not worshiping God at all.  He is worshiping an idol.

Now Spinoza, as I read him, is not a reductive pantheist.  But if you can see why the reductive pantheist does not worship the same God as the traditional theist, then perhaps you will be able to appreciate why it is reasonable to hold the same of the Spinozist.

And if I can get you to appreciate that, then perhaps I can get you to appreciate that it is scarcely obvious that Christian and Muslim worship the same God.

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Creatio ex Deo and Pantheism

The following post draws mainly upon Robert Oakes, "Does Traditional Theism Entail Pantheism?" American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1983), pp. 105-112. Reprinted in Tom Morris, ed. The Concept of God (Oxford U. Press, 1987). 

The question arises:   Does my construal of creatio ex nihilo in terms of creatio ex Deo commit me to pantheism? If so, how does that comport with my avowed onto-theological personalism? I will try toshow that my construal does not commit me to pantheism, or at least not to the pantheism that Oakes seems to embrace.

The logically first question concerns just what pantheism is and is not. I’ll begin with what it is not.

A. Pantheism worth discussing is not the view that God (G) is identical to the physical universe (U). For that would amount to saying that God does not exist. Whether or not God exists, the divine nature excludes the possibility of God’s being a system of physical objects. The reduction of G to U thus amounts to the elimination of G. Therefore, the use of ‘God’ to refer to U is simply an egregious misuse of the term ‘God,’ a misuse on a par with Tillich’s misuse of ‘God’ to refer to one’s ultimate concern.

B. What of the opposite reduction of U to G? This is also a type of pantheism not worth discussing: it implies that God exists but the physical universe does not. For it is self-evident that the physical universe cannot exist unless it is in some sense distinct from G. After all, G is immutable whereas U is mutable; hence, by what McTaggart calls the Discernibility of the Diverse (the logical contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals), U cannot be identical to G if both exist.

C. If pantheism is to be worth discussing, it must somehow allow for a difference of some kind between God and the cosmos. It must steer a middle course between a strict identity of G and U and a type of difference that would render them ‘indifferent’ to each other, i.e., a type of radical difference that would allow the possibility of U existing without G existing. A viable pantheism must therefore avoid three positions: (1) God is world-identical; (2) The world is God-identical; (3) God and the world are externally related in the sense that either could exist without the other.

One way to satisfy these requirements is by saying, Spinozistically, that created entities are modes of God, or as Oakes says, "aspects or modifications" of God. (p. 106 et passim) For if x is a mode (aspect, modification) of y, then x is not identical to y, y is not identical to x, and x and y are not merely externally related.

It is important to realize that classical theism must also satisfy the requirements, (1)-(3). In particular, classical theism must deny that U can exist without G. For it is a central tenet of classical theism that God is not merely a cause of the inception of the universe, but a cause of its continuance as well. God is not merely a deistic 'starter-upper,' but a moment by moment conserver. How exactly creatio originans and creatio continuans fit together involves problems that cannot be discussed in this post.  (Cf. William F. Vallicella (2002), The Creation–Conservation Dilemma and Presentist Four-Dimensionalism, Religious Studies 38 (2):187-200.)  But there can be no doubt that for classical theism as it is found in Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley and others, creation in the full sense involves both notions, both originating creation and continuing creation. 

Now given the fact just mentioned, how are we to distinguish classical theism (CT) from pantheism in the (C)-sense, the only sense in play here? Does (CT) perhaps entail pantheism? (To say that p entails q is to say that, necessarily, if p is true, then q is true. Equivalently, it is to say that it is impossible that p be true, and q false.)

You will notice that the doctrine of conservation ‘shortens’ the ‘ontological distance’ between creator and creatures. It implies that at each moment divine activity is required to keep the creature from lapsing into nonbeing. The point is not merely that God as a contingent matter of fact conserves creatures moment by moment, but that creatures are necessarily such that they are conserved moment by moment by divine activity. This suggests that the very being of creatures is their being-conserved moment by moment, which in turn gives rise to the following worry: How then can creatures retain any ontological independence?

Drawing on Oakes, the following Argument from Conservation can be mounted for the thesis that classical theism entails pantheism (but of course not pantheism in the absurd (A) or (B) senses). (The argument is in Oakes, but the reconstruction is mine.)

