Creation and the Sovereignty of God

Hugh J. Mccann

Description

A systematic view of God as Creator

Creation and the Sovereignty of God brings fresh insight to a defense of God. Traditional theistic belief declared a perfect being who creates and sustains everything and who exercises sovereignty over all. Lately, this idea has been contested, but Hugh J. McCann maintains that God creates the best possible universe and is completely free to do so; that God is responsible for human actions, yet humans also have free will; and ultimately, that divine command must be reconciled with natural law. With this distinctive approach to understanding God and the universe, McCann brings new perspective to the evidential argument from evil.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Need for a Creator
2. Creation and the Natural Order
3. Eternity
4. Evil, Freedom, and Foreknowledge
5. Free Will and Divine Sovereignty
6. Sin
7. Suffering
8. Divine Freedom
9. Creation and the Moral Order
10. Creation and the Conceptual Order
11. Divine Will and Divine Simplicity
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Theology
• Philosophy of religion
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005465
• Langue: English

Extrait

Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion MEROLD WESTPHAL, EDITOR
Creation
AND THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD
 

 
Hugh J. McCann
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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© 2012 by Hugh J. McCann
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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McCann, Hugh J. [date]  Creation and the sovereignty of God / Hugh J. McCann.
p. cm. — (Indiana series in the philosophy of religion)
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35714-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00546-5 (ebook)
1. God. 2. Creation. I. Title.
BL 205.M35 2012
213—dc23
2012012906 1
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
For Janet
 
CONTENTS
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
1. The Case for a Creator
2. Creation and the Natural Order
3. Eternity
4. Evil, Freedom, and Foreknowledge
5. Free Will and Divine Sovereignty
6. Sin
7. Suffering
8. Divine Freedom
9. Creation and the Moral Order
10. Creation and the Conceptual Order
11. Divine Will and Divine Simplicity
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
Parts of this book draw on previously published work. Chapters 1 and 2 are partly based on Jonathan Kvanvig's and my “Divine Conservation and the Persistence of the World,” in T. V. Morris, ed., Divine and Human Action (Ithaca: Cornell, 1988), and our “The Occasionalist Proselytizer,” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). Chapter 3 appears in an earlier form as “The God Beyond Time,” in L. Pojman and M. Rea, eds., Philosophy of Religion (Belmont: Wadsworth, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc., 2008). Chapter 4 draws on “The Free Will Defense,” in K. Perszyk, ed., Molinism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Oxford, 2011). Parts of Chapters 5 and 6 are indebted to my “Divine Sovereignty and the Freedom of the Will,” Faith and Philosophy 12 (1995), and “The Author of Sin?” Faith and Philosophy 22 (2005). Chapter 7 is based on “Pointless Suffering,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 2 (2009). Chapter 8 draws from “Modality and Sovereignty: On Theism and Ultimate Explanation,” Philosophia Christi 12 (2010). Chapter 11 includes material from “Divine Nature and Divine Will,” Sophia 16 (2010). I am grateful to the publishers for permission to draw from these sources.
A large part of this book was written during my two separate years as a fellow in the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. I am grateful for the support of the Center and the University, as well as for sabbatical support from Texas A&M University. It is impossible to remember and thank all whose encouragement and comments have contributed to this work. I owe a special debt to Jonathan Kvanvig, who first drew me into the philosophy of religion, and who co-authored the papers that form a partial basis for Chapters 1 and 2 of the present volume. I have benefited from the assistance and comments of Robert Audi and from numerous discussions with Michael Loux. Earlier versions of various chapters were read at the University of Notre Dame, Baylor University, Florida State University, the University of Oxford, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and at meetings of the American Philosophical Association. I am grateful for the discussion on these occasions, as well as for comments on the manuscript by Merold Westphal and an anonymous reviewer for Indiana University Press. Others whose insights and encouragement helped me include Michael Almeida, Wesley Baker, Andrei Buckareff, Robert Burch, David Burrell, John Churchill, Jeremy Evans, Thomas Flint, Allen Gehring, William Hasker, Christopher Haugen, Robert Kane, Brian Leftow, Emil Ogden, Louis Pojman, Zachary Manis, Mark Murphy, Timothy O'Connor, Myron Penner, Alvin Plantinga, Louis Pojman, Philip Quinn, Michael Rea, Katherin Rogers, William Rowe, Robin Smith, Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen, and David Widerker. I am grateful to each, and I apologize to anyone I have omitted. Finally and above all I am grateful to my wife Janet, without whose patient encouragement and sensitive insight I cannot imagine this work having come to completion.
TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY OCTOBER , 2010
INTRODUCTION
 
