For the theist, the purpose for which created persons exist
may only be fully realized outside this physical universe, even if
it is essential to them to begin their existence in this universe.
About the Author: The Witherspoon Lecturer, Dr. Keith Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. A priest of the Church of England, he holds Doctor of Divinity degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Formerly Dean of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Professor of History and Philosophy of Religion at the University of London, he has lectured at the universities of Glasgow, St. Andrew's and Cambridge. He is a member of the Governing Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and has taught at Drake University, Claremont Graduate School, and the University of Tulsa. His publications include: Ethics and Christianity (1970); God, Chance and Necessity (1996), God, Faith and the New Milennium (1998); Religion and Human Nature (1998); and, most recently, Religion and Community (2000).
Most religious believers think that there is a God, a supreme being who created
the universe, and whose existence does not depend upon that of the universe.
Furthermore, in being a creator, God is thought of as free, conscious and active,
as intentionally bringing about the universe for some consciously entertained
reason. This means that such believers are committed against hard-line materialism.
They are committed to the coherence of the idea of a non-embodied consciousness,
which can formulate a purpose and implement it by creating a material universe.
Theists do not think that the universe somehow has a purpose inherent in itself.
They think that there is a creator God, who exists independently of the universe,
and who can create it for a purpose. God, for most believers, has knowledge
of everything that is possible and actual. God is able to bring about, to make
actual, sets of possible states. So God has knowledge and will. The primary
object of God's knowledge and will is said by most classical theologians to
be the divine being itself—as Aristotle put it, God's being consists in
a "thinking upon thinking". God is aware of and wills or affirms the
divine being as it exists in its own proper perfection. So knowledge and will
do not, as such, depend upon some material substratum for their existence. Indeed,
they are ontologically prior to all material existences. The primary form of
being is something like what we know as non-material conscious agency. That
is a basic postulate of theism, and it seems a perfectly intelligible one.
If God is already perfect in self-knowing and self-willing, why should God
create any universe at all? For most theists God has the ability to actualize
states which are not states of the divine being itself, and indeed to actualize
beings like God, made in the divine image, insofar as they have knowledge and
creative will, naturally to a limited degree. The reason God should actualize
such beings is normally thought to be that it is good to do so. Such created
beings can enjoy something of the enjoyment that God derives from knowing and
willing, and so they increase the number of beings who enjoy, which is good.
Perhaps, too, God can enjoy different sorts of actualities by co-operating and
sharing experiences with such created personal beings. On some Christian interpretations,
it is part of the divine nature to be essentially loving, which involves some
form of relationship to other persons, and therefore some creation of such persons.
Whether or not that is so, created persons are in the Jewish and Christian traditions
said to be like God in having knowledge and will, though their knowing and willing
is limited in a way that God's is not.
One implication of this is that if divine awareness and agency is non-material,
created beings with awareness and agency are likely to possess as the most important
part of their natures a non-material component. This component will be, as it
is in God, a subject of awareness and agency, a subject which is non-material
in that it does not essentially depend on the existence of particular forms
of matter for its existence and functioning. This seems to be a straightforward
and natural inference, but it is not of course a strict implication of the existence
of God. What is a strict implication is that, for a theist, the primary form
of knowledge and will, from which all other forms derive, is a non-material
form.
Another respect in which theism is committed to a non-materialist view is that
for a theist the primary sense of "identity" is not of continuous
existence in space or time—a sense which does normally apply to physical
objects in general. In God identity seems to be given by two main factors, a
unity of experience by which all objects of knowledge are members of the same
consciousness, and a continuous agency by which many things are brought about
by the same causal agent. God is a being such that everything that can possibly
be known by one being is a conscious element of the divine experience, and everything
that exists is an effect of the divine agency, either directly or indirectly.
