Abstract
Many theists believe that God is continuously acting to sustain the universe in existence. One way of understanding this act of sustenance is to see God as actually creating the universe anew at each moment. This paper argues against the coherence of this view by drawing out some of its consequences. I argue that the re-creationist must deny the causal efficacy of created f things, as well as the identity of things across time. Most problematically, I argue that re-creationism ultimately denies the reality of time itself.
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Notes
Commentators who dissent from the view that Descartes was a re-creationist grant that he held to the idea that God sustains the universe’s existence through time, but do not think that this sustenance takes the form of the continuous creation of temporally discrete moments. See Daniel Garber, “How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance, and Occasionalism,” The Journal of Philosophy, 1987, pp. 567–580, as well as an expanded discussion of the same topic in Garber’s Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) pp. 263–272. More recently, Kenneth Clatterbaugh argues for the same position in The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy: 1637–1739 (New York: Routledge, 1999) pp. 39ff.
Aside form finding ambiguities in the texts that are usually taken to support re-creationism, there are several positive arguments against attributing re-creationist sustenance to Descartes. The first, from Garber, is that Descartes talks about the duration of things as a necessary part of their existence, and if the re-creationist is correct, then God could create a thing for a single moment—that is, create a thing without duration. (Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics pp. 272f). Clatterbaugh bases his conclusion, in part, on the fact that Descartes talks at great length about the causal efficacy of created things, which he must not be committed to occasionalism (Clatterbaugh 34), and hence neither to a strong version of re-creationism which, as I will show in the next section, would lead to occasionalism.
Both of these arguments would be significant in a study of Descartes’s actual stance on re-creationism—although it is possible to see both as reasons for thinking that Descartes was just an inconsistent re-creationist, instead of not a re-creationist at all. Unfortunately for my project, neither Garber nor Clatterbaugh suggests what Descartes could have thought that the mechanism of sustenance would be if it were not re-creationism (Garber, at least, suggests that Descartes did not really care about the issue; see Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics 265f).
Quotations form Descartes are taken from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volumes 1 and 2, translated by Cottingham, John; Stoothoff, Robert; Murdoch, Dugald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1985 and 1984, respectively. Referred to as “CSM I” and “CSM II”.
Kvanvig, J. L., & McCann, H. J. (1988). Divine conservation and the persistence of the world. In T. V. Morris (Ed.) Divine and human action: Essays in the metaphysics of theism (pp. 13–49). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Referred to as “KM”.
One strand of these arguments begins with a conception of God, and argues that God must re-create the universe in order to maintain sovereign and total control of the universe, and also to remain utterly simple in his own being. These arguments are fairly convincing, but they will not concern me here. If they are good arguments, then it only means that giving up the divine re-creation of the universe requires us to also give up an extreme view of divine autonomy and simplicity.
They reason that something with the power to push itself through time would never stop existing (Descartes would agree). Since all things do stop existing, none of them is self-sustaining. Of course, if there were things in the universe that had always been in existence, and always will be, then the argument would fail. Kvanvig and McCann must therefore argue against the existence of true atoms (that is, of irreducible, indestructible things). They do so with a curious thermodynamic augment. The second law of thermodynamics, they say, demands that all organized states of matter decay to disorder, and thus anything, including any purported atom would eventually also have to decay (KM 35). I find this unconvincing. If we are dealing with a genuine substantial atom (and not “atom” in the usual sense that physicists use the word), then it is by definition not composed of anything simpler, and hence it is already (and always) in the state of least organization.
They also take up the issue in “The Occasionalist Proselytizer: A Modified Catechism,” Philosophical Perspectives, 1991, pp 587–615. Here they argue that divine conservation of the universe leads to occasionalism, but that this conclusion is acceptable, since no other form of causation is coherent. They do not (here) specifically talk about God’s constant re-creation of the universe.
Clatterbaugh argues that this is a part of Descartes’s understanding of causality in chapter 3 of his Causation Debate (47ff).
Quinn, P. (1983). Divine conservation, continuous creation, and human action. In The existence and nature of God (pp. 55–80). Notre Dame, London: University of Notre Dame Press. Referred to as “Q”.
I know of one other, very brief defense of the idea that re-creation does not lead to the existence of numerous distinct individuals, which come in a note in William Vallicella’s, “Concurrentism or Occasionalism?” (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 1996, p. 353, note 20). Of the objection that in a re-creationist world, what looks like a continuous object is really just a series of distinct objects, he says: “Nothing I have said, however, entails this. I am thinking of time as continuous and things in time as comprising continuum-many temporal parts [sic].” It is not entirely clear what this response amounts to. Vallicella seems to be suggesting that time’s continuous nature saves the existence of things across time. If this is his response, then there seems to be no sense in which things need to be re-created. The idea that God sustains the universe by re-creating must—it seems—be based on the idea that time is not, without God’s help, continuous at all.
One could suggest that persons are not a part of the created world - that we are really and essentially non-earthly souls. But even so, insofar as our bodies, at least, are living in the world, they are subject to re-creation, and are hence faced with the problem of survival across time. More importantly, if we are only accidentally manifested in the created world, then we would not need to be re-created, and a large part of the theist’s attraction to re-creationism would drop away. Presumably, theists like the position precisely because it makes us (and everything else) eternally dependent on God.
Quinn calls this conclusion “manifestly repugnant” (op. cit. 66). The need to avoid the conclusion is what set him off on his (I hope to have shown failed) quest to explain how a single thing being created at more than one time.
Strictly speaking, the re-creationist could make sense of the pious claim that God re-creates the universe at every moment if they were to hold that God is also and simultaneously continuously destroying the universe. Presumably theists would not be too happy with this—we want to piously attribute power to God, but we would also want to retain some kind of divine benevolence—celebrating God’s gift of existence would not be much of a celebration if we needed this gift only because God had just taken away our existence.
The language of time as a divinely created film comes from Daniel Garber’s discussion of Descartes’s views of time in Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992), pp. 266f.
This is essentially the position that Garber attributes to Descartes (see Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics 273ff); God is the immediate cause of motion in the universe insofar as he continuously applies a force to moving bodies. This is not to say that Garber thinks that Descartes did not believe that God also sustains the universe in existence, only that this sustenance was not the same act by which God persevered the order of the universe. Unfortunately, as noted earlier, Garber does not think that Descartes ever explains the nature of the act of sustenance that underlies this preservation.
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Pavelich, A. On the Idea that God is Continuously Re-creating the Universe. SOPHIA 46, 7–20 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0010-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0010-y