1. Every contingent being is necessarily such that it is existentially dependent on God at each moment of its existence.

2. If anything X is necessarily such that it is dependent on something Y at each moment of its existence, then X is a mode (aspect, modification) of Y.

Therefore

3. Every contingent being is a mode (aspect, modification) of God, which amounts to pantheism.

The validity (formal correctness) of this argument is not in question, and premise (1) merely states the conservation doctrine, an essential subdoctrine of classical theism. So the soundness of the argument rides on premise (2).

Premise (2) fits some cases very well. A wrinkle in a carpet satisfies both the antecedent and the consequent of (2). Same holds for the dance and the dancer. Suppose Little Eva is doing the Locomotion ("C’mon baby, do the Lo-co-mo-shun . . ..) There is the dance-type and its various actual and possible tokens. Little Eva’s gyrations at time t constitute one of these tokens such that the token in question could not possibly exist except as an aspect or modification of Little Eva at t. Similarly for felt pleasures and felt pains. The esse of a pain just is its percipi: a pain cannot exist except as perceived. Pains and the like are therefore plausibly construed as aspects or modifications of perceivers. Finally, it is plausibly maintained that a particular thinking, believing, imagining, is an aspect or modification of a thinker or a believer or an imaginer.

But now consider an object imagined as opposed to the act of imagining it. I mean an object that does not exist apart from its being imagined, a purely intentional object. (A rich vein of gold at the base of Weaver’s Needle; a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater.) Said object does not exist on its own, but only as the accusative of an act (or acts) of imagining. Now while it makes sense to say that the act (the occurrent episode) of imagining is an aspect or modification of an imaginer, it does not make much sense to say this of the intentional object (the accusative) of the act. Indeed, we cannot even say that the intentional object is an aspect or modification of the act trained upon it. Why not?

Note that if x is an aspect or modification of y, then x cannot exist without y, but y can exist without x. (A carpet wrinkle cannot exist without the carpet of which it is the wrinkle, but the carpet can surely exist without that, or any, wrinkle.) By contrast, if x is the intentional object of act y, then x cannot exist without y, AND y cannot exist without x. An imagining cannot exist except as the imagining of a definite object, and that object, qua intentional object, cannot exist without the act. I conclude from this difference that the intentional object cannot be an aspect or modification of the act. It is not a property of the act, but its object or intentum. A fortiori, it cannot be an aspect or modification of the subject of the act, the imaginer in the case of an act of imagining.

We therefore have a class of counterexamples to premise (2) above. The Argument from Conservation therefore fails, and classical theism does not collapse into pantheism – or at least not for the reason that Oakes provided in the article under discussion.

So far, then, I cannot see that I am committed to pantheism in any of the three senses lately distinguished by my construal of creatio ex nihilo  as creatio ex Deo.

Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo? Am I a Panentheist?

In an e-mail Michael Sudduth asked me what I thought of panentheism.  I suspect my position, as developed in A Paradigm Theory of Existence and various articles, points in a panentheistic direction.  For when I think about the relation of the One and the Many, I think of the Many as 'in' the One in a manner analogous to the way an intentional object is 'in' the mind.  The manifold of contingent beings is 'in' the divine One.   The present post will sketch a way panentheism might  be teased out of classical theism.

Classical theists hold that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This phrase of course carries a privative, not a positive, sense: it means not out of something as opposed to out of something called ‘nothing.’ This much is crystal clear. Less clear is how creation ex nihilo (CEN), comports, if it does comport, with the following principle:

ENN: Ex nihilo nihit fit. Nothing comes from nothing.

The latter principle seems intuitively obvious. It is not a truth of formal logic -- since its negation is not self-contradictory -- but it does appear to be a truth of metaphysics, indeed, a necessary truth of metaphysics. But if (ENN) is true, how can (CEN) be true? How can God create out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing?

It would be unavailing to say that God, being omnipotent, can do anything, including making something come out of nothing. For omnipotence, rightly understood, does not imply that God can do anything, but that God can do anything that any possible agent could possibly do. But there are limits on what is possible. For one thing, logic limits possibility, and so limits divine power: not even God can make a contradiction true. There are also extra-logical limits on divine power: God cannot restore a virgin. There are past events which possess a necessitas per accidens that puts them beyond the reach of the divine will. Nor can God violate (ENN), given that it is necessarily true. God is subject to necessary truths. Some may see a problem with that, but I don’t. Necessary truths, like all truths, are accusatives of the divine intellect and so cannot exist unless the divine intellect exists. The divine intellect limits the divine will.

