Margaret J.Osler
When we speak of providence we mean God’s foresight in designing and caring for the world he created.
European ideas of providence were the offspring of the marriage between Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology. Greek philosophy contributed the idea that nature contains principles of order, while biblical religion contributed the idea of an omnipotent God who governs the world he created. Various attempts to reconcile divine omnipotence with principles of order produced different theories about the nature of God’s relationship to the Creation.
Background: Greek Philosophy and the Bible
According to the Old Testament tradition, God created the world ex nihilo (from nothing) by an act of his power and will. God is omnipotent, and his actions do not necessarily conform to human standards of rationality. God’s wisdom and power are evident in the Creation: “The heavens declare the glory of God;
and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19.1 AV). His interactions with his people and miraculous interventions in the world are signs of his continuing activity in the Creation.
Several Greek philosophers also contributed to the formation of the idea of providence. Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.) explained the orderliness of the world in the Timaeus. According to Plato, a godlike being, the Demiurge, molded preexisting matter into the world and its contents on the model of the perfect, eternal forms. The Demiurge is like a divine potter, using preexisting materials and modeling them to replicate the eternal forms, and thereby differs from the God of the Bible who creates everything ex nihilo. In a late dialogue, the Laws, Plato asserted that a World Soul guides the universe benevolently. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) agreed with Plato that the orderliness of nature flows from forms or essences, but he thought that these forms are intrinsic to individual beings, which are inseparable composites of matter and form. His philosophy of nature included a notion of finality but denied that finality was imposed by an external agent or god. The Stoic philosophers, following Zeno of Citium (334–262 B.C.), believed that the cosmos is one of divine and purposeful design, a view expressed in their concept of Logos, which at once refers to the interconnectedness and design of the cosmos and to its underlying rationality, which is accessible to human understanding. Opposed to any idea of providence, Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) claimed that the world originated from the random collisions of atoms in empty space. The Epicurean doctrine of chance became the perennial target for providentialist philosophers and theologians. Both Platonic and Stoic ideas appear in many early Christian writings and contributed to the formulation of a characteristically Christian conception of divine providence.
The Middle Ages
Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354–430), by far the most influential of the church Fathers, held a providential view of the world. Deeply influenced by Platonism, he believed that God created the world and ordered it
“by measure and number and weight” (Wisdom of Solomon 11.20). This order, which is universal, enables humans to see the design in the world and to understand it as God’s handiwork. Disorder is extrinsic to the original Creation, arising only as a consequence of sin. Augustinian philosophy and theology dominated medieval thought until the translation of Aristotle’s works from Arabic into Latin in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Medieval Christian theologians faced the difficult task of reconciling the omnipotent God of the Old Testament, who created the world and rules it freely, with Greek ideas about the self-sufficiency and inherent rationality of the world. The confrontation between Christian theology and Greek philosophy intensified in the thirteenth century as the recently translated works of Aristotle infiltrated the university curriculum. Fearing that Aristotelianism would lead to the idea of an autonomous nature, which exists independently of God and is ruled by necessary relations that would impede the action of divine will, Augustinian theologians like the Franciscan Saint Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274) opposed the teaching of Aristotle’s works. This movement reached a crisis in 1277 when Etienne Tempier, the bishop of Paris, condemned 219 propositions, many of which seemed to restrict God’s power and freedom. Many of the condemned propositions asserted the existence of necessity in the world (for example, the propositions that the world must be eternal or that there can be only one world). Theologians and philosophers responded to this crisis by formulating two different approaches to the relationship between divine power and the natural order. They used the terms potentia Dei absoluta (the absolute power of God) and potentia Dei ordinata (the ordained power of God) to explain this relationship. God’s absolute power is his power considered from the standpoint of what it is theoretically possible for him to do, barring logical contradiction. His ordained power is his power in relation to the world he has actually created.
Although there were Christian Platonists like Augustine who believed that certain absolute principles exist independently of God, most Christian thinkers asserted that God created the world by his absolute power and, therefore, could have created the world in any way that he wanted. They differed, however, about his relationship to the created world. Intellectualists, like Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74), who emphasized God’s intellect, accepted some elements of necessity in the world, some things that God had created freely but was not thereafter able to change. Because of the unity of God’s will and intellect, any change in the essence of some created thing would imply that God’s intellect was faulty, because something he knew to be true at one time would turn out to be false at another. After the Condemnations of 1277, philosophers tended to emphasize God’s absolute power. Voluntarists, like William of Ockham (c. 1280–c. 1349), considered God’s absolute freedom to be preeminent, concluding that the world is utterly contingent since it is completely dependent on God’s power and free will. The differences between intellectualists and voluntarists on the nature of divine providence had important epistemological and metaphysical consequences. Because intellectualists accepted the possibility of some necessary relations in the world, they believed that some a priori knowledge of the world is possible. Voluntarists, however, emphasizing the contingency of the Creation, argued that all knowledge of the world must be a posteriori, or empirical.