One might say that divine identity is given by a (necessary) all-encompassing
unity of experience and an equally all-encompassing conscious agency. God is
whatever it is which experiences and causes everything other than itself. It
would seem, by analogy, that the identity of finite persons would primarily
consist in the extent to which there was a unity of experience, of co-conscious
elements, and a unity of intentional agency throughout various causal chains
of events. Such unities would naturally not be all-encompassing, and they might
be fragmented or restricted in various ways. But one might expect to find personal
identity, not primarily in the continuity of some physical body, but in unities
of experience and continuities of intentional agency. One might incline to say
that whatever has a conscious unity of experience and a continuity of intentional
agency will so far be a person, created in the image of God.
This does not show that finite persons are immaterial beings. It does, I think,
show that theists have strong reason to think that material embodiment is not
essential to finite personal existence. Insofar as persons are truly created
in the image of God, they are likely to be such that it is not absolutely essential
to their existence that they are embodied in particular spatio-temporally continuous
forms. Their very existence and continued identity as persons does not essentially
depend upon their retaining some particular continuous form of embodiment. This
suggests that they could survive the death of their particular bodies, even
if it is proper to them to have some form of embodiment. For the theist, it
must be an important consideration that the purpose for which created persons
exist may only be fully realized outside this physical universe, even if it
is essential to them to begin their existence in this universe. In other words,
the universe may have a purpose—to bring about the existence of created
persons of a particular embodied sort, perhaps—but that purpose may point
beyond itself to a greater goal, to be realized by persons only beyond the physical
universe. Insofar as Christians believe the purpose of God for humans to be
participation in eternal life, they precisely do believe this. All I am suggesting
is that such a possibility seems to be implicit in the basic hypothesis of theism,
and it will plainly affect any assessment of the sort of purpose this physical
universe in itself has. The Christian will expect such a purpose to be incomplete
or only partially exemplified, yet to point towards a fuller completion in a
natural way.
It is not, of course, in dispute that human beings are embodied. They are physical
organisms, animals with 46 chromosomes and a particular genome, composed of
quarks and leptons, like everything else in this universe. It may be asked why
that should be so. One possibility is that human agents are emergent parts of
a developing cosmos, which generates within itself creative communities of conscious
agents. One intelligible purpose for creating a universe like this could be
to generate relatively autonomous materially embodied agents which come to understand
their own structure and to direct their own future, by the co-operative action
of communities of personal beings which are generated within the cosmos from
its own inherent potentialities.
In the received scenario of modern cosmology, this universe began in a primal
state of infinite energy and mass, exploding, expanding and cooling to produce
successively more variegated and complex forms of matter or energy. The received
model does not think in terms of the actions of a personal God. Instead, it
postulates a set of supremely simple and beautiful general laws which operate
in a quasi-eductive manner to produce sets of physical states. The model has
become so familiar that its breathtaking intellectual audacity may be missed.
Why should there be one set of simple laws, which can be understood only by
sophisticated mathematical minds? In what sense are such laws supposed to exist,
even before there is any complex material universe? How can one know that they
will govern every physical event without exception, throughout the whole universe
in every space and at every time?
The model is deeply Platonic, positing that beneath the space-time world of
human experience there is a deeper, more beautiful and elegant reality, knowable
only by intellect, which is the hidden causal basis of the apparent world. This
is just about as far from common sense empiricism as one could get. It presents
a view of experienced reality as causally dependent upon a realm of intellectual
principles of supreme simplicity and beauty, of utter generality and universal
scope, wholly determining all events in accordance with its own general laws.
It would not be absurd to see this underlying reality as something analogous
to a cosmic mind, though one which always acts in terms of general principles,
and never adjusts the system to realize particular purposes, or enters into
personal relationships with parts of the cosmos. It is a pure Intellect, without
moral purpose—though it does possess at least one supreme value, that of
intellectual beauty and rationality.
A good reason for not calling this reality "God" is that it does
not have knowledge, in the sense of a conscious assent to true propositions,
and it does not have will, in the sense of a purpose which it seeks to realize.
There is a structure of laws, which operates in accordance with some inner necessity
to produce the universe. So one may feel wonder at its intricacy and reverence
before its beauty. But it will remain like a beautiful work of art rather than
like a conscious personal being.
