Some skeptics claim that evolution contradicts the Christian understanding that the world
is created by God.
They argue that evolutionary biology can explain the complex
variety of living things by appealing only
to random genetic mutation and natural selection – and therefore, that it is unnecessary to appeal
to the idea that God has designed or created the world.
In fact, they might even say that talking about God as the creator is an obstacle to
science because it makes us appeal to supernatural explanations of phenomena in the world around
us that science should investigate.
Some defenders of the doctrine of creation
respond by admitting the premise that evolution and the doctrine of creation are incompatible, and
arguing instead that chance events cannot bring about
the complexity we see in the world.
As we discussed in our last video, St. Thomas Aquinas does not hold either of these views.
He offers a sophisticated account of how God can govern the world according to his providential
plan, how God can bring about the marvelous order and symmetry we find in the cosmos,
through genuinely contingent causes and chance events.
In this video, we will explain some of the key elements of Aquinas’s position.
The Christian – or
more properly, the Judeo-Christian – understanding of God does not see him
as a part of the universe.
The ancient pagan worldview considered God (or the gods)
as the highest or most noble part of the universe,
but nonetheless a part.
But for Christianity, God is not a part of the cosmos.
Nor is God simply separate from the universe.
Rather, he is the very source of the universe, its absolutely transcendent and first cause.
This means that everything that we encounter in the universe is already related to God
as its transcendent first cause.
And God does not relate to things in the world in the same way as the things in the world
relate to each other.
In fact, as Aquinas teaches, God is pure being – his existence, his being, is infinite,
which means that there is no mixture of imperfection
or of potentiality in him.
He is pure act.
Unlike God, all other beings are composed of act and potency.
They depend on God for their existence and for their actuality.
This helps us understand how God is a cause of an absolutely different kind, in a different
order altogether, from every other cause that we know.
He gives to other causes their being and therefore their capacity to cause.
Creaturely causality is real, and there is no competition between taking seriously
the causality that we find in the world, and simultaneously affirming that
God is the first cause of all of these things, of all of these causes.
Aquinas therefore identifies two different types of causality, labeled first
or primary causality, which is the unique and transcendent causality that is proper
to God alone, by which he establishes things in their being and gives to them their power
to be causes.
The causality of creatures within the universe
is different, and Aquinas calls this secondary causality.
Creatures are genuinely secondary causes, and their causality has a kind of integrity
and relative autonomy in its own created order.
But they are caused causes.
They receive their being and their actuality, and hence their ability to cause,
in contrast to God, who is not a caused
cause, and so is a cause of a different order.
This means that God can bring things about in the world through the normal activity of
creatures in the world, through creatures who act as secondary
causes.
When creatures are secondary causes, God is always standing behind them as the first cause.
God’s gift of secondary causality to creatures
is a result of the infinity of his actuality and of his power – it
shows a great power to give others the power
to be a cause – it also is a result of his goodness, which
desires creatures to participate even in the perfection of being a real cause of goodness
in others.
This truth is important for understanding the relationship between science and Christian
faith.
It shows us that the domain of contemporary science is the domain of investigating
secondary causes, and that this can be done in a very robust way without in any way
being in competition with the truth that God is the first and transcendent cause of everything.
In fact, it is important for science to investigate
the things we find in the world, and to understand
them as real, genuine causes.
And at the same time, we can be sure that, whatever science discovers, the kind of causality
that a creature has is never in competition with God’s transcendent and first causality
of the world and of every being in it.
God is the source of what science studies.
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