Moreover, since the contingency of everything in the world rules out the existence of essences, nominalism
—the view that universals have no reality except as names that humans invent to denominate groups of things—is a concomitant of voluntarism. These theological positions, with their attendant philosophical implications, endured into the early-modern period, when they influenced attitudes toward scientific method.
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Early-Modern Natural Philosophy
Traditionally, the concept of providence was divided into general providence (the order and foreknowledge that God implanted in the original Creation) and special providence (his particular concern for humankind).
In the seventeenth century, thinkers also distinguished between ordinary providence (God’s design of the Creation) and extraordinary providence (his miraculous intervention in the natural order). Early-modern natural philosophers had two primary concerns about divine providence: (1) to understand God’s relationship with the creation; and (2) to ensure that God’s care for, and interaction with, the Creation retained a central role in any new philosophy of nature. The first issue raised questions about the status of the laws of nature; the second was entangled with controversies about the nature of matter and its properties.
Considerations of providence were important in the formulation of new philosophies of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the wake of the Copernican revolution, European natural philosophers sought a philosophy of nature to replace Aristotelianism, which had provided metaphysical foundations for natural philosophy at least since the thirteenth century. Two prominent candidates for such a philosophy of nature were the mechanical philosophy, articulated by Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) and René Descartes (1596–1650), and the so-called chemical philosophy, which derived from the work of Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim [1493–1541]). Both of these philosophies were perceived to challenge the traditional Christian doctrine of providence, largely because their respective theories of matter seemed—in different ways—to exclude God from having an active role in nature. The mechanical philosophers postulated a sharp demarcation between matter and spirit, which seemed to place the mechanical philosophy in danger of falling into materialism and deism, if not outright atheism. The chemical philosophy incorporated active and spiritual properties into matter, but it was also thought to pose the danger of excluding God from the natural world. Active matter was thought to be self-sufficient: It could account for all of the phenomena in the world without recourse to divine action.
The antiprovidential consequences of the mechanical philosophy became manifest in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whose materialism and determinism were notorious. Fear of Hobbist materialism led other thinkers to insist on providential interpretations of the mechanical philosophy.
Gassendi, who modified atomism to rid it of the materialistic and atheistic associations with Epicureanism, explicitly incorporated divine providence into his version of the mechanical philosophy. Appealing to the argument from design, he considered the world to be the product of intelligent design rather than the result of the chance collision of atoms. Denying both the Epicurean doctrine of chance or fortune and the Stoic doctrine of fate, Gassendi insisted that the world is ruled by divine decree. Adopting a voluntarist theology, he described a world that is utterly contingent on divine will. Consequently, he believed that empirical methods are the only way to acquire knowledge about the natural world. The laws of nature, according to Gassendi, are simply empirical generalizations. They are contingent truths because God can change them at will, a fact to which miracles attest. At the same time, Gassendi emphasized God’s role as Creator and Governor of the world, a position he supported by lengthy appeals to the argument from design.
Descartes was effectively an intellectualist, who described a world in which God had embedded necessary relations, some of which enable us to have a priori knowledge of substantial parts of the natural world. Often interpreted as a voluntarist because of his claim that God could have created the world so that 2+2=5, Descartes was, in fact, a mitigated intellectualist who drew on the traditional rhetoric of the distinction between the absolute and the ordained power of God. According to Descartes, God created certain truths to be eternal, such as the mathematical truths and the laws of nature. He created them by his absolute power and, therefore, was free to have created different laws and eternal truths had he so willed.
But he created them freely, and, by his absolute power, he freely created them to be necessary. This
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necessity, which provided the underpinnings for his claim to know the first principles of nature a priori, places him squarely in the intellectualist camp and provided the foundation for his rationalist philosophy.
The Cambridge Platonists Henry More (1614–87) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) adopted an even more extreme form of intellectualism. They upheld the existence of the Platonic form of absolute goodness, which limits God’s freedom of action. More was initially attracted to Descartes’s philosophy particularly because it gave spirit the same ontological status as matter. Eventually, More grew very critical of Cartesianism, fearing that it would easily lead to materialism. To avoid this danger, he added another entity, the Spirit of Nature, to the Cartesian world of mind and matter. More argued that all sorts of phenomena are impossible to explain simply in terms of “the jumbling together of the Matter.” Such phenomena included the parallelism of the axis of the earth and the consequent sequence of the seasons, gravity, the results of Boyle’s air-pump experiments, and the evidence of design in the parts and habits of living things, all of which resisted purely mechanical explanation. To explain them, More introduced the Spirit of Nature, which is incorporeal, extended, and indiscerpible (indivisible), a causal agent, carrying out God’s providential plan for the Creation.
