Transcript

In harmony with the whole Christian tradition, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that just as God is origin and source of all things, as creator, he also cares for all things, and this is called God's providence.

Now, when Aquinas speaks of providence in God, he says that it pertains to the mind of God, who is the creator of all things.

Yet, because God is infinitely intelligent, infinitely wise, he does not cause things to be pell-mell.

Rather, Aquinas holds that creation is characterized by order, and more specifically, all things come forth from God according to an ordered plan, and all things are ordered back to God as their ultimate end.

Providence, therefore, refers to what precedes this created order in God himself.

It is the perfectly wise plan in the mind of God for the entirety of creation, by which all things come forth from him and are ordered or directed back to him.

How far does this providence of God extend?

Here, Aquinas considers an objection.

It might seem that the world is governed by chance, and if that's the case, how then could there be divine providence?

This objection pops up especially if you think of creation as a beginning point in time.

You might say, okay, I'll grant you that God got the universe started in the beginning, but after that, it unfolds more or less on its own as things interact according to chance, and so not following some kind of divine plan.

Now, hiding in this objection are two mistakes, two confusions about the relation between God and the world.

The first is about the notion of creation itself.

St. Thomas argues that creation is not simply a beginning point in time, a first moment at which the universe began to exist.

Rather, according to Aquinas, creation is an ongoing relation of radical ontological dependence.

To be a creature means to receive being, to be caused, to participate in existence at every moment.

So, being a creature, being created, characterizes all finite things at all times.

This point is important because it helps us see that God does not just get the universe rolling and then step out of the picture.

The second mistake is related to this first one.

It's to think that God is a cause of things in the world in the same way that creatures are causes of things in the world.

Now, as pure being, God simply is.

Absolutely.

He's, therefore, a cause of a totally different kind, in a totally different order altogether, from all other causes that we know, causes in the world.

And there's no competition between taking seriously the creaturely causality that we find in the universe and at the same time affirming that God is the first cause of all of these creaturely causes.

God himself creates and respects created causes and creatures really do, in a limited sense, generate the order of the world that we see around us through their causality.

This means that God can bring things about in the world through the normal activity of creatures who are secondary causes in the world.

But what about the claim that we see a great deal in the world that does seem to happen by chance?

Doesn't Aquinas's claim about divine providence do away with this?

And further, what about human freedom?

Doesn't a belief in providence undermine a belief that we're free?

Aquinas has good answers to both of these questions.

Let's speak first about chance.

The first point to say about this is that because God is the cause of all that is, there's no possibility that some outside cause could intervene from outside of what God has planned.

That's because outside of what God causes, there simply is nothing.

Since we do, in fact, see chance events in the world, how does Aquinas account for them?

In fact, he says that there are different kinds of secondary causes and they interact in complex ways.

So there's neither a pure indeterminacy or sheer randomness in the world nor a pure determinism.

Rather, there are genuinely different kinds of causes caused by God.

First, there are what could be called necessary causes.

Actually, we call them per se causes.

They're causes that bring about a particular result always or for the most part.

We're not yet talking about chance here.

We're talking rather about things like laws of physics or the kind of ordered causes that biologists identify.

But there's a second category which Aquinas calls paraxidins causes and here we find his treatment of chance within his treatment of divine providence.

When you have a paraxidins cause, you have intersecting lines of causality that bring about a result that is much harder to predict.

There's a classic example of a chance encounter or a paraxidins cause.

Suppose that Tom owes ten dollars to Susan and Tom sets out one day to go to the grocery store and so does Susan unbeknownst to Tom.

Both arrive at the store to buy their groceries.

They run into each other with the result that Tom pays Susan the money he owes her.

Now when Tom left his house, was he intending to pay Susan the money?

No. Was Susan intending to collect the money from Tom?

No again.

But in fact because these two lines of causality intersected at the grocery store, they happen to meet and it happens that Tom pays Susan.

Aquinas speaks about another category of causality in the world which he calls contingent causes.

Even in the material universe there are truly contingent causes.

These are causes that are not purely determined.

Here we might think of what quantum mechanics describes in the science of physics and its work on indeterminacy.

In fact Aquinas has a way to account for this kind of contingency.

He thinks that God can cause things to be contingent causes and from within the universe those causes are truly contingent.

But of course from God's perspective since he establishes them in being and gives them their causal power, they're not contingent to him.

That's because God's viewpoint is not just like a worldly viewpoint, but one that is outside of the universe and is undergirding it at every moment.

Now finally we come to the category of human freedom.

This is a genuinely contingent cause and yet God can move man's will from within according to his plan and we'll talk about that in the next video.

All this discussion of different kinds of creaturely causes help us to see how God provides for his creation.

God's plan encompasses everything that happens in the world, even things that happen truly by chance, truly by contingency, or by acts of human freedom.

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