So the problem remains: How can God create the world out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? How can we reconcile (CEN) with (ENN)?

One response to the problem is to say that (CEN), properly understood, states that God creates out of nothing distinct from himself. Thus he does not operate upon any pre-given matter, nor does he bestow existence on pre-given essences, nor create out of pre-given possibles.  But if God creates out of nothing distinct from himself, this formulation allows that, in some sense, God creates ex Deo, out of himself. Creating the world out of himself, God creates the world out of nothing distinct from himself. In this way, (CEN) and (ENN) are rendered compatible.

In sum, ‘Creatio ex nihilo’ is ambiguous. It could mean that God creates out of nothing, period, in which case (CEN) collides with (ENN), or that God creates out of nothing ultimately distinct from himself. My proposal is that the Latin phrase be construed in the second of these ways. So construed, it has the sense of ‘creatio ex Deo.’

But what exactly does it mean to say that God creates out of God? A critic once rather uncharitably took me  to mean precisely what I do not mean, namely, that God creates out of God in a way that implies that the product of the creative operation (creation in the sense of created entities) is identical to its operator (God) and its operand (God). That would amount to an absurd pantheism in which all distinctions are obliterated, a veritable "night in which all cows are black," to borrow a phrase from Hegel.

When I say that God creates ex Deo what I mean is that God operates on entities that are not external to God in the sense of having existence whether or not God exists. I build a rock cairn to mark the trail by piling up otherwise scattered rocks. These rocks exist whether or not I do. My creation of the cairn is therefore neither out of nothing nor out of me but out of materials external to me. If God created in that way he would not be God as classically conceived, but a Platonic demiurge. So I say that God creates out of ‘materials’ internal to him in the sense that their existence depends on God’s existence and are therefore in this precise sense internal to him. (I hope it is self-evident that materials need not be made out of matter.) In this sense, God creates ex Deo rather than out of materials that are provided from without. It should be obvious that God, a candidate for the status of an absolute, cannot have anything ‘outside him.’

To flesh this out a bit, suppose properties are concepts in the divine mind. Then properties are necessary beings in that they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds just as God does. The difference, however, is that properties have their necessity from another, namely God, while God has his necessity from himself. (This distinction is in Aquinas.) Inother words, properties, though they are necessary beings, depend for their existence on God.  Suppose that properties are the ‘materials’ or ontological constituents out of which concrete contingent individuals – thick particulars in Armstrong’s parlance – are constructed. (This diverges somewhat from what I say in PTE, but no matter: it is a simplification for didactic purposes.) We can then say that the existence of contingent individual C is just the unity or contingent togetherness of C’s ontological constituents. C exists iff C’s constituents are unified. Creating is then unifying. (We have a model for this unifying in our own unification of a sensory manifold in the unity of one consciousness.)  Since the constituents are necessary beings, they are uncreated. But since their necessity derives from God, they are not independent of God.

In this sense, God creates out of himself: he creates out of materials that are internal to his own mental life. It is ANALOGOUS to the way we create objects of imagination. (I am not saying that God creates the world by imagining it.) When I construct an object in imagination, I operate upon materials that I myself provide. Thus I create a purple right triangle by combining the concept of being purple with the concept of being a right triangle. I can go on to create a purple cone by rotating the triangle though 360 degrees on the y-axis. The object imagined is wholly dependent on me the imaginer: if I leave off imagining it, it ceases to exist. I am the cause of its beginning to exist as well as the cause of its continuing to exist moment by moment. But the object imagined, as my intentional object, is other than me just as the creature is other than God. The creature is other than God while being wholly dependent on God just as the object imagined is other than me while being wholly dependent on me. 

A  critic thinks  that "The notion of total dependence, dependence in every respect, entails identity, and therefore no dependence at all. If a is dependent on b in all respects, then a ‘collapses’ into b, taking dependency, and difference, with it." So if the creature is dependent on God both for its existence and for its nature, the creature collapses into God. And of course we can’t have that. It is obvious that the manifest plurality of the world, the difference of things from one another and from God, must be maintained. We cannot allow a pantheism according to which God just is the world, nor one on which God swallows up the plural world and its plurality with it. 