This book is a study of the concept of God as creator and of problems that attend that concept. In part, it represents an application of insights I hope I have gleaned from my work in the theory of human action. More importantly, it is an exercise in what is often called perfect being theology. I wish to defend the thesis that God is an absolutely perfect being, who as creator exercises complete sovereignty over all that was, is, and will be. This sovereignty, I argue, extends not only over all that comprises the physical world, but also over human decisions and actions, over what is moral and what is not, over conceptual reality, and even reaches to God's own nature. This kind of position has not predominated among philosophers of religion in recent years, and it faces significant difficulties—especially having to do with creaturely freedom and responsibility, the problem of evil, God's own freedom, and the stability of conceptual truth. But the idea that God is perfect and absolutely sovereign lies very close to the heart of the Western theological tradition. It deserves a vigorous defense. I hope to provide one, and to offer plausible solutions to the problems it encounters.
Chapter 1 presents an argument for the existence of a creator. I hold that such arguments should not aim for deductive certainty, since doing so diverts attention to fruitless disputes over infinite regresses and the principle of sufficient reason. Instead, the argument for a creator should be inductive, founded on the idea that the creative activity of a personal God counts as the best explanation for the existence of the world. The strongest competing hypothesis is that the world is self-propagating: its existence at any moment is to be explained by some causal activity through which the past is able to confer existence on the present and, thereby, on the future. I argue that there is no such process in our experience, and that the scientific laws often supposed to undergird such a process are not even diachronic. Rather, the creative activity of God is alone responsible for the existence of the world in its entire history. In short, God not only produces the world “in the beginning,” if it has one; he also sustains it throughout its existence. This leads to a problem that is often raised against sustenance theories, namely that they render natural causation otiose, thereby forcing us either to treat it as redundant or to adopt an occasionalist cosmology. This dilemma is addressed in chapter 2 , where several efforts to resolve it are surveyed. The best solution, I argue, is to adopt a view of natural causation that treats it not as a process of existence-conferral but as consisting in the transfer of conserved quantities such as energy and momentum. God alone is the cause of the existence of things; indeed, to provide for their existence is precisely his role as primary cause.
Chapter 3 defends the thesis that God is timelessly eternal. Such an understanding of God's nature is called for if he is to have sovereignty over time rather than being subject to it. God's eternity does not, however, mean that temporal becoming is in any way illusory. Time is a legitimate aspect of the created world. The concept of a timeless God is defended against objections that such a God would be unable to cause temporal effects, and that he could not know the truth value of tensed propositions.
Chapters 4 to 7 concern the problem of evil. In chapter 4 this problem is described, along with the standard free-will defense against it. The question of God's omniscience and sovereignty in creating free creatures who sin is examined, and the two most common answers to this question are rejected. One answer, sometimes associated with Boethius, points to God's timelessness and argues that this means his knowledge of our actions is not truly ‘foreknowledge,’ so that his omniscience poses no threat to our freedom. But this view fails to accord God full sovereignty as creator, and introduces passivity into him as knower. The other solution is the Molinist one, according to which God knows of our actions in advance via “middle knowledge.” This, however, deprives God of omnipotence by calling for there to be some possible worlds he cannot create. It also encounters problems in the grounding of so-called counterfactuals of freedom, as well as failing to explain how such propositions could be known by God prior to creation. The overall conclusion of chapter 4 is that the standard free-will defense fails. In chapter 5 the question of creaturely freedom and its relation to divine sovereignty is examined. Freedom, it is argued, cannot consist in an exercise of agent-causation whereby we confer existence on our own actions. God alone, acting as first cause in creation, is the cause of all that exists. This includes exercises of creaturely will, over which he is completely sovereign. Yet in being creatively responsible for our actions, God does not act upon us in the way