The Being of God
A universe containing self-conscious beings must have a cause sufficient to produce such beings, a cause which must at least have the property of self-consciousness. This property cannot simply "evolve" from protoplasm or stellar energy, because this would mean that more consciousness is the result of less consciousness and no consciousness. Evolution is, therefore, a transition from the potential to the actual, wherein the new powers and qualities constantly acquired are derived, not from the potential, but from a superior type of life which already possesses them.
What is this superior type of life? Taking as his basic principle the fact that something cannot come out nothing, or, to state it positively, that every effect demands a sufficient cause, St. Thomas both demonstrates the necessity for its existence and outlines its general character in five ways. He shows that it must be a First Move, the First Cause, the Being which exists necessarily, the possessor of the perfect degree of every positive property to be found in things, and the origin of order, whereby all things are directed to their proper ends. The gist of the whole argument is simply that the universe requires an origin or cause other than itself, and that this cause must be absolutely self-sufficient. Everything in the universe is the effect of some prior cause; every movement is the result of a prior movement; every being is derived from some prior being. The universe is always depending on something prior to itself, and at any "moment" it can only be a cause, can only exist, by virtue of being an effect. It is therefore primarily an effect. The chain of causation cannot be extended back infinitely, for then we should have a system which is an effect without any primary cause...It does not make it any less nonsense to increase its size, to carry the effects causing one another back and back and back. It only becomes a bigger and bigger absurdity. Carry it back to infinity, and you have an infinite absurdity... You must, then, arrive at an origin, a cause, which is not an effect, which exists in its own right - necessarily - and does not derive from being from something else just because it is Being.
It follows that this necessary and self-sufficient Being will have some astonishing properties. Because it must be the sufficient cause of the whole universe (otherwise it would not be the first cause), it will have in the most complete degree every positive property to be found in the universe - including life and consciousness. It will be utterly free from limitation other than self-limitation, for there is nothing prior to it to impose any limits upon it. It will not, therefore, be limited by time and space, and thus will be entirely present in every place and at every moment. It will not be a body, because all bodies have spatial limitations and are subject to change and motion. It will not be a world-soul, considered as the form of the universe-body, because form and body are mutually dependent whereas the first cause is necessarily independent. It will not be the universe itself considered as a Gestalt, a whole organism is a dependent system which does not originate itself. It will not even be divisible into parts, since parts involve spatial and temporal limitations.
In sum, reason can show that God exists, and that he is the unlimited fullness of life and being. Yet he is quite other than what we normally term life and being, that is, the universe, for whereas things have life and have being, God is life and is being....
From the purely philosophical standpoint the problem is that while the Thomistic argument works perfectly backwards, in reasoning from the universe to God, it does not work so well in reasoning forwards from God to the universe. It is shown quite clearly that the universes demands a Cause such as has been described. But it is not shown at all clearly how the Cause produces the universe. Two possible solutions have to be rejected. The first is that God created the universe out of some primordial, chaotic matter which had existed from all eternity along with but apart from God himself. But if this matter is not caused by God he is not the first cause, and we have to look for God elsewhere, because if we are not dealing with the first cause, we are not dealing with God. The second is that God created the universe out of his own "substance," by a process which should be called emanation rather than creation. But if God is indivisible this involves pantheism, since every "part" of the indivisible God is equal to the whole - is God himself. If every single created thing is absolutely identical with God, all differences, all grades of perfection, all values, become illusory. In fact the universe, as we understand it, does not exist at all. The problem of creation, of the origin of the universe, is abolished by saying that there is no creation. There is only God. There is also a completely unexplained illusion of a diversified universe. To say that God caused the illusion is in effect to return to the problem of creation, and we have to begin all over again. To say that man created it is to say the same thing, because man is God; or else it is to that God as man became subject to the illusion. And again, God is not the first cause.
Rejecting these two solutions, orthodox theology maintains that God created the universe out of nothing. (This does not, of course, mean that the "nothing" was in any sense a material out of which the universe was constructed, nor yet should we imagine it even as an empty space apart from God within which it was made.) The universe, together with its time and space, was not. And then, by a fiat of the divine will, it was. Of course, this is not really a solution. It is simply a description of what must have happened if there was no pre-existing material and if God did not make the universe out of himself. God caused the universe by some other means, but we don't know how. Reason here has to jump a gap, seeing no way out of the dilemma. The gap does not lie between God and the universe; it lies in reasoning, for theology knows no rational principle which can account for the action. It can only say that whereas creatures cause things out of themselves or out of pre-existing material, the Creator causes things in the manner proper to a first cause - independently of pre-existing material. But the point upon which orthodox theology wishes to insist is not just that there was no pre-existing material; it is that the universe, definitively and absolutely, is not God. For in ordinary logical terms the identification of the universe with God involves pantheism, which renders all moral distinctions unreal.
We could well afford to leave this problem alone as one of the unfathomable mysteries of the Godhead were it not that mystical experience, both Christian and non-Christian, glimpses, or intuits, an answer deeper than this, an answer for which theology has no proper terms of expression. When expressed in theological terms, the answer sounds like pantheism, for which reason official theology has always looked upon mysticism with suspicion. The mystic, on his side, is often somewhat dissatisfied with theology, because it seems to set a gulf between God and man which love cannot tolerate because it desires the most intimate kind of union. We are raising, in fact, the crucial problem of transcendence and immanence, the One and the Many, a problem that has always been troublesome for Christian theology because the seeming dualism of God on the one hand and the universe on the other has not been adequately resolved. While it remains unresolved the mystic must either go his own way and leave theology alone, or else he must be for ever wrestling with the adaptation of experience to theology and theology to experience, forever tempering his language with caution and taking care not to be a heretic. For the mystic knows that in some mysterious and indescribable manner God and his universe are one.
- Alan Watts