A theist will certainly recognize some important features of classical notions
of God in this neo-Platonic concept. The idea that there is a first causal principle
of being which has supreme beauty and wisdom, which in some sense exists by
necessity, which is not itself composed of matter but upon which all the material
complexity of the cosmos depends, is a fundamental part of the idea of God developed
by Maimonides and Aquinas in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is a far
cry from the reductionist materialism of some popular writings on science. As
Bernard d'Espagnat says, "Quantum mechanics...should help to dispel the
illusion that a naive corpuscular picture can be elevated to an authentic description
of that which truly is" (Reality and the Physicist, Cambridge University
Press, 1989, p. 195).
Modern cosmologists may say that they are not speaking of some being beyond
the universe, but of the universe itself, in its deepest structure. This, however,
may not be the absolute difference from classical theism that it sometimes seems
to be. If the deep structure of the cosmos is intelligible beauty, this is not
entirely remote from Thomas Aquinas' definition of God as "esse suum
subsistens", or the principle of self-existent Being. Modern cosmology
seems to postulate a non-material aspect of reality which at least bears close
analogies to some central features of classical notions of God. It often lacks,
or denies, the idea of a separately existing conscious being with particular
purposes. But followers of Aquinas, quite orthodox theists, as well as followers
of Tillich, who was more orthodox in this respect than is always realized, are
also often found to deny that God is "a being". It seems plain, nevertheless,
that the concept of "purpose" is a crucial point of tension between
classical theism and the neo-Platonic model of cosmology. Steven Weinberg says,
"We shall find beauty in the final laws of nature, [but] we will find no
special status for life or intelligence. A fortiori, we will find no
standards of value or morality" (Dreams of a Final Theory, Vintage,
London, 1993, p. 200). In a phrase of memorable clarity and bluntness, he also
said, in The First Three Minutes, that "the more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it seems pointless," and he repeats this thought
with apparent approval in Dreams.
I think there is a paradox in the very statement of these thoughts, and it
is as follows. If you ask what the greatest values of human life are, what things
are really worth valuing for their own sakes, many people (and certainly Steven
Weinberg) would say: beauty and truth. If we can learn to appreciate beautiful
things, then we can find great happiness and fulfillment in contemplating and
perhaps in creating such things. If we can learn to understand more about the
world we live in, our lives can feel greatly enriched. Indeed, one recipe for
a happy life is to learn to create and appreciate beauty, and to understand
more about why things are the way they are. So beauty and comprehensibility
are two of the greatest values known to human beings.
Steven Weinberg explicitly says that there is beauty in the laws of nature,
and that the universe does seem to be comprehensible. It follows that the universe
does exhibit two of the greatest values we can think of, and indeed it does
so to a remarkably high degree. The paradox is to say that the universe exhibits
these great values to a high degree, and at the same time say that the universe
has no value, or is pointless. It is almost a self-contradiction. It would be
extremely odd if I played you a Bach fugue, and said, "Of course it is
very beautiful, and structured with supreme rationality, but it is also valueless
and pointless." You would, I hope, quite rightly reply, "But its beauty
and structure is the point. What other point would one want?"
For something to have a point is for it to be valuable for its own sake, or
at least to lead to some such values. For something to have value is for it
to be considered a worth-while object of the attention and interest of a rational,
intelligent being. So of course a Bach fugue has both value and point, even
if it does not lead anywhere. It just exists for its own sake, and a good thing
too. Could we not say the same about the universe, if it really does exhibit
great beauty and rationality?
As a matter of fact it is precisely the amazing success of science in the twentieth
century which shows that there is beauty underlying the apparent ugliness of
much of human existence, and that nature is much more intelligible than we might
have thought. It is science which brings out the beauty and comprehensibility
of the universe, which are often hidden to the naked eye. It is therefore science
which shows that the universe does have value and point, even if it does not
lead anywhere (where would it be leading, anyway?). Its sheer existence, as
a beautiful and comprehensible reality, is its value and point. So it is very
paradoxical for Steven Weinberg to say that a beautiful and comprehensible universe
is pointless. It is almost as paradoxical for him to say that it gives "no
special status to life or intelligence." For all the beauty and intelligibility
of the universe would be un-noticed and unappreciated if there were no intelligence,
and there would be no intelligence if there was no life. We might even say that
the beauty and intelligibility of the universe would be without actually realized
value unless they were noticed and appreciated by some intelligence or other.