Robert Boyle (1627–91) rejected More’s Spirit of Nature because he thought that God’s wisdom, power, and goodness alone sufficed to explain the order observed in the world. Boyle’s voluntarism is evident throughout his writings. “God,” he declared in The Reconcileableness of Reason and Religion, is “the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion.” Boyle believed that God continues to have power over the laws he created freely and that he can override them at will, as the biblical miracles demonstrate. He rejected intermediate entities, like More’s Spirit of Nature, as limiting divine freedom. Boyle believed that God created matter and then set it into motion in determinate ways so that it formed the great mechanism of the world. Boyle frequently employed the metaphor of a clock to explain how an orderly world could result from the principles of matter and motion. God, the divine clockmaker, created the world with foresight, and he governs it with care. For Boyle, general providence could be explained in terms of God’s initial creation of matter and his setting it into motion. Special providence was manifest in the life of every person both at the moment when God implants a soul in the embryo and, in a more personal way, in the divine guidance he gives for making daily decisions.
Like More, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) found it necessary to modify the mechanical philosophy in ways that would ensure an important role for providence and divine activity in the world. Newton’s early notebooks on natural philosophy, composed in the 1660s, indicate that he found that many phenomena resisted purely mechanical explanation. These “difficult” phenomena included gravitation, the reflection and refraction of light, the cohesion of bodies, and the processes of living bodies. Moreover, the mechanical philosophy posed dangers for a providential view of the world. As an Arian, Newton rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and held that Jesus was a created, although a divine, being; he also held a conception of an extremely transcendent God. Consequently, he felt some urgency to secure a central place for divine activity in the world. Newton preserved his providential worldview by supplementing the mechanical philosophy with a variety of active principles drawn from his extensive alchemical studies. These active principles enabled him to explain the recalcitrant phenomena and contributed to the development of his theory of universal gravitation. He explained the passive and active forces, with which he enriched the mechanical philosophy, as resulting directly from divine activity, thus ensuring a central role for providence in his cosmology, which became a massive argument from design. Newton was also a voluntarist. He believed that God is able to do anything that is not logically contradictory and that the Creation might have been different from what it is because its creation was the voluntary act of an omnipotent God. In an extended criticism of Descartes’s philosophy and particularly of his theory of matter, Newton stated that the existence of matter and its observed properties are completely dependent upon divine will. According to Newton, God or his
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agent is everywhere in the universe, directly responsible for the activity and order that are found in the world.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) proposed a theory of preestablished harmony to explain how God’s wisdom could be manifest in the world. According to this theory, God created each individual thing so that whatever happens to it arises from its own, internal nature. Despite the apparent independence of each individual from every other and from God, the whole world proceeds in a harmonious pattern, preestablished by God. Leibniz claimed that preestablished harmony accounted for the relation of body to mind and for the production of miracles, which presupposed a harmony between the physical and the moral orders. Leibniz’s theory can be understood as an extreme form of intellectualism, for, in it, God literally does not act on the world after his initial act of creation.
The difference between voluntarist and intellectualist interpretations of providence was a central issue in the famous controversy in 1715 and 1716 between Newton’s spokesman, Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), and Leibniz. As an intellectualist, Leibniz criticized the Newtonian insistence on divine activity in the world as implying that God’s workmanship is less than perfect, so that he must constantly intervene in nature and repair his work. A better workman, according to Leibniz, would create a world that would run smoothly forever, without the need for intervention. Replying as a voluntarist, Clarke argued that Leibniz’s account entails the existence of limits on God’s freedom and power.
Later Developments
The seventeenth-century discussions of providence continued to resonate in the styles of science that emerged in the eighteenth century and beyond. A style of science is the specific manifestation of the general epistemological and metaphysical assumptions that govern a particular scientific practice. To the extent that some scientists emphasize the necessity of the laws of nature and the use of abstract reasoning and mathematics to unlock the secrets of nature, they continue to practice a style that reflects an intellectualist interpretation of divine providence. Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) abstract, mathematical approach to theoretical physics reflects this tradition. To the extent that others emphasize contingency, probability, and the use of empirical methods, they are practicing science in a style deriving from a voluntarist understanding of providence. Stephen Jay Gould’s insistence on the historical contingency of the processes of evolution has roots in the voluntarist theology of an earlier period. Modern science has dropped the explicitly theological language that was so central to early-modern discussions, but it is still historically linked to earlier concerns about the nature of God’s relationship to the Creation.
See also Atomism; Cambridge Platonists; Cartesianism; Epicureanism; Isaac Newton;
Mechanical Philosophy; Stoicism; Theodicy
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