Psalms and Secondary Causes

Lately I’ve been reading through the Psalms. I’ve read the Psalms many times and find them deeply comforting but also challenging. One thing I’ve noticed on this reading is how nationalistic — I’d dare say jingoistic — many of the Psalms sound, while at the same time coming across as whiny and self-justifying. Some of them must have been, originally, quite a bit of propaganda. But this post is about theology and philosophy, and how the Psalms help us understand primary and secondary causes, so I’ll leave this part of the discussion for another day.

Discussions about theology and science often go awry when people assume that God must “intervene” in nature in order to act. The Psalms regularly attribute natural events to Divine action. A good case study is Psalm 135:

For I know that the LORD is great
And that our LORD is above all gods.
Whatever the LORD pleases, He does,
In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps.
He casues the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth;
Who makes lightnings for the rain,
Who brings for the wind from His treasuries.

Ps. 135:5-7

Perhaps the ancient Psalm writer really thought God dipped into a storehouse of clouds and lightning kept at the ends of the earth and pushed them along over Jerusalem with his literal hand and breath. We know today there are no literal “ends of the earth,” no storehouse of clouds and lightning waiting for God to scoop them up. We know how weather forms, and we don’t need to invoke direct Divine intervention to explain the origin of a storm.

But I wonder if the Psalm writer really was that naive. The Psalm continues with a discussion of God’s mighty acts of justice (grisly justice that doesn’t seem all that just — but I’ll leave that for another day as well):

He smote many nations
And slew mighty kings,
Sihon, king of the Amorites,
And Og, king of Bashan,
And all the kingdoms of Canaan;
And he gave their land as a heritage,
A heritage to Israel His people.

Ps. 135:10-11.

In Numbers 21, and Dueteronomy 2, Sihon was King of the Amorites, who was not willing to let the Israelites, led by Moses, pass through his land. Numbers tells us that

So Sihon gathered all his people and went out against Israel in the wilderness, and came to Jahaz and fought against Israel. Then Israel struck him with the edge of the sword, and took possession of his land from the Arnon to the Jabbok.

Num. 21:21-31.

After dispatching Sihon, the Israelites came upon Og the King of Bashan:

But the Lord said to Moses, ‘Do not fear him, for I have given him into your hand, and all his people and his land; and you shall do to him as you did to Sihon, king of the Amorites, who lived at Heshbon.’ So they killed him and his sons and all his people, until there was no remnant left him; and they possessed his land.

Num. 21:33-35. (See also Deuteronomy 3)

The Israelites met Sihon and Og in battle, and these Kings died by the sword. There’s no indication that God directly struck them dead. The “natural” cause of their deaths was the injuries they received in battle, which required the action of Israel’s soldiers. It’s possible to describe that event without references to Divine action. But the Psalms say God slew Sihon and Og, and Numbers and Deuteronomy say God delivered the armies of Sihon and Og to Israel for victory.

Reformed Divines sometimes referred to this as concurrence – God concurred in the actions of the human warriors to achieve God’s end. Perhaps this is a decent way to think about it, but it also seems to cramp the agency of the human actors, and it doesn’t really get at events that don’t involve intelligent agents, such as the weather. (Yes, intelligent agents can affect the weather, as in climate change, but weather happens whether any agent acts or not.)

The Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, using Aristotle’s four-fold concept of causation, spoke about primary and secondary causes. The primary cause is God’s will, which in Aristotelian terms relate to the formal and final causes. God established the original design of things like storm clouds and humans, their formal cause, which enables them to achieve certain things. God also established — or, more accurately, God is — the final cause of all that He created, the purpose and end for which they are made. The secondary cause is the action of the thing itself — what Aristotle called material and efficient causes. A thing has capacities relating to its properties — the material of which it’s made. When a thing causes effects, putting something into motion, that is an efficient cause. So evaporation, air pressure, ocean temperatures, and so-on producing a storm are water, air, and temperature acting in accordance with their material properties to produce effects. Warriors using their intelligence and strength to produce weapons and kill enemies are using their material properties to produce effects.

