Doctrine of Creation (Part 9): Conservation

Conservation (cont’d)

In our last lesson we differentiated carefully between creation and conservation. Creation is the act of God whereby he first brings something into existence. Conservation is the act of God whereby he keeps something in existence from moment to moment.

I argued that the notion of creation inherently involves the idea of a tensed theory of time – sometimes called the A-theory of time – according to which temporal becoming is an objective and real feature of the world. Things really do come into being and go out of being as time passes. By contrast, on the tenseless view of time or a so-called B-theory of time, time is stretched out like a line and all times (whether past, present, and future to us) are equally real. I said you could compare this B-theory of time to a loaf of bread which is stretched out and can be sliced into temporal slices, and all of these parts are equally real. The whole four-dimensional loaf simply exists tenselessly, and things that are in time are located at different slices of this four-dimensional object. So on a B-theory – or tenseless theory – of time the universe never really comes into being. It just has a front edge – a first slice – but it never really comes into existence as a whole. It's as eternal as God is. It would exist timelessly along with God who is outside the four-dimensional spacetime manifold and would be causally operative and connected to everything in it. I argued that a serious biblical doctrine of creation involves a tensed theory of time whereby things come into being and go out of being and is therefore incompatible with this tenseless, or B-theory, of time.

What about conservation? Is it compatible with a B-theory of time? Well, at first blush I think you would say that conservation is compatible with a B-theory of time. It just co-exists along with God, and God is causally related to every part in it. When you reflect on this, however, I think you can see very quickly that this construal would prove to be problematic because on the B-theory of time these slices do not endure through time from one moment to the next. Rather, each one is fixed and immovable, so to speak, at its temporal coordinate, and therefore God does not preserve anything through time. Rather, they're just different slices at different times, and those slices are not the same thing. They are different parts which simply exist tenselessly at their temporal coordinates. Moreover, on this theory of time this whole four-dimensional object never comes into being or goes out of being. It just exists alongside of God and therefore isn't preserved over time. Time is an internal dimension of this object, but the object itself doesn't exist over time. Therefore, it seems to me that the very idea of conservation implies a tensed, or A-theory, of time. The conservation of an entity over time is necessary if and only if an A-theory of time is true so that it endures from one moment to another and in the absence of God's conservation would lapse into non-being. But on a B-theory of time nothing endures from one moment to another, and neither is it possible for something to lapse into non-existence. Everything just exists at its temporal station. So it seems to me that on the B-theory of time you cannot properly speak of God's conservation either of the world or of things in the world.

Divine Sustenance

This is paradoxical because on a tenseless view of time God is in some sense causing the universe to exist. It is dependent upon him for its being; in some sense then he sustains it. Similarly, if we allow into our ontology (or our view of what exists) timeless entities (say numbers or sets or other mathematical objects), these things exist outside of time and therefore are not conserved in being by God. They do not endure from one moment of time to another because they're simply timeless. Nevertheless, if there were such entities they would have to depend upon God for their being. They cannot exist independently of God. So there is something like conservation of them in existence but it isn't, properly speaking, conservation because they wouldn't be conserved from one moment to another.

The existence of these sorts of entities seems to require a third category that has been overlooked by classical theology – a sort of static or changeless creation which would be also appropriate to a tenseless theory of time such as we have illustrated on the whiteboard. I want to use the name “sustenance” for this peculiar relation. That's a term of my own invention here. It's not creation; it's not conservation. It’s sustenance.

We can define this in the following way.

This would be, I think, the appropriate way to speak of the dependence of either timeless abstract objects upon God or of the dependence of the four-dimensional universe as a whole or of its temporal slices on God if a B-theory of time is true. So if one does embrace a B-theory of time, it seems to me that while God doesn't conserve things in existence we can say that he sustains them in existence given this analysis.

Concurrence

Let me move on to our next section. We've been talking about conservation – God's preserving the universe in being over time from one moment to another. This was typically thought to be part of continuing creation, as you may remember, though I criticized that classification. But there was another part of continuing creation in addition to conservation. There is what is called divine concurrence, or in Latin concursus. So in addition to conservatio you had concursus, or in English translation “concurrence.”

