How God Can Guide Random Events & Free Choices (Aquinas 101)

How do divine providence, random events, and free choices relate to each other, especially in regards to scientific theories like the big bang, evolution, and quantum mechanics? Is there a conflict between indeterminacy and the divine causality described by St. Thomas Aquinas? Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., a Dominican friar from the Province of St. Joseph, breaks down why there is no conflict between God’s providence and scientific theories about the big bang, quantum mechanics, and evolution. God through his divine providence guides the unfolding of everything that is, even through the secondary causality of indeterminate or so-called random events, because he is the primary cause and ultimate end of all of all things.

Primary and Secondary Causality: Aquinas on Indeterminacy (Aquinas 101) - Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.


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[True-]

Well explained thank you 😊 Easy to see why St Thomas Aquinas is a Dr of the Church ✝️ God Created everything so there should be no choosing between only "science" or "religion" 💗🙏 May God Bless all who strive to live the Gospel & search for Truth 👼✝️💗

[roisinpatriciagaffney]

Thank you, Father Legge.
St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

[scottknapp]

I’ve been binging on Thomistic Institute videos and they confirm my faith. Causality is a key influence on my belief that God is. The videos also confirm my belief that church doctrines are man’s attempt to express deeper truths in a way that limited humans can embrace. They are products of oral and written traditions that come from human myth-making. Man looked out into the mysteries of the cosmos and imagined stories that explain it all. Religions emerged and people accepted their simple explanations.

[LeslieKlinger]

this is why Theology is the queen of science

[josephbarbarie]

Awesome presentation as always -- it never shies away from the physical, observable, realities of the universe, but leavens them with philosophy. Thanks so much, Fr. Legge!

[albert]

Wow...thank you Father. This was something I was struggling with. Thank you so much for pulling me out of my intellectual blackhole.

So, when I "chose" my profession (major decisions) or decided what I should have for breakfast (minor decisions), they are truly free, but at the same time consistent with the will of God?

Thank you for all your insightful and well presented contents. Catholics and non-Catholics alike should study it carefully. Scholastic Metaphysics is making a major come back!

[ianb]

Because God is outside time and is the First Cause at every moment, his mode of creation is not to set the universe in motion like an autonomous machine and step away. Rather, he eternally creates or actualizes it at every single moment of existence. This is how God's Providence is able to work in conjunction with human and angelic freedom: In His infinite knowledge, he actualizes, at every single moment, the universe in which the events He has planned out occur, whether by human choice or natural happenstance or both.

What does this mean for randomness? Well, for starters, it's important to remember that what we call randomness or "chance" is always relative or random with respect to something else. For instance, when I throw a pair of dice, my decision on when to throw it, how hard to throw it, which direction to throw it, and so forth are not random, but are rather deliberate and chosen by me for my purposes. The forces determining what happens to the dice after I throw them are not random either, but deterministic. Someone who knew the precise physical qualities of the dice and all the various forces acting on them could presumably predict which numbers the dice will land on, like Data in Star Trek.

However, my own choices and the various deterministic forces acting on the dice are random *with respect to the numbers the dice will land on*. They don't favor any particular outcome over another. As a result, if I throw the dice enough times, I will get a statistically random distribution of outcomes according to rules of probability.

So what does this mean for God's Providence as it pertains to randomness? To be precise, it means that God does *NOT* work through randomness, but instead that events aren't actually random at all with respect to God's Providential purposes for them.

A paradigm example from history and Scripture is the role that Judas Iscariot played in the Passion of Christ. As Scripture makes clear, Judas' actions were free, and he was morally accountable (and apparently condemned) for them. They weren't intended by Judas (or by Satan) to bring about the redemption of mankind, so one might be tempted to say they were "random" in that sense. But as Scripture also makes clear, the actions of Judas (and Satan) were NOT random with respect to the redemption of mankind at all, but were in fact tightly and elaborately orchestrated and planned by God from the beginning of time (and indeed outside time) to bring about the arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ.

This same Providence governs the outcome of the Big Bang, the formation of the Solar System, the Earth, Sun, and Moon, etc. Again, God worked through secondary causes by Providence to bring about the place where we would live, with all the properties we would need to live in it. These events were NOT random with respect to creating a home precisely suitable for life and humanity in particular, but were tightly orchestrated by Providence to produce that result.

Things get more complicated when we get to the theory of evolution. The problem here is not that God couldn't have guided evolution by Providence to the ends He wanted. He could and did. The problem is that the Darwinian *theory* of evolution entails an assertion that He didn't. The central premise of Darwinian theory isn't that living things share a common ancestry rather than being created ex nihilo (though of course it does depend on that). Rather, Darwinian theory is meant to explain the appearance of purposiveness and function of living things in a way that eliminates the need for any actual teleology to account for it - of either the intrinsic Aristotelean/Thomistic type or the extrinsic purpose of designed artifacts. It's a denial that biological function is objectively real, and a claim regarding how the appearance of biological function is (supposedly) accounted for purely within the mechanistic philosophy.

