I wrote the other day in a comment over at the blog of our friend and fellow Orthospherean Bruce Charlton:
… one of the things that God can do – which creatures cannot – is create creatures that can and do act.
I then wrote to myself, in my Journal:
This argues against the possibility of our success in creating actual persons via AI. It does not however rule out the possibility that our work in AI could provide an occasion or niche for the ingress or inception of actual persons to the mundane order. After all, our sexual acts do not create persons, but do, rather, provide the mundane occasions for their incipience. So then likewise from time to time for our buildings and crossroads, our battlefields and ruins. And our bodies.
We creatures cannot create novel actual entities – novel creatures – ex nihilo. We can at most so arrange already actual things in our near vicinity (spatial and temporal, and indeed also conceptual) as to allow for the ingress to our world of such entities – whether they be already actual in our world, or only in their own proper natural world, or in some other worlds, or whether they be altogether novel, in every world whatever.
In talk of creation, much confusion is sowed by a conflation of creaturely powers of creation – which are those of rearrangement of already actual factors in the past of the present moment – with the powers of creation proper to God alone. God alone can make altogether new things happen … sometimes, and indeed in our lives usually, by means of what has already happened to, for, in, and by us. But per contra, all we creatures can do is rearrange what has already happened – in our world, or in God. The novelty we generate then is already implicit in what we rearrange. This is not so for God: Behold, he says, I make all things new. Revelation 21:5.
It is not uncommon for quite serious and careful thinkers to fall into the casual error of supposing that the limits to creaturely creativity – of rearrangement of pre-existent factors – apply also to God, and limit him – with the consequence that there must have been something other than God, with him equally prior and primordial, which in creation he arranged and ordered. They do not. God is nowise limited. On the contrary, God is himself the Limit of all things. God qua ultimate is Being per se, and thus the ontological source of all other being. All that is, is new altogether and absolutely from and by and in him. Acts 17:28.
Back then for a moment to AI: we can’t create persons by means of the algorithms we discover and implement. But that does not mean that the algorithms we discover and implement cannot form niches – vacua – into which persons (whether new or ancient) might then make themselves manifest to us effectually. Nature abhors vacua. They will be filled, willy nilly, somehow or other. Beware, then, in your creation of such vacua. This, NB, not just in respect to AI, but – more concretely – in respect to your own life. Fill it up, all, with the Holy Spirit, so that there is in it no room for any other, lesser spirit.
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I should say at last also that our work in AI can in principle open niches for the ingress of demons, as has been noted of late in our little corner of the web. Some of what we have seen out there from AI of late is indeed pretty goddamn spooky. But the same goes, after all, for our work on our own lives. AI is weak beer, compared to that. Where in you are the demons at work? OK, yeah, right? All over the place. So, we all have plenty we can do, to drive out demonic influence. The niches newly opened to the demonic by AI are nothing, compared to the niches we open in ourselves at every turn.
The Orthosphere 
@Kristor – You have, I think, defined the nature of the core metaphysical question almost exactly as I would – but take a different path from that point!
I agree that if real-creation exists – i.e. not just re-arrangement of pre-existing stuff – then it must be a divine attribute.
I continue by reasoning that: therefore, if Men are capable of real-creation, then Men need to be – in some qualitative way – gods.
This I accept: i.e. that Men, as Children of God really create And are gods.
Note that God, capitalized, is the *primary* creator, and we Men (and all other Beings that really-create) are *secondary* creators, whose real-creation happens within the already-existing ‘universe’ of God’s primary creation.
The creating is therefore qualitatively the same process: when Men create, they are doing the same kind of thing as God. The distinction between God and gods is therefore between making the framework, and working within and from that framework; it is also a temporal creation, in that primary creation came first.
Because secondary creation is real-creation, it qualitatively changes God’s primary creation – including making it bigger.
The difference between our views is therefore metaphysical – we understand the issue in the same way – but we make different assumptions about what is actually the case, based on other fundamental assumptions e.g. concerning the prior definitions of God’s nature, and the nature of reality (e.g. of Time).
The point of departure between us then is that, while I don’t think creation of living creatures is possible to living creatures, you do.
My reason for thinking as I do is at bottom phenomenological: I find that I don’t create *my own* next moment of life. Rather, these moments of my life arrive for me without my doing anything, a sheer gratuitous gift; and I have no idea how; so that I have no idea how to go about obtaining a new moment of life. Instead, I just keep finding myself in the midst of a new moment of life.
How then might I create a new moment of life for anyone else?
It goes deeper. How might we go about producing another day?
Once a new moment of a new day has arrived from I know not where – indeed, from a pure complete absence of itself, a sheer untrammelled nothingness of what I find that it is now becoming – why, then I in my own likewise incomprehensible and totally new moment can get to work on it, to see what I can make of it. But the raw materials of such makings – the mere new facts of the present life of the living creature and of his world – are given, primordially.
The bottom line is that no moment in the life of a creature can be absolutely sui generis. This can be shown, not just phenomenologically, but logically. To create itself, or for that matter to do anything at all, a creature would first have to exist, so as to be able then to exert creative influence upon things. But, by definition, a creature that does not yet actually exist – such as the me of five minutes hence – cannot act to do anything: it just is not, so it cannot. Among all the things it cannot do because it does not actually exist is create itself.
