In harmony with the whole Christian tradition, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that
just as God is origin and source of all things as creator, He also cares for all things.
And this is called God's providence.
Now, when Aquinas speaks of providence in God, he says that it pertains to the mind
of God who is the creator of all things.
Yet, because God is infinitely intelligent--infinitely wise--He does not cause things
to be pell mell.
Rather, Aquinas holds that creation is characterized by order, and, more specifically, all things
come forth from God according to an ordered plan, and all things are ordered back to God
as their ultimate end.
Providence therefore refers to what precedes this created order in God Himself.
It is the perfectly wise plan in the mind of God for the entirety of creation by which
all things come forth from Him and are ordered or directed back to Him.
How far does this providence of God extend?
Here, Aquinas considers an objection.
It might seem that the world is governed by chance, and if that's the case, how then could
there be divine providence?
This objection pops up, especially if you think of creation as a beginning point in
time.
You might say, "Okay, I'll grant you that God got the universe started in the beginning,
but after that it unfolds more or less on its own as things interact according to chance
and so not following some kind of divine plan."
Now, hiding in this objection are two mistakes, two confusions about the relation between
God and the world.
The first is about the notion of creation itself.
St. Thomas argues that creation is not simply a beginning point in time, a first moment
at which the universe began to exist.
Rather, according to Aquinas, creation is an ongoing relation of radical ontological
dependence.
To be a creature means to receive being, to be caused, to participate in existence at
every moment, so being a creature, being created characterizes all finite things at all times.
This point is important because it helps us see that God does not just get the universe
rolling and then step out of the picture.
The second mistake is related to this first one.
It's to think that God is a cause of things in the world in the same way that creatures
are causes of things in the world.
Now, as pure being, God simply is absolutely.
He's therefore a cause of a totally different kind, in a totally different order altogether
from all other causes that we know, causes in the world.
There's no competition between taking seriously the creaturely causality that we find in the
universe and at the same time, affirming God is the first cause of all of these creaturely
causes.
God Himself creates and respects created causes, and creatures really do in a limited sense
generate the order of the world that we see around us through their causality.
This means that God can bring things about in the world through the normal activity of
creatures who are secondary causes in the world.
But what about the claim that we see a great deal in the world that does seem to happen
by chance?
Doesn't Aquinas's claim about divine providence do away with this?
And further, what about human freedom?
Doesn't a belief in providence undermine a belief that we're free?
Aquinas has good answers to both of these questions.
Let's speak first about chance.
The first point to say about this is that because God is the cause of all that is, there's
no possibility that some outside cause could intervene from outside of what God has planned.
That's because outside of what God causes, there simply is nothing.
Since we do in fact see chance events in the world, how does Aquinas account for them?
In fact, he says that there are different kinds of secondary causes and they interact
in complex ways so that there's neither a pure indeterminacy or sheer randomness in
the world nor a pure determinism.
Rather, there are genuinely different kinds of causes caused by God.
First, there are what could be called necessary causes.
Actually we call them per se causes.
There are causes that bring about a particular result always or for the most part.
We're not yet talking about chance here.
We're talking rather about things like laws of physics or the kind of ordered causes that
biologists identify.
But there's a second category which Aquinas calls per accidens causes, and here we find
his treatment of chance within his treatment of divine providence.
When you have a per accidens cause, you have intersecting lines of causality that bring
about a result that is much harder to predict.
There's a classic example of a chance encounter or a per accidens cause.
Suppose that Tom owes $10 to Susan, and Tom sets out one day to go to the grocery store
and so does Susan unbeknownst to Tom.
Both arrive at the store to buy their groceries.
They run into each other with the result that Tom pays Susan the money he owes her.
Now, when Tom left his house, was he intending to pay Susan the money?
No.
Was Susan intending to collect the money from Tom?
No, again, but in fact because these two lines of causality intersected at the grocery store,
they happen to meet and it happens that Tom pays Susan.
Aquinas speaks about another category of causality in the world which he calls contingent causes.
Even in the material universe, there are truly contingent causes.
These are causes that are not purely determined.
Here we might think of what quantum mechanics describes in the science of physics and its
work on indeterminacy.
In fact, Aquinas has a way to account for this kind of contingency.
He thinks that God can cause things to be contingent causes, and from within the universe,
those causes are truly contingent.
But of course from God's perspective, since he establishes them in being and gives them
their causal power, they're not contingent to Him.
That's because God's viewpoint is not just like a worldly viewpoint, but one that is
outside of the universe and is undergirding it at every moment.
Now, finally we come to the category of human freedom.
This is a genuinely contingent cause, and yet God can move man's will from within according
to His plan, and we'll talk about that in the next video.
All this discussion of different kinds of creaturely causes help us to see how God provides
for His creation.
God's plan encompasses everything that happens in the world, even things that happen truly
by chance, truly by contingency, or by acts of human freedom.
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