Introduction
Let’s suppose you missed a flight. This almost happened to me a few days ago, but as that entire event was unfolding, I thought to myself: How should we interpret this in light of God’s overall purposes for us? There are three possibilities – it is a blessing, a curse, or a trial. Now some may suggest that it simply happened without any divine purpose at all, but I cannot accept that. The biblical account of God’s sovereignty presents his control over every particular thing (e.g, Matt. 6:30, James 4:13–15, Acts 17:26), as well as His purposing of all things for His glory (Colossians 1:16). A Thomistic perspective entails this position as well, so it as at least rationally defensible. Unfortunately, I think our society despises God’s intricate involvement in their lives because they prefer to be left alone, or somehow think the notion itself is absurd. Why think that God is involved at all if a missed flight could be explained as a simple mistake on our parts? How does this situation benefit me, one could ask, or how could God do this to me? I do not presume to be capable of extensively answering each of these issues in a single post, for each of these questions have book length treatments in philosophy and theology. However, I do hope to illuminate and apply these principles in a way that could be insightful for our daily lives.
The Nature of God’s Power
Let’s address the first question: Why think that this is the direct work of God at all? Actually, I would qualify that question because I do not think that it is the “direct” work of God at all. This is to avoid the error of occasionalism, which is the philosophical doctrine that every created substance is of itself incapable of being an efficient cause. Every effect in creation is therefore directly caused by God. In other words, the sun that vaporizes the water does not do so of its own nature, but because God determined that this is what the effect would be. But if He so pleased, He could cause an effect to do whatever He wanted – e.g, the sun would appear to turn the water into dinosaurs for no intrinsic reason. While I’d love to refute this, I think most people would already recognize this as absurd. If that’s the case though, how could God possibly be involved? Either nature does it or God does it, right? That’s a false dilemma. It’s possible for God to cause and purpose things through nature, just as a chess player works through the rules of chess for the purpose of checkmating his opponent. Every move can be anticipated and planned accordingly without sacrificing the nature of the game.
Similarly, God perfectly anticipates every event and plans accordingly, without sacrificing the nature of things. Though this is slightly incomplete, since He decided to actualize this world with all its particularities before the foundations of the world. It’s not as if God finds Himself with a world and is forced to work with what He has. Furthermore, not only does He work before and through the nature of things, He works in the nature of things as well. By becoming a man to die on the cross, He worked in the world to shape the course of history. He does all of this for His glory and purpose, but does so without fail. Now one could ask, “How do I know that God had a specific purpose for that event? Perhaps it is not essential to His plan?”. There are indeed some aspects of reality that you could consider accidental (i.e, it’s not essential to something, not that it’s outside God’s control). For example, it would be difficult to see how a blue colored ball would thwart the entire purpose of God unless it was orange. But Scripture tells us that even the hairs on a person’s head are known by God. So the least we could say is that God knows certain “trivial facts”, but how does this lead us to purpose?
His Universal Plan
First we need to understand that not every feature in the world needs to be “essential” to God’s plan in order to have a purpose. It is possible that the blue ball is a child’s favorite color such that it is a blessing to him. This is obviously extrinsic to the ball, however, as it is not as if that specific ball itself intended to be picked up by that particular child. So extrinsic purposes are possible for particular things with accidental features, without necessarily being essential to God’s plan. Though it’s not inconceivable that something accidental could work to be at least partly essential for something like Jesus’s death – e.g, Judas could have had a silver coin as child, you never know. But even if it had no essential purpose, it could still participate in God’s plan if it fulfilled some good. For example, the Christian worldview entails the idea that God desires our flourishing as creatures (Jeremiah 29:11). Part of flourishing as creatures is experiencing joy. Thus God could work through the ball to provide that child with joy, and by consequence would be fulfilling a infinitesimal part of His greater purpose. I only say infinitesimal because it is Christ that essentially fulfills this joy in us, not the ball. That does not make the ball bad, it just makes it a lesser good.
Second, I think we’re limiting our understanding of “purpose” to either whatever is good for a person or whatever is in accord to God’s plan. This is incorrect, because it just begs the question: What if the ball was never used? What purpose would that possibly serve? This question could not be answered if we did not have a Thomistic account of purposes that will hereby be called final causes or teleology. Since the ball is a human artifact, it derives its purpose from us to be used for a child’s amusement, but of itself it would not necessarily possess that feature. We are interested in what teleology the ball has of itself, not what purpose we assign to it. By final cause then, I just mean that a ball is of its own nature directed toward a certain range of effect/s as its final cause or end just as an arrow points toward the target as its final end or goal. One of the effects that the ball is directed to is the potential to be melted into goo. This effect is present within the ball regardless of whether it gets actualized. Understood this way, all created objects would have some potential to be directed toward a certain end.
Lastly, all physical beings have final causes, but not all final causes are physical beings. The intellect is capable of final causality precisely because it is intentional by nature. Anything that intends a certain end is already exemplifying a form of teleology, except in a much different way than physical things do. At this point though, I think I’m adventuring too far into purposes that do not matter to us. Or so it seems! In reality, the purposes that are most relevant to us are those that are intrinsic to our nature. For example, it is good for us to eat food but this could not be unless it was our nature to eat. Because of the different natures of things, I think God’s purposes work in different ways for all things. A human has different ends that a ball does not have. So it becomes meaningless to ask, “Does God have a plan of salvation for balls?” because they’re simply not in need of such things. Nevertheless, I do think there is a hierarchy of purposes where the lowest forms of final causes are there to serve the higher forms. A clear example of this is water serving the plant’s need for water, and the plant serving the animal’s need for nutrition.
Conclusion
In this way, I think God works through each thing to accomplish good for beings like us. But if there so happened to be a “ball” that did not have a purpose for the greater good of rational agents, then I do not think that threatens the sovereignty of God in any way. It’s not as if every physical thing must work for our own good in order to have a purpose at all, that’s just absurd. Just by virtue of being anything at all, the ball is said to have a degree of goodness that God at every instant of its existence actualizes. Since God is goodness, every thing that has being must be analogous to this goodness in different ways. Even Satan, who has been regarded as evil personified, must have some sort of goodness insofar as he has being. The more perfect we are in relation to our natures, the more we reflect the glory of God’s being. This is why I reject the Calvinistic notion that God is most glorified when we are most damned. Or for the elect, when we are most satisfied in Him. God’s glory is not increased or diminished by any state of man, but only our reflection of His glory within our being can be increased or decreased. Now that some objections have been removed, I’ll be focusing on the practical side in my next post. Forgive me if that bored you, this post ended up being much longer than I had intended.