If on the other hand I could indeed create moments in the lives of creatures, why, I’d be doing it all over the place. It would be awesomely cool! If humans could do that sort of thing, we’d be cranking out new species of animals and plants all the time – not hybrids, mind, not the results of breeding, but entirely new species. That sort of creation would be a standard feature of human society.
It isn’t. We find that we are perforce limited to operating on data that have already been given to us, gratis. I find no evidence anywhere in my experience, or in the records of the experiences of others, that any of us can create life de novo.
Your language about primary versus secondary creation is echoed, and thus supported, in orthodox Christian theology. Creatures do act; but they are not themselves the original sources of their capacity to act, or to be. They are, and can then act, because God has given them being, and with it – this follows by definition, and thus as an integral package deal – freedom, and power.
Tolkien and Lewis both wrote about our imitative creative abilities which derive from God’s creativity. Tolkien even called it “subcreation,” and that alerts us to another possibility. We can in some way make creatures with agency, when they are in literature or drama. We think we are entirely in control, and in fact it is our words, coming from our brains, that go onto the page. And yet authors report characters and situations getting away from them and striking out on their own, asserting some sort of self.
A poor imitation of the Creation, to be sure, but it does allow us some insight into it.
As above, so below. We created domestic animals too.
Really? We created cats out of a total absence of cats?
No. Cats were around before we were. We lived with cats symbiotically, and learned about them, as they learned about us. It was an instance of coevolution. The same thing happens in marriages, between nations, and with each new kid – when things go well!
Things have not gone so well in the symbiosis of humans with, say, black widow spiders. That said, I myself harbor fond feelings for spiders in general, despite their bites: they feed on our insect enemies – so, like cats (who also bite us) they are our natural allies – and are just amazing.
It is crucial to distinguish between creation and recombination; also between the creation of creatures and their actions, by which novel states of affairs in the world come to be – by which, i.e., forms never before instantiate in our world come to be instantiate in our world, so that new things happen from one moment to the next – so that each breath occurs in a world that had never yet before happened; and so that we can tell each moment from every other. Creatures do act, and so do instantiate novel forms; it is just that they don’t act so as to instantiate novel forms *of living creatures* – other than, as with agriculture, animal husbandry, genetic experimentation, or sex (and, perhaps, AI), indirectly, by arranging occasions for the instantiation of novel living creatures.
@ Assistant Village Idiot: Quite so. I’ve had the same thing happen when I’m writing out an argument: it can take on a life of its own, and lead me to places I had not looked for, indeed had not suspected even existed. And of course composers have reported the same thing. It has even happened to me when singing a bit of polyphony I know well; suddenly it can grab me and swing me along to a musical insight – or, even, a theological insight – I had not before apprehended. Actors, too, can find themselves animated by a character they are playing, and astonished by what then happens.
There exist – in the mind of God, if nowhere else – forms of creatures which have never lived in our world. The form of a living creature is its soul. When Tolkien wrote about Gandalf, he so arranged things in himself, and in the selves of his readers, as to open an ontological niche for the ingress to them of influence of the soul of Gandalf – despite the fact that Gandalf might not exist in any world. Now, influence upon a living creature by a form is participation of that creature in that form, and vice versa. It is in some measure expression by that creature of that form. So, when we ponder Gandalf, we do really partake his soul – even if he is himself in no world quite alive. So doing, we instantiate him, a bit. So, in us, he begins to live, a bit.
This is all worked out quite thoroughly in the theory of egregores. I have written a bit about them here. It is also worked out in Christian ecclesiology, to a far, far greater degree; and sacramental theology.
Thus when an author or actor finds that his character has taken on a life of his own, there is a certain straightforward truth in it. The character might actually exist only in the simulated world of a novel or play; but in that simulated world, he does actually exist, and act.
Nevertheless what has happened in such situations is not the creation of a new living agent, but rather the instantiation of a soul that has found some ontological niche in our world, thanks to the efforts of the artist in rearranging his near vicinity, and his own body, his own acts.
We do the same thing when we open ourselves to the influence either of demons, or of saints and angels.
@Kristor: “This can be shown, not just phenomenologically, but logically. To create itself, or for that matter to do anything at all, a creature would first have to exist, so as to be able then to exert creative influence upon things. But, by definition, a creature that does not yet actually exist – such as the me of five minutes hence – cannot act to do anything: it just is not, so it cannot. Among all the things it cannot do because it does not actually exist is create itself.”
Not ‘logically’ – because this is again metaphysics, and laced with assumptions that differ from mine!
Because I believe that all “creatures” – who I call Beings – have always-existed: have existed from eternity. That is, indeed, foundational for my basic understanding.
This is again a matter of assumptions – you assume that Beings must have been created – therefore cannot be real-creators. I would agree IF all beings had been created – but I assume they were NOT created; I assume that all Beings are co-eternal – including the being God who is primary creator of this creation.
You report your subjective experiences as never creating; but admit that you have ruled out the