Theistic intentional explanation

It is frequently objected that explanations in terms of the divine will are useless because they can "explain" everything.

One might equally object to quantum mechanics that it can explain any coherent macroscopic state, since all macroscopic outcomes have non-zero probability. This would be a poor objection. For while it could be that any macroscopic state can be given a statistical explanation, these explanations are not all equally good. The statistical explanation of why the cream spreads throughout the coffee is much better than the statistical explanation, invoking flukish probabilities, of why the cream coagulates into a regular nonagon.

Similarly, one might object to ordinary agential explanations. After all, just about anything within the power of humans can be given an agential explanation simply by positing some odd set of motivations. But some of these agential explanations will be better than others.

So it seems to be in the case of divine will explanations. Some are much more plausible than others. The explanation that there is life because God was so impressed with the value of life that he willed there to be life is much better than the explanation that there are platupuses in order to make us laugh. Why is the former a better explanation? One reason is that life is a greater value than laughter. Another is that while there being life is the only way to get the value of life, there being platypuses is not the only, and not the best (giving P.G. Wodehouse his sense of humor and writing ability is an even better way), way to get the value of laughter.

Moreover, notice that just about anything that occurs in a book could be explained by positing some motives or other on the part of the writer. But the explanation is better when these motives cohere well with the motives apparently exhibited elsewhere in the book. Nature throughout seems to exhibit a motive to give reality a mathematical structure and predictability. Explanations in terms of that motive are thus much better than explanations in terms of a one-off motive. In this way, good science, by discovering such structure, will actually help provide very good theistic explanations.

That said, the less good explanations are still explanations. In a typical case where something realizes a value (there may be some exceptions, say if there is some deontic prohibition in the vicinity), this realization of the value will give God a reason to make the case come about, and God will not ignore that value. He will act at least in part on it. So it is true that the platypus exists in part to make us laugh. But a much better explanation will be given by attending to the evolutionary processes that produced it.

The incarnation and adverbial ontology

Christ is God and Christ is a human. God is unchanging and humans are changing. God is omnipresent and humans are spatiotemporally delimited. God is all powerful and the power of humans is limited. All praise be to Christ on this Christmas day!

Yet such theological claims appear to lead to contradiction: is Christ unchanging or change? is he limited or unlimited? Since we have excellent reason to think the claims are all true, we have excellent reason to think the claims are not contradictory. A traditional way to resolve the apparent contradiction is to introduce a qua or as qualifier:

1. Christ is unchanging, omnipresent and omnipotent as God, but as human he changes, and is limited in presence and power.

Such answers do work logically speaking, but it would be good to have a little bit more to say about what the "as" does.

I want to suggest something that may not be original[note 1] but that I found enlightening. Start with the observation that there is no contradiction at all in this sentence:

2. Sam is quick as a reader and slow as a runner.

And there is an obvious and easy way to understand (2) that removes all appearance of contradiction:

3. Sam reads quickly and runs slowly.

No contradiction results from contradictory adverbs being attached to different predicates. From Sam reading quickly we can deduce that Sam does something quickly, but that does not contradict his doing something else slowly.

Now we can make the same move in regard to (1). We will need two base predicates which are then adverbially modified. The ones that come to mind are "is God" and "is human". Then (1) becomes:

4. Christ is God unchangingly, omnipresently and omnipotently, but he is human changingly and limitedly in presence and power.

So far that's just words. But now make it into ontology. The ontology takes a cue from Spinoza's nesting of modes. (Other philosophers have nested modes, but I think it is only in Spinoza that the nesting is really central.) When Sam reads quickly, there is Sam, who reads, and Sam's reading, which is quick. If Sam reads excessively quickly, there is Sam, who reads, and Sam's reading, which is quick, and the quickness of Sam's reading, which is excessive. All of these, other than Sam himself, are modes (Spinoza wrongly thinks Sam is a mode, too). We can now talk of a mode being directly or indirectly a mode of something. Thus, the quickness of Sam's reading is directly a mode of Sam's reading and indirectly a mode of Sam. The excessiveness of Sam's quickness of reading is directly a mode of Sam's quickness of reading and indirectly a mode of Sam's reading as well as of Sam.

Next theorize that a mode m is an essence of an individual x if and only if m is directly a mode of x. This could simply be a necessary "if and only if" or, more ambitiously, it could be an account of what it is to be an essence, essences being nothing but direct modes. Observe that this is a non-modal account of essence—here we are talking of essence in the ancient and medieval sense, not in the modern modal sense (such a distinction was pointed out by Fine, but the best account in print is by Michael Gorman).

