Discussion Starter for Philosophers in Jesuit Education Meeting, 12/2013
Theistic Explanation in Natural and Moral Philosophy
Mark C. Murphy, Georgetown University
Theistic explanation
The topic that I would like to discuss this evening is theistic explanation. I want to
start my giving a brief account of what theistic explanation is, and what theistic
explanations in natural and moral philosophy would be like before I turn to the
questions for discussion.
Here is a generic characterization of theistic explanation. A theistic explanation is,
unsurprisingly, an explanation. An explanation relates facts: an explanation is a
description of how some fact or thing makes, or contributes to making, some fact the
case. That my children are uncontrollable explains why my living room is a mess,
because my children’s being uncontrollable makes it the case that the living room is
a mess.
Theistic explanation is also, unsurprisingly, theistic. An explanation is theistic if the
explaining fact, the explanans, is a fact about God. Note here the generality of the
idea. To say that something has a theistic explanation leaves open a variety of
questions about the sort of theistic explanation that it has. It leaves open the
question, for example, whether the relevant theistic facts are facts about God that
hold necessarily or facts about God that hold only contingently. It leaves open the
question whether there is some particular aspect of God, e.g. the divine intellect or
the divine will, that is doing the explaining. It leaves open whether the explanation
is partial or complete, i.e. whether nontheistic facts may play an ineliminable role in
the relevant explanation. It leaves open whether the explanation is mediated or
immediate, i.e. whether the facts about God explain the relevant explanandum only
by explaining some other nontheistic fact, or not. It leaves open whether the
‘making it the case’ that figures in explanation is causal (the activity of the bartender
explains why there is a whiskey on the rocks in that glass) or constitutive (that there
is whiskey in the glass and ice in the glass explains why there is a whiskey on the
rocks in the glass).
Here is an example of a putative theistic explanation in natural philosophy. There
exists a world of finite beings subject to generation and corruption. That such a
world exists is explained by the contingent willing of God. To say that God created
the world is to give a theistic explanation of the world’s existence.
Here is an example of a putative theistic explanation in moral philosophy. There
exist requirements that give decisive reason for compliance to every rational
creature and which have the same structure as the institutional requirements we
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call obligations. That such moral requirements exist is explained by God’s having
given the content of those requirements as commands to all created rational beings.
Explanandum- and explanans-driven explanations
When theistic explanation is invoked in natural and moral philosophy, the context is
usually the following. There is some phenomenon, an explanandum, that calls for
explanation. (This explanandum may be a contingent fact, but it need not be; it is
possible for a necessary fact to itself call for explanation, if the necessary obtaining
of that fact is not itself self-explanatory.) The only, or best available, explanation is
an explanation that appeals to theistic facts. And so, driven by the demands set by
the explanandum to be explained, we settle on theistic explanation as the best
explanation.
The question of when it is appropriate to offer theistic explanations because of
explanandum-driven considerations such as these is a difficult and messy and
worthwhile one, raising all of the standard concerns about God-of-the-gaps style
reasoning along with other less-charged and equally-important questions. And I am
happy for there to be discussion of it on this occasion. But my heart’s desire is to
consider another way for theistic explanation to be desirable, one that is not
occasioned by the need to explain some particular phenomenon in nature or morals
but by reflection on the idea of God itself.
Call an ‘explanans-driven’ explanation an explanation the quality of which as an
explanation is promoted because it belongs to the very nature of the explanans to
enter into explanations of that type. Every being that of necessity exercises some
activity that tends to brings about certain results in the world is such as to enable
some explanans-driven explanations. For every being is such that, by its nature, it
makes things to be the case. To be a cat is to bring about a specific range of feline
phenomena; to be a mushroom is to bring about a specific range of mushroomy
phenomena, and so forth. If there is a cat in the room, and there is cat fur on the
sofa, one thing that makes the explanation the cat shed its fur onto the sofa a good
explanation of the presence of cat fur on the sofa is that that explanation accounts
for the phenomenon; that is its explanandum-driven quality. But it is also made a
good explanation because cats gotta shed fur. That’s what they do. So if you have a
cat on the scene, then it needs to enter into such explanatory states of affairs.
What sorts of explanans-driven theistic explanations should we aim to give?
If every sort of existing being can potentially enter into explanans-driven
explanations, then we might well wonder if there are theistic explanations that have
some of their quality as explanations just from the fact that those explanations have
God doing things that God’s just gotta do. Here is one that seems unproblematic.
Though the standard view is that God creates contingently, here is an activity that
God must engage in: if any contingent substance exists, God creates it. So, supposing
God’s existence, for any contingent substance the existence of which calls for
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explanation, there is something that counts in favor of a theistic explanation: it is an
explanans-driven consideration that God is by nature a being the activity of which
explains the existence of whatever contingent substances there are. So it is not just
that contingent substances need explaining, and God fills the bill; given God’s
existence, God is the sort of being that just has to do that sort of explanatory work.
Here is an important question. What sorts of issues regarding sort of theistic
explanation are answered, at least in part, by considering that some explanations
are explanans-driven, and that it belongs to the divine nature to occupy a certain
explanatory role? That is a bit of an abstract mouthful, but let me offer a couple of
issues that we might address.