The universe would no doubt be valuable in a sort of hypothetical sense, since
"value" is the property of being a worthwhile object of the attention
of an intelligent being, and the universe could possess that property even if
there were no actual intelligent beings. But the actual state which is of value
is the appreciating of beauty and truth. It would again be rather odd to say
that the universe was of supreme value, even though there never existed an actual
state which was supremely worthwhile. There is a strong link between value and
intelligence, in that the greatest values require intelligence to appreciate
them. Actual values, then, consist not just in the existence of beautiful and
intelligible things, but in states of apprehending and appreciating their beauty
or intelligibility, that is, in states of some intelligent minds.
It was in accordance with this principle that Aristotle (in Metaphysics
Lambda) defined God, the most perfect conceivable being, as a being which
rested complete in the blissful appreciation of its own supreme beauty and intelligibility.
Such a being, for Aristotle, would be "good", in realizing the most
desirable state of existence possible. If it was possible to share in some part
of the divine self-contemplation, to contemplate the being of God in what has
been called "the beatific vision," that would be the supreme good
of intelligent creatures.
Whether or not there is such a Supreme Good and the possibility of contemplating
it, one can see that it would be one of the greatest possible goods for intelligent
beings to contemplate beauty and intelligibility, as it is found in the cosmos.
There is a link here, then, between intelligence, value and morality. It takes
an intelligent being to actualize states of value. Since such an actualization
is a great good, and morality is concerned with actualizing good states, it
must be the case that a central concern of morality must be with making possible
the actualization of states of appreciating beauty and truth.
There is, I think, a modern restriction of the concepts of "morality"
and of "moral goodness" which may obscure this very clear point. The
restriction is that morality is only concerned with one person's relations to
other people, and moral goodness must lie in relating to others either altruistically
or justly. That is, of course, part of moral goodness, but it can have the peculiar
consequence that it leaves untouched the question of what things and states
people should be aiming at, and helping one another to achieve (as Jeremy Bentham
said, "Pushpin is as good as poetry"). On a more Aristotelian view
of the matter, morality is concerned with the good life, and that is concerned
with actualizing states of value. Of course one is to be concerned with their
actualization in community, since it is a human good to live in community. But
unless one clearly bears in mind that the most worthwhile values are those connected
with beauty and truth (and, I would add, with Aristotle, friendship), morality
may lack content. It is, contrary to what Weinberg explicitly says, but in fact
following from his own central arguments, reasonable to hold that, if the universe
is beautiful and intelligible, then it does give a special status to intelligence,
since it generates out of itself beings which are capable of appreciating beauty
and intelligibility, and so actually realizes those states of value which lie
in such appreciation. The universe thereby also gives a special status to morality,
since moral good lies in intelligences realizing states of value.
This does not prove that the existence of the universe has the purpose of realizing
states of value. But I do think it gives initial plausibility to the hypothesis
that there is such a purpose. The purpose would be to generate states of consciousness
whose content is the beauty and wisdom of the universe. Consciousness, in itself
immaterial, would have as its content the intricately structured material world
in which it is properly, though not essentially, embodied. Moreover, consciousness
would not be an alien immaterial intrusion into a physical cosmos. It would
be an emergent, if immaterial, property of the increasingly complex and organized
structures which are generated by the autonomous processes of the natural world.
There is no neutral, non-evaluative way of deciding whether there are sufficient
states of high enough value in the universe for that to be considered a worthwhile
goal of a rational creator. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable contention that
there are. In particular, Christian belief in immortality opens the way to seeing
this life as just part, though a very important part, of the development of
sentient beings who can realize many states of value in their own unique and
distinctive ways, in realms of being beyond this cosmos. That makes an important
difference to assessment of the degree of actualizable value in the universe.
