First Cause

First Cause




Polkinghorne asks himself whether before the discoveries of quantum theory and chaos theory an honest theologian was impotent to talk convincingly of God’s action in the world. He answers that classical theology, especially in the writings of Aquinas, sought to preserve the uniqueness of divine action by speaking of God’s primary causality, exercised in and under the multiplesecondary causalities of creatures. “No explanation was given of how this happens; it was simply said to be the case. Any attempt to exhibit the causal joint by which the double agency of divine and creaturely causalities related to each other was held to be impossible, or even impious”[1]. Here we see that Polkinghorne wants a more complete answer, one that includes how this happens.


Hethen indicates three consequences of this point of view:


1. “The ineffability of the mode of action of this primary causality had the effect of totally repudiating any possibility of an analogy between human and divine agencies”[2].


2. “God is fully party to every event, not simply by allowing it to happen by divine permission as the creation is held in being, but in bringing it aboutthrough the exercise of divine will. Nothing is outside direct divine control (…). O felix culpa! is to be written over all of human, terrestrial and cosmic history.”[3].


3. “Primary causality is so divorced in character from secondary causality that it may be held to be active whatever form the latter is believed by science to take”[4].


And finally finishes his critic saying that“What, for its partisans, is the strength of the idea of primary and secondary causality is, for its critics, its greatest weakness. The strategy represents an extreme case of a two-languages approach to understanding how theology and science relate to each other”[5].


To answer this lets see what is primary causality and why we think Polkinghorne has not completely understood it. To do this wewill begin with the account of divine action made by Artigas: after disclosing his ideas about the intelligibility of nature he says that “the preceding reflections are most coherent with the existence of a truly divine agency, a personal God who has conceived natural dynamism and uses it to produce, according to natural laws, a world of successive levels of emerging innovation, which ultimatelymakes possible the existence of truly rational beings”[6].


In opposition to what Polkinghorne seems to think, for Artigas analogy is very useful when we try to speak about God. He explains that, on the one hand, God's action on nature should be seen as completely different from natural causality but, on the other hand, “divine and natural causality must have something in common, insofar as inboth cases we are dealing with causes that produce effects. In this context, analogy means that we apply the concept of cause both to God and to creatures, partly in the same way and partly in a different way”[7]. This essential difference is expressed by the terms First Cause and secondary causes.


To prevent some frequent misunderstandings in the relationship between God and nature, Artigaspresents a clarification made by Ian Barbour: “Some theologians have developed the thesis of Thomas Aquinas that God as primary cause works through the matrix of secondary causes in the natural world. God endows each creature with intrinsic properties and empowers it to express them. This differs from deism by asserting that the world does not stand on its own but needs God's continual concurrenceto maintain and uphold it. It also differs from deism in acknowledging the emergence of radically new forms of life and mind in evolutionary history”[8]. Note the differences with deism mentioned by Barbour. Then finishes with two important assertions: “There are no gaps in the scientific account on its own level; God's action is on a totally different plane from all secondary causes”[9]. An...