The  principle lately quoted is refuted by every intentional object qua intentional object. The object imagined is totally dependent in its existence on my acts of imagining. After all, I excogitated it: in plain Anglo-Saxon, I thought it up, or out. This excogitatum, to give it a name, is wholly dependent on my cogitationes and on the ego ‘behind’ these cogitationes if there is an ego ‘behind’ them. (Compare Sartre’s critique of Husserl on this score in the former’s Transcendence of the Ego.) But this dependence is entirely consistent with the excogitatum’s being distinct both from me qua ego, and from the intentional acts or cogitationes emanating from the ego and directed upon the excogitatum. To press some Husserlian jargon into service, the object imagined ist kein reeller Inhalt, it is not "really contained" in the act. The object imagined is neither immanent in the act, nor utterly transcendent of the act: it is a transcendence in immanence. It is ‘constituted’ as a transcendence in immanence. 

The quoted  principle may also be refuted by more mundane examples, examples that I would not use to explain the relation between creator and creature. Consider a wrinkle W in a carpet C. W is distinct from C. This is proven by the fact that they differ property-wise: the wrinkle is located in the Northeast corner of the carpet, but the carpet is not located in the Northeast corner of the carpet. (The principle here is the Indiscernibility of Identicals.) But W is wholly (totally) dependent on C. A wrinkle in a carpet cannot exist without a carpet; indeed, it cannot exist apart from the very carpet of which it is the wrinkle. Thus W cannot ‘migrate’ from carpet C to carpet D. Not only is W dependent for its existence on C, but W is dependent on C for its nature (whatness, quiddity). For W just is a certain modification of the carpet, and the whole truth about W can be told in C-terms. So W is totally dependent on C. 

So dependence in both essence and existence does not entail identity.

Somehow the reality of the Many must be upheld.  The plural world is no illusion.  If Advaita Vedanta maintains that it is an illusion, then it is false.  On the other hand, the plural world is continuously dependent for its existence on the One.  Making sense of this relation is not easy, and I don't doubt that my analogy to the relation of finite mind and its intentional objects limps in various ways.

In any case, one thing seems clear: there is a problem with reconcling CEN with EEN.  I discuss and reject a different solution to the problem in On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit.

Sudduth, Simplicity, and the Plotinian One

Dave Lull has once again pointed me to a fascinating post, Michael Sudduth Follows His Monad Back to Vaishnava Vedanta. Excerpt:

A major problem with Scholasticism is the innate desire that all men have to participate directly and ontologically in their God. We all want that real connection. Sudduth explains, “I pondered this experience for several minutes, while at the same time continuing to experience a most blissful serenity and feeling of oneness with God”.

The fact is Van Tilism and Scholasticism, its Grandfather, can never give man real and ontological connection because like the fools they were, they tried to take the Ultimate Principle of Plotinus and the Pagans and somehow get a Christian worldview out of it with their theory of Absolute Divine Simplicity. This leaves only a pagan ecstatic trance state for Christian men to seek in their attempts to connect to their creator. Thus Sudduth, was in my opinion, simply following his monad back to its Pagan source. He is being consistent. Sudduth says, “I had gone so far in my Christian faith, but it was now necessary for me to relate to God as Lord Krishna.” Notice he doesn’t say, “through Lord Krishna” but “as” Lord Krishna. In Plotinus’ construction hierarchies of being emanated from the One which represent levels of composition , and at each hierarchy was an intermediary. In different versions of this metaphysical construction, the gods are intermediaries on this chain of being. As one move up the chain of being one becomes ontologically identified with the intermediary. Sudduth says, “Since this time I have experienced Krishna’s presence in the air, mountains, ocean, trees, cows, and equally within myself. I experience Him in the outer and inner worlds, and my heart is regularly filled with serenity and bliss.” You see on his view, God is in the state of mind not the proposition.

In conclusion, I commend Sudduth for his logical consistency. When will the rest of the Scholastic Reformed have the courage to do the same? My Scholastic reader, Sudduth is taking Absolute Divine Simplicity to its logical end. I have two options for you.

1. Follow Sudduth

2. Leave Scholastic Neoplatonism for Gordon Clark’s Scripturalism: An absolute Triad: Three ontologically distinct persons; three distinct complex-non-simple eternal divine minds who find their hypostatic origin in the person of the Father.