For a Christian, then, the universe can plausibly be seen as purposively oriented
to a goal of great value. But what about the process by which persons have emerged
in this universe? If the universe is the creation of a wise and powerful God,
one must postulate that the process is well adapted to its goal, that it is
efficiently designed, given the nature of the goal.
On this postulate there can be, and is, dispute. Biologists like Stephen J.
Gould argue strongly that the existence of persons on this planet is an accident,
almost a freak event. If we ran through the evolutionary process again, he claims,
it would come out quite differently, and human beings would probably not emerge.
There is so much sheer chance in evolution, so many random mutations and environmental
catastrophes, that it is amazing any complex conscious beings evolved. If some
disaster had not wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, humans would
almost certainly never have existed. So we owe our existence to an accidental
disaster, perhaps an asteroid hitting the earth, and not to any careful plan.
Steven Weinberg seems to agree: "we will never be able to eliminate the
accidental and historical elements" from our understanding of nature, he
says (Dreams, p. 27). Now that may be true, as far as human knowledge
and prediction go. Because we can never get a precise enough grasp of the initial
conditions of any process, and because of the limitations placed by quantum
theory upon our knowledge of all the properties of physical objects, many events
will seem to us to be accidents, things that could very easily have been otherwise.
But could they really have been otherwise?
Many physicists—and Weinberg himself, most of the time—are, or would
like to be, physical determinists. That is, they would like to say, with LaPlace,
that given the initial state of the universe, and a complete set of all the
laws of physics, every subsequent state follows by necessity. We might not be
able to predict every physical state, but every state is nevertheless necessarily
determined to be what it is by the laws of nature operating on previous physical
states.
I find this an utterly unconvincing hypothesis. It seems to me to be a perverse
translation of the theistic thesis that everything happens in accordance with
the sovereign will of God. For some theists, if God is omnipotent, then God
must determine every state of the universe to be just what it is, since God
is the one and only cause of everything in the universe. This is not, of course,
physical determinism, since it is God who determines every state, and not some
"impersonal" laws plus previous physical states. God could break every
law of nature, and still completely determine absolutely everything. I do not
accept this theistic view, but one can see how belief in an omnipotent universal
cause might easily lead to it. Take away the universal cause, however, and there
seems little reason to think that all events are determined by some necessity,
that there are "laws" which operate universally and unbreakably, and
that nothing happens except in accordance with those laws. Why should that be?
As David Hume pointed out, the idea of necessary connections in nature is a
very obscure one, and it is hard to see how anyone could justify the assertion
that such total determinism is true—that there will never, in the whole
history of the universe, be an event that does not fall under some utterly general
and universal law.
Nevertheless, it is obvious that a determinist cannot really accept that there
are any "chance" events at all, in the real sense of events undetermined
by past states and general laws. If the universe was run through again, a determinist
must think that exactly the same things would happen again. Now if God set the
universe up, it will be utterly obvious to God, and completely determined at
the first moment of creation, what will happen throughout the process. Far from
being a hazardous process, subject to all sorts of possible accidents, the history
of the universe will be predetermined in all its details. So it may be that
the process has been set up as a simple initial state plus a set of elegant
general laws, so as to result inevitably in the existence of communities of
rational agents and the values they embody. The existence of human beings will
not be a freak accident at all.
Gould's view might be, however, that physical laws permit many alternative
courses of action. Like the conservation laws of physics, they lay down limits
on what may occur, but permit many possible combinations of events within those
limits. As long as the momentum of a kinetic system is conserved, individual
particles may move at any number of velocities. This seems to me a more plausible
view. But it does not permit the existence of totally freak accidents, in the
sense of things which are almost wholly improbable. On the contrary, it limits
severely the sorts of things that can happen. The probabilities that exist can
in fact be precisely quantified. Accidents can happen. But it seems most plausible
to think that the parameters of physical systems lay down general patterns of
change and development which, in the end, can be predicted to eventuate in macroscopically
predictable outcomes.