According to the doctrine of concurrence, God is the cause of everything that happens in the world. That is not to say that God is the only cause – that would be occasionalism-- which we talked about last time. Rather, according to concurrence, God concurs with the action of the secondary causes to produce their effects, and in the absence of God's concurrence these secondary causes would be powerless to produce any effects. They would not cause anything. The secondary causes are effective only because God concurs with their operation to produce their effects.

This doctrine was applied by medieval theologians to explain certain biblical miracles. For example, you all remember the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were thrown by King Nebuchadnezzar into that smelting furnace to be incinerated. But instead of perishing in the flames, they were walking around inside the furnace unharmed. These medieval theologians explained this miracle by saying it is not that there was a change in the bodies of these three children of Israel – it's not that they became like asbestos or some incombustible material. Rather, what God did was he withdrew his concurrence with the flames, so that they could not produce their effect and burn up the men. They remained ordinary, non-supernatural, human, flesh and blood, but they were not harmed by the flames because God withdrew his concurrence with the secondary causes, so that the effect of burning and charring would not be produced. That would be a vivid illustration of how concurrence works in the world with secondary causes.

One might ask: how does this relate to human free will and determinism? Here we have a difference of opinion between the disciples of Thomas Aquinas and Luis Molina on this question. Aquinas maintained that God acts on the secondary causes to make them produce their effects. So when it comes to the human will, God causes the human will to choose A rather than not-A. God's concurrence acts on the secondary causes to make them produce their effects. Molina, by contrast, championed what he called simultaneous concurrence. That is to say, God acts along with the secondary causes to produce their effects. He doesn't act on the secondary cause to make it do something; rather, he acts with the secondary cause to produce its effect. He compares concurrence to two men pulling a boat up onto the shore with two ropes. Each one is pulling the boat on his own rope, but together the effect of the boat’s being lifted onto the shore is produced. It is not that one man acts on the other man who then pulls on the boat. It's not like a chain. Rather these are two simultaneous causal actions that unite to produce the common effect.

Molina, by holding to simultaneous concurrence, maintains that he is able to preserve human free will because, unlike Thomas Aquinas’ view, God doesn't move the human will to choose this or that. Rather, God simply acts with the human will to produce in being what the human will freely chooses. The followers of Molina thought that Aquinas’ view led to determinism and the denial of free will, but Molina's doctrine of simultaneous concurrence allows Molina to say that God is the cause of everything that happens, but that this is perfectly consistent with human freedom because he acts along with the secondary cause to produce the effect, not on the secondary cause to produce the effect.

This is a remarkable doctrine, I'm sure you'll agree. I doubt that anyone in this class has even heard of concurrence before. It has been almost totally eclipsed in contemporary theology in discussions of the relation between God and the world. This is ironic because it seems to follow from divine conservation, which is the only doctrine of creation that most theologians are willing to embrace today. Just think about it. If God conserves some entity E from t to t*, then he has to conserve E not just in abstraction but he has to conserve E in its concrete particularity with all of its properties. To give an example, suppose that the entity E is a wad of cotton, and suppose that at time t the cotton is brought into proximity with a flame, so that the cotton then becomes smoldering and black at t*. It goes from being white and fluffy at t to being black and smoldering at t*. God must not merely conserve E from t to t*, he has to conserve that piece of cotton in all of its particularity. For the cotton to exist from t to t*, God has to preserve it as a white fluffy piece of cotton at first and then as a black and smoldering piece of cotton later. Therefore, in conserving it with all of its properties, God concurs with the cotton's being white at t and being black at t*. So concurrence actually seems to follow from the doctrine of conservation, which is ironic, as I say, given the fact that most theologians who want a doctrine of creation will agree to conservation, but concurrence never seems to enter the picture.

Next time we will turn to the doctrine of divine providence, where we will explore ways in which God is active in the world.