I'd love to comment, but I have a dentist appointment.  Man does not live by bread alone, but without bread and the properly maintained tools of mastication, no philosophy gets done, leastways, not here below.

Afternoon Update:  I now have time to hazard some brief and off-the-cuff bloggity-blog commentary. 

Earlier in the post, the author writes, "Once someone believes that truth and God cannot be found in a proposition, but in a psychological state, truth by definition becomes something subjective and arbitrary." The full flavor of this no doubt escapes me since I haven't read Van Til or Gordon Clark.   Not that surprising given my background, which is Roman Catholic, though as 'Maverick Philosopher' suggests, I aim to follow the arguments where they lead, roaming over the intellectual landscape bare of a brand,  and free of institutional tie-downs  and dogmatic ballast.  The lack of the latter may cause my vessel to capsize, but it's a risk I knowingly run. 

But speaking for myself, and not for Sudduth, though I expect he will agree with me, I do not understand how anyone could think that the ultimate truth or God (who is arguably the ultimate truth) could be found in a proposition or a body of propositions. Doctrine surely cannot be of paramount importance in religion.  That is a bare assertion, so far, and on this occasion I cannot do much to support it. But I should think that doctrine is but a "necessary makeshift" (to borrow a phrase from F. H. Bradley) to help us in our  "Ascent to the Absolute" (to borrow the title of a book by my teacher  J. N. Findlay).  The name-dropping gives me away and indicates that I nail my colors to the mast of experience in religion over doctrine. (Practice is also important, but that's a separate topic.)

Thoughts lead to thoughts and more thoughts and never beyond the circle of  thoughts.  But I should like to experience the THINKER behind the thoughts, which thinker can no doubt be thought about but can never be reduced to a thought or proposition.  Philosophy operates on the discursive plane, cannot do otherwise, and so is limited, which is why we need religion which in my view, and perhaps in Sudduths', is completed in mystical experience.

The path to the ultimate subject that cannot be objectified, but is both transcendentally  and ontologically the condition of all objectivity, is an inner path.  I needn't leave my own tradition and make the journey to the East  to find support.  I find it in Augustine:  Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas .  "Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. The truth resides in man's interiority."  The way to God is through the self.  The way is not by way of propositions or thoughts or doctrines, and certainly not by fighting over doctrines or condemning the other guy to hell for holding a different doctrine, or a doctrine that plays down the importance of doctrine.

The ultimate truth is not propositional truth, which is merely representational, nor the ontic true of things represented, but the ontological truth of God. (This tripartition can be found in both Heidegger and in Thomas.)   Now if I find God, but not "in a proposition," but by experience (in fitful glimpses as if through a glass darkly here below, in the visio beata yonder) does it follow that that I have merely realized "an arbitrary and subjective psychological  state"?  That is a false alternative.  Not that I wish to deny that some mystical experiences are nonveridical and misleading.  Humans are subject to deception and self-deception in all areas of life.

There is also the matter of the divine simplicity.  Here I will just baldly state that a God worthy of worship must be an absolute,  and that no decent absolute can be anything other than ontologically simple.  For more, I refer you to my Stanford Encylopedia article and the divine simplicity category of this weblog.

This is hotly contested, of course.  Athens and Jerusalem are in tension, and you can see that my ties to Athens -- and to Benares! -- are strong and unbreakable.  There are deep, deep issues here.  I am not a master of them; they master me.  One issue has to do with the role of reason and the power of reason.  While confessing reason's infirmity, as I have on many occasions in these pages, I must also admit that it is a god-like faculty in us and part of what the imago Dei must consist in -- and this despite what I have said about the discursive path being non-ultimate.

I grant that the Fall has (not just had) noetic consequences: our reason is weaker than it would be in a prelapsarian state.  But we need it to protect us from blind dogmatism, fundamentalism and the forms of idolatry and superstition that reside within religion herself such as bibliolatry and ecclesiolatry.

We should not paper over the deep tensions within Christianity but live them in the hope that an honest confrontation with them will lead to deeper insight.

And a little Christian charity can't be a bad idea either, especially towards such 'apostates' as Michael Sudduth.

Why James Anderson is not a Panentheist

The Sudduth conversion prompts Professor Anderson to explain. (via Dave Lull)