Gould, however, affects not to see any happy medium between absolute determinism
and the occurrence of completely random and arbitrary events, which no knowledge
of the system could have predicted. He discounts the possibility that the overall
development of a physical system is highly predictable, while particular occurrences
within the system remain to some extent open and unpredictable. Yet that seems
to be just the sort of physical system that quantum mechanics suggests underlies
all physical systems, and that could well apply to the atomic as well as to
the sub-atomic world.
At this point one touches on one of the simplest and yet deepest questions
about causality. What makes things happen as they do? If one says, "Nothing
at all," one has a state of complete chaos, in which anything or nothing
might happen at any moment, and there would be no reason to expect any sense
in the universe at all.
The model which seems to appeal most to scientists is a "determining law"
view. There is some set of laws which makes events happen just as they do. That
is to say, objects can only act in accordance with some pre-specified law. But
how the laws make things conform to them, or in what sense the laws actually
exist, remains quite obscure. The philosophical origins of this view lie, as
I have suggested, in a view of God as all-determining sovereign, or in the Leibnizian
reformulation of this view, in a belief that there is a sufficient and good
reason for everything that happens.
There is an oddity about the Leibnizian view, however, which needs fuller investigation.
He assumed, as Immanuel Kant did, that, if there was a reason for change, that
must be a determining reason. It must be such as to allow no alternative. So
this is the best possible world, and each law is the best possible universal
principle. It has often, and I think rightly, been pointed out that the idea
of one best possible world may be incoherent. Many possible worlds may be good
in many incommensurable ways, so there is no overwhelming reason to create just
one of them. Nevertheless, it would be false to say there is no reason to create
any of them. There is good reason to create a good thing, even if there are
many other good things one could create instead. Such a reason would not, however,
be a determining reason. It would rather be an inclining reason. If one asks,
"Why bring about a state of this sort?" a perfectly good answer would
be, "Because it is a good state." But if asked, "Why bring about
this precise state?" one might reply, "It was a free creative choice."
Does that mean the choice is arbitrary? No, an arbitrary choice is one for which
there are no reasons at all.
In the case of a choice by a rational creator, even when it is undeterminably
free, there are reasons present. Most obviously, the state chosen must be a
good one, and not markedly worse than alternatives. But also one might take
into account such factors as the other things one has chosen, the possibilities
of exercising imaginative creativity, and the generation of a general pattern
of choices of which this is part. There is a vast difference between an event
for which there is no reason at all, and an event which is chosen by a creatively
free agent for the sake of its distinctive goodness. What is common to the two
cases is that the precise choice, within a given range, is undetermined by any
factor already existing before the choice is made.
One might amend the principle of determining reason, therefore, into a principle
of inclining reason, which carries with it a principle of creatively free choice
between a specified range of goods. One can then say that one factor that makes
things happen might be an undetermined and creative choice of goods, within
a general structure of intelligible law. But that may not meet Gould's objection,
since the undetermined factors in evolution (the random mutations, e.g.) do
not seem to be choices of goods. They are often deleterious to the organism,
and thus do not seem to be rationally choosable at all. That is no doubt why
Gould allocates them to chance rather than to any underlying intelligence. What
sort of God would allow so many harmful mutations to occur? This of course was
the strength of the determinist view—there is simply no alternative to
what happens, so you can hardly hold God responsible for it. But now if God
allows undetermined events, why does God not simply determine them, if not for
the best, at least for good? However, it turns out that the very formulation
of this possibility contains the reply to the question it poses. If God determined
all physically undetermined events, then there would be no undetermined events
after all. We would be back to the case of complete divine determinism, even
though we would have rejected physical determinism. So the real question is:
is it a good thing to have complete divine determinism?
Many theists have unhesitatingly said yes to this question. Indeed, they often
think that any omnipotent God must determine everything, since that is precisely
what omnipotence is. However, many theists think that there is a good reason
for God not to determine everything. This reason is basically that, if a relationship
of freely responsive love is to exist between creator and rational creatures,
that response cannot be determined by the creator. The creature must be able
either to accept or reject the creator's.
