Quasi-causation

You pray for me to get a benefit and God grants your prayer. The benefit is in an important sense a result of your prayer. But you didn’t cause the benefit, for if you had, it would have been an instance of causation with God as an intermediate cause, and it seems to violate divine aseity for God ever to be an intermediate cause.

Still, relations involving to the benefit is relevantly like a causal one. For instance, means-end reasoning applies just as it does to non-deterministic causal chains:

• You want me to improve morally. I will improve morally if God gives me grace. So you pray that God gives me grace.

And I owe you gratitude, though I owe more to God.

There are even cases of blameworthiness where the action “goes through God”. For instance, it is a standard view (and dogma for Catholics) that God creates each soul directly. But a couple can be blameworthy for having a child in circumstances where the child can be reasonably expected to grow up morally corrupted (e.g., suppose that a white supremacists are sure to steal one’s children if one has any). Or consider sacramental actions: a couple can be blameworthy for marrying unwisely, a priest for consecrating the Eucharist in a sacrilegious context, etc.

I call these sorts of relations “quasi-causal”. It would be good to have an account of quasi-causation.

Perhaps Lewis-style counterfactual accounts of causation, while not being good accounts of causation nonetheless provide a good start at accounts of quasi-causation?

Are there any cases of quasi-causation that do not involve God? I am not sure. Perhaps constitutive explanations provide cases. Suppose your argument caused the other members of the committee to vote for the motion. Their voting for the motion partially constituted the passing of the motion. But perhaps it is not correct to say that you caused, even partially, the passing of the motion. For what you caused is the vote, and the vote isn’t the passing, but merely partially constitutive of it. But maybe we can say you quasi-caused the passing of the motion.

This post is really an invitation for people to work on this interesting notion. It also comes up briefly towards the end of my new infinity book (which is coming out in about two weeks).

Divine aseity and light-weight Platonism

Here's a standard theistic argument against Platonism: If Platonism is true, then God is dependent on properties like divinity, goodness, omniscience and omnipotence. But God is not dependent on anything. So, Platonism is false.

I think it's worth noting that this argument only works given heavy-weight Platonism. The light- and heavy-weight Platonists agree that, at least if F is fundamental, x is F if and only if x instantiates Fness. But the heavy-weight Platonist adds the claim that if x is F, it is F because it instantiates Fness. The light-weight Platonist--van Inwagen is the most prominent example--makes no such explanatory claim.

Without the explanatory claim, the dependence argument for a conflict between Platonism and theism fails. For while it may be true on light-weight Platonism (assuming "is divine" is fundamental--something that Jon Jacobs at least will deny--or an abundant Platonism) that God is divine if and only if God instantiates divinity, we cannot conclude that God's being divine depends on God's instantiating divinity or on any other property. Indeed, the light-weight Platonist could (but does not have to) even make the opposite claim, that God instantiates divinity (or goodness, omniscience and omnipotence) because he is divine (and good, omniscient and omnipotent).

Of course, the aseity argument isn't the only reason to deny Platonism. God is the creator of everything other than himself, and that causes problems for properties, too.