These secondary causes, in Aquinas’ theology, have their own integrity. This means we can examine the relationship between properties and effects scientifically without looking for Divine intervention. We can describe a thunderstorm, or a battle, in terms that don’t invoke God, and the resulting narrative is true at its own level of description.

So do we need God at all? In the modern period, many streams of philosophy rejected Aristotle entirely, and in particular rejected Aristotle’s ideas about causation. This did free up the energy and imagination of the modern scientific revolution from certain dogmas relating to Aristotle’s cosmology. But material and efficient causes alone don’t tell as anything about the significance of any events, including their moral or ethical significance. Is there a purpose to existence? Are there better and worse ways to be in light of any such purpose? These are questions relating to what Aquinas called primary causes and to Aristotle’s formal and final causes.

But how can we know there really is something like formal and final causes? Maybe scientism is right: the universe is a brute fact, there are only secondary causes — matter and physical effects — and the effort to find any transcendent design and purpose is a delusion. But most people, anyone who really thinks about it, I’d say, knows this can’t be right. The fact that anyone cares about the truth of this claim shows that we know it matters and that we can actually reason about it beyond the scope of mere matter and physical effects.

But — one very important thing to note here is that we can’t know there really is something like formal and final causes by searching for God at the end of a chain of material or efficient causes. If we’re looking for the literal storehouse God reaches into to dig out lightning, we won’t find it; if we’re looking for the “irreducibly complex” part of evolution that could only have been assembled directly by God, we won’t find it; if we’re looking for a physically measurable soul or Divine or Evil Spirit that physically alters our brains to produce good or bad actions, we won’t find it. Such efforts miss the point entirely.

To dig further into this question of epistemology, we’d need to get into some deep and contested waters. In short, I think some kind of externalism must be correct, and in particular that Plantinga and the “Reformed Epistemologists” are on the right track about basic beliefs that can’t be proven by the kinds of evidence demanded by internalists. I would suggest that “Reformed” epistemology is also consistent with early/mid-Medieval and Patristic Christian epistemologies, properly understood within their own contexts. Aquinas is often portrayed as an internalist, offering rational proofs based only on self-evident truths, but I don’t think that’s really what he was doing in the Five Ways or otherwise. Certainly it’s not what Augustine or the Greek Fathers did. But this gets way deep into the weeds. I’m not really sure any of these pre-modern thinkers fit neatly into modern internalist / externalist boxes, and I’m not sure I do either (really these boxes seem to me a symptom of some excesses of modern analytic philosophy and I lose patience with them quickly).

Looping back to Psalm 135: how does the Psalmist know God commands the storms? How does he know God was behind Israel’s victories over Sihon and Og? In the first case, this doxological statement is based on the Psalmist’s experience of majestic, powerful storms in relation to his experience of God. It is an analogical observation. The storms reveal God’s power. In the second case, God Himself revealed to Moses that God would ensure the victory. The “evidence” for the primary causes was grounded in revelation.

So how did the Psalmist or Moses know, or how do we know, that there is revelation, or if there is revelation, that it is God’s revelation? In Plantinga’s terms, this gets into the question of “properly basic” beliefs. I think Plantinga properly refers to the testimony of the Holy Spirit here, but I also think in this way he is not sufficiently Trinitarian and Christological. I don’t see in Plantinga very much about the Son — the Son’s incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension, but also the Son’s preexisting nature as the Logos of creation.

You could say the Son’s nature as the Logos cuts against Plantinga’s program — the Logos is the reason of creation, the natural law that allows rational reflection to lead us to the truth of God. But this leads us to ask a related theological question about the relationship between “nature” and “grace.” If creation is a gift, an act of grace, the Logos‘ self-donation in creation is also an act of divine self-disclosure — an act of revelation. There is no “pure,” unmediated nature; there is no “pure,” unmediated reason. To know anything, human creatures must always refer to something external to their own minds, not least when employing human reason, which is a human way of partaking in the Logos.