Range. One thing worth puzzling over is the range of nontheistic facts that should
be subject to theistic explanation. Theists have tended to be of one mind that the
existence of a world of contingent material objects is the sort of thing that requires a
theistic explanation, and they would be skeptical of a view on which there is a mass
of material that is simply part of the given that God has to work with, much the way
Plato’s demiurge works with refractory material. In other words, it is not just that
material beings need a theistic explanation; it is that God must account for their
being.
But some philosophers have wondered about the existence of other sorts of facts, or
things, in ways that either expressly assert or seem implicitly to endorse a limitation
on theistic explanation. Some philosophers have suggested that the realm of
abstract objects — properties, propositions, etc. — is a realm of necessarily existing
beings that does not require theistic explanation. (This view was defended by
Wolterstorff in On Universals, and more recently by van Inwagen in “God and Other
Uncreated Things.”) Do explanans-driven considerations give us reason to think that
such objects must be theistically explained or necessarily nonexistent, even if
explanandum-driven considerations do not force us in that direction?
Here is another range issue. Leftow has argued that the very range of what is
possible should be seen, pace Leibniz, as being theistically explained. The argument
is perspicuous: it is that God would be greater if God were conceived as the
explainer of modal truth than if these were part of the ‘given’ within which God’s
activity must take place. Do explanans-driven considerations give us reason to think
that the shape of the modal itself is theistically explained?
Immediacy. Put to the side the range issue for a moment. One relevant dimension
along which would-be theistic explanations differ is the dimension of immediacy.
The divine willing that explains creation is related immediately to the fact of
creaturely existence; God uses no instrument to create, and so creation is a matter of
immediate theistic explanation. One key question is whether this feature of theistic
explanation of creation should be taken to be a feature of the theistic explanation of
every phenomenon. Should we take every nondivine fact to have an immediate
theistic explanation?
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Here is a case study. Mere conservationism is the view that God creates and
conserves creatures and their causal powers, but the creatures exercise those
powers unaided by God; what happens between creatures, so to speak, stays
between creatures. Concurrentism is the view that creatures exercise their causal
powers only through divine cooperation, divine concurrence, so that in every effect
in the natural order there is a theistic explanation that exhibits immediacy. Though
facts about the creaturely nature enter ineliminably and immediately into the
explanations of all that happens in the natural order, facts about God ineliminably
and immediately enter into all that happens as well.
Suárez, a defender of the concurrentist view, considers a variety of reasons for
thinking that the action of creatures requires divine cooperation. Some of these
arguments hold that it is arbitrary or incoherent to hold that God conserves effects
in existence while rejecting that God concurs in the bringing about of those effects.
Some make appeals to Scripture, either to direct descriptions of divine cooperation
with the action of creatures or to reports that seem best explained on a
concurrentist theory of divine action in nature (e.g. the miraculous non-incineration
of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, which Suárez interprets
to be a case in which God miraculously withheld concurrence from the fire while
leaving the fire’s nature intact). But he saves what he calls his “best argument” for
last:
This manner of acting [i.e. divine concurrence in the ordinary course
of nature] in and with all agents pertains to the breadth of divine
power, and on God’s part it presupposes a perfection untainted by
imperfection; and even though it does bespeak an imperfection on
the part of the creature, … this imperfection is nonetheless endemic
to the very concept of a creature or participated being as such. … For
the rest, there is in this way a perfect and essential ordering between
the First Cause and the secondary cause, and there is nothing
impossible here… therefore, this general influence should not be
denied to God (Disputationes Metaphysicae, disputations 20-22 trans.
Alfred Freddoso as On Creation, Conservation, and Concurrence (St.
Augustine’s Press, 2002), 22, 1, 13.).
I understand Suarez here to be making an argument from the perfection of the
divine nature — an explanans-driven consideration — to the concurrentist account
of divine action in nature. It befits the perfection of the divine nature to be involved
in this intimate way in the bringing about of events in the natural order. And as
nothing precludes this relationship between God and creature in the bringing about
of events in the natural order, then, that relationship ought to be affirmed. Suárez’s
“best argument” appeals primarily to God’s nature — it speaks to the “breadth of
divine power” and is possible only for a being whose “perfection is untainted by
imperfection.” And so we should take God’s involvement in nature to be the more
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extensive concurrentist account rather than the less extensive conservationist
account.
Is Suarez’s argument cogent, the sort of thing that can be used to assess rival
explanations? Should we take it that every nondivine fact has a theistic explanation
that exhibits immediacy? Are there any facts that just preclude this understanding?
Completeness. While I obviously have some enthusiasm for Suárez’s argument, my
enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that it looks like one could wield it as an
argument that theistic explanation of nondivine facts is not just immediate, but
complete. Yikes. If you wield that argument in natural philosophy, you get
occasionalism. If you wield it in moral philosophy, you get raging theological
voluntarism. Suppose for the sake of argument that both of these are bad things. Is
there a way of making a relevant distinction, so that even if Suárez’s best argument
gives a strong basis for preferring theistic explanations that exhibit immediacy, that
argument does not give a strong basis for preferring theistic explanations that
exhibit completeness? (Suárez is very clear that God’s contribution is not typically
complete (except in the case of miracles, say), but that it is not complete is treated as
just an obvious point, and we aren’t given a diagnosis of why the form of the
argument for divine immediacy does not also yield an argument for divine
completeness.)
The general question that gathers together the various particular queries
raised above is: What implications does theism itself have for the sort of theistic
explanations we affirm? I am much looking forward to y’all’s guidance for how
to think through this question.
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