An immediate implication is that organisms are not substances with intrinsic function as Thomist philosophy holds them to be, but mere aggregates of matter, like human artifacts. But a further implication (and Darwin's primary argument, because he was responding to Paley, who was a Descartian rather than a Thomist) is that biological organisms don't have even extrinsic function like human artifacts do. The main premise is that "natural selection" (ie, some organisms surviving and reproducing more than others) and "random" variation have produce an *appearance* of function (or intendedness for a purpose) like that seen in human artifacts, but without anyone intending it. Hence, the "randomness" of variation in the theory is specifically randomness with respect to the appearance of purpose in biology, and "natural selection" is also supposed to be "random" in the sense of accounting for the appearance of function without being orchestrated to any outcome in particular. Hence, the theory is a denial that the purpose we see in living things, including humans, came about by *any* intentional means, including Providence acting through secondary causes.

Now, this picture is actually incoherent, and Darwinism's eliminativism regarding the objective reality of biological purpose is self-defeating. I don't blame you guys for not getting into this issue in this sort of overview video, because the issues are subtle and complex. But there's a lot at stake here. After all, the entire Thomistic Natural Law approach to morality depends on the fact that living things are substances, and it is built on the objective, irreducible reality of biological function.

So it would be nice to see you guys get into a Thomistic explanation of biological function, why it must be real and why it's incoherent to deny or reduce it, why organisms must be substances, why these things must be grounded in God's intellect, and so forth.

[neuronneuron]

I think the real question we are interested in is theological - Why would God use these secondary causes (the big bang, QM, evolution) in his creation over some other set of arbitrary secondary causes? What ultimate goal do they serve? How do they uniquely manifest his glory? And what is the role of the scientific method in our salvation? Do we need to know any facts to get to heaven? What purpose does knowledge serve?

[bradwalton]

This _seems_ to explain something that I read in Noonan's "General Metaphysics, " and which greatly puzzled me. "The principle of change applies with equal force and rigor to both receptive and operative potencies [such as the will].... Nothing ever passes from potency to act except under the influence of another being which is already in act, and this applies to operative potencies." In any case, I would like to know more about the relationship between God and the human will, according to Aquinas.

I appreciate these videos, but I feel like they oversimplify or sidestep some of the biggest issues. Does God will people to freely choose evil? Does God will for innocent children to get cancer? I’m left with lingering questions like those after this video.

[frankrosenbloom]

I'm an MD but I have an undergraduate minor in philosophy. Nonetheless, delving more deeply into these matters as a Catholic sometimes leaves me more confused. Simple question father. If I choose to eat a hamburger today was that completely my choice within the realm of my powers as a human being and my free will, or did God determine from all time that today I would eat a hamburger and move my free will in such a way such that I would do it?

[renecordero]

I have some questions from the good friars. If God guides everything with divine providence, then all the wars and other disasters created by humans are part of divine providence. We may ask: how can the divine providence plan tolerate so much evil? If I am correct in my understanding of divine providence, the way I try to answer the question is by saying that given human freedom, divine providence creates the best possible outcome for the salvation of our souls that could come out of this freedom. And that a way in which God does this is by deriving a greater good for our salvation than all the evil that we humans, with our free will, do. Do I understand divine providence correctly? Is my answer a reasonable answer?

[DelioJez]

Genuine question for which I’d love an answer: if I continue to pray for my ex- girlfriend to come back, could God influence her free- will? God bless ❤

[metatron]

Thomas Aquinas thought that nothing causes itself, but that eliminates libertarian free will as a necessary condition for free will is that the self causes the self to create a thought.

[falnica]

Saint Thomas recognized the importance of faith, since there are many things in the religion that can never be proven

But what if someone doesn’t have faith?

[edzanjero]

Does the RCC still maintain its exclusivity as stated in the Council of Trent..." there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church?"

[helpmaboabb]

I've not sure if you are reporting Aquinas's beliefs but on which you have no opinion, or whether you bring these forward as doctrine.

[Plodalong-allday]

Move us to act freely still sounds like a contradiction.

[JatnaRD]

So... God determines cancer, harlequin ichthyosis, and such?

[robertwilsoniii]

I honestly don't like the sound of this. I prefer arguments from free will, and materialist accounts of will. In particular, I support Hylomorphism, Dispositionalism and Orch OR.