Thus all our accidental modes are indirectly modes of us, through our essence. My present typing of this post is a mode of my humanity: I am human typingly. And Christ, unlike us, has (at least[note 2]) two essences: humanity and divinity. Thus any mode of his is one of his essences or is a mode of one of his essences. (Sometimes our words will be ambiguous. Thus when we say that "Christ is wise", that is ambiguous whether he is divine in a wise manner or is human in a wise manner or both.)

This account makes it plausible that analogy will be a central concept. Adverbs apply analogically across predicates. The "quickly" in "Sarah runs quickly" and "Sarah thinks quickly" is to be understood analogically. In general, I suspect cross-essence predications are to be understood analogically. That is a Thomistic aspect in the theory.

Another Aristotelian aspect is that we can make sense of "necessary accidents". Thus, Aristotle thinks it is an accident of a human that the human have a capacity for laughter, but he also thinks this is a necessary accident—every human necessarily has a capacity for laughter. It is insufficient for a mode to be an essence that the mode is necessary: it must be directly a mode of the individual. But just as it is indirectly a mode of me that I be laughing—I am human laughingly when I laugh (which differs from, say, being an alien or angel laughingly)—it indirectly but necessarily a mode of me that I have a capacity for laughter—I am a human with a capacity for laughter ("with..." is one of the many ways of indicating adverbial modifiers).

There is a serious theological difficulty. Does not the account contradict divine simplicity? After all, does not (4) posit a mode of God, namely divinity, and modes of a mode of God, namely omnipresence of divinity, omnipotence of divinity and unchangingness of divinity? Yes, but that only contradicts divine simplicity if these modes are all distinct. But they aren't distinct. Divinity, omnipresence of divinity and all the others are all just God. Thus God is his own mode in this technical vocabulary. But since predication of God is analogical, what this means it that God is related to himself in a way analogical to our relationship to our modes. (Compare: the person who loves herself is related to herself in a way analogical to the way someone who loves another is related to that other.) It's important not to take "mode" to mean "accident", but that was already something necessary from the fact that essences are modes.

Of course, this is not a complete account of divine simplicity yet. Something needs to be said about apparently contingent modes of God, such as creating Adam. (I think claims like "God creates Adam" should not be taken as predicating a mode of God. Why not, with the medievals, take the claim as predicating a mode of Adam? Or as predicating being creator of all contingent beings of God and contigency of Adam?)

This reconciliation with divine simplicity does, however, mean that I cannot simply define a substance as something that isn't a mode. For God on this reconciliation is a substance and a mode. (And that is Thomistic, too, though the vocabulary of "mode" is not. God is both substance and that substance's pure act.) We might define a substance as something that isn't a mode of anything else. Or we might say that x is a substance if and only if the proposition that x exists has a truthmaker which is x and has no other truthmaker.

Finally, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to extend my "metaphysically Aristotelian quantification" to this context. At the same time, some of my cross-level uses of "is" in this post will need some charitable analogical reading.

Defeating evil

In recent years, some theists have proposed that it is not enough to say that God allows evil that greater good may come of it (with whatever qualifiers and precise formulation that needs). Rather, God defeats evil. I have suggested once that when x forgives an evil that was done to her, this is a good sufficiently to justify God's permitting the evil. In fact, I think a stronger claim holds: when we forgive an evil done to us, we thereby defeat that evil. Interestingly, even though the claim that an evil has been defeated strikes me as logically stronger than the claim that a greater good has come from the evil, it can sometimes be the case that we can directly see that the defeat claim is true and then infer from that that a greater good has come. Here is such a case. I think of Jews in one block of a concentration camp who get up an hour before everybody else at, so that they can all take turns praying using the one set of tefillin and one prayer shawl that they have hidden, risking their lives and sacrificing their meager sleep to praise the Lord. This, it seems clear to me, defeated at least some of the Nazi evils done to them: the Nazis strove to dehumanize them, but instead as a result they rose—by God's grace surely—to the greatest heights of humanity. (This kind of reminds me of what I say about poetic justice here.)

Let me end on a different, somewhat lighter note. Here is a proposed sufficient condition for defeat of an evil, that probably does not apply to the above cases. An evil E is defeated in respect of a victim x if x is able to properly and whole-heartedly laugh at E. (Here it's worth remembering Isaac's name. Literally: "He laughs (or will laugh)". Who is "He"? Probably God: "God laughs at his enemies" seems to be the image.)