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The Art of Creation and Conservation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Charles Taliaferro
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Extract

In a humorous, fanciful collection of stories by R.M. Rilke, Stories of God, God forgets about parts of the creation and then gradually comes to learn of them, sharing in their suffering and joy. The notion that God can forget about the created order or fail to know some of its basic features in not unique to Rilke. Some Christian philosophers believe that an essential feature of creaturely freedom is that God does not know what free acts will be performed. They claim that God either cannot know, or elects not to know, important events which will occur. More extreme is the deistic conception of God in which the creator is less than fully apprised of human history, past, present and future. Early gnostic myths envisioned God as being unaware of the created world, the world being the result of some demiurgic intermediary emanating from God. Aristotle held that God does not apprehend all the particular features of the world. In contrast to this sampling of deism, gnosticism, and Aristotle, the classical Christian conception of God is that God does not avert his gaze from the creation; the knowing presence of God is inescapable. Notwithstanding some disagreement whether the scope of divine knowledge includes future free acts, Christians have claimed God’s knowledge of the world is supreme and unsurpassable. God does not forget about the world, nor does the world blindly emanate from him. The creation and conservation of the world is deliberate and consciously willed.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 67 , Issue 793-794 , July 1986 , pp. 315 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Rilke, R.M., Stories of God, translated by Norton, Herter (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963).Google Scholar

2 J.R. Lucas has defended this position in Freedom of the Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

3 See Richard Swinburne, chapter 8, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. See also Quinn‘s, Philip 'Divine Conservation, Continuous Creation, and Human Action’ in The Existence and Nature of God, edited by Freddoso, F. (South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Quinn offers a superb analysis of the distinction between creation and conservation, but he does not elucidate the cognitive element involved in either divine activity.

4 For example, H.D. Lewis found the classical theistic arguments to be unsuccessful as natural theology and yet believed they had great value in explicating the concept of God.

5 For example, Rowe, William, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. Taylor, Richard, Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963)Google Scholar, Meynell, Hugo, The Intelligible Universe (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Shepherd, John, Experience, Inference and God (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Reichenbach, Bruce, The Cosmological Argument (Springfield, Illinois: Charles Thomas Pub. Co., 1972)Google Scholar. Earlier defences of the argument may be found in the works by E.L. Mascall, F.R. Copleston, E. Gilson. and Austin Farrer, among others.

6 Antoine de Saint‐Exupery, The Little Prince, translated by Wood, Katherine (San Diego, CA.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968)Google Scholar.

7 A recent defence of metaphysical libertarianism can be found in Peter Van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. For a good discussion of the freedom of God see Flint‘s, Thomas 'The Problem of Divine Freedom’, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 20, July 1983Google Scholar and Ross, James, Philosophical Theology, chapter 7 (New York: Bobbs Merrill Co., 1969)Google Scholar.

8 Kim, Jaegwon, ‘Causality, Identity, and Supervenience’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. IV (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1979). p. 40Google Scholar.

9 Robinson, Howard, Matter and Sense: A Critique of Contemporary Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 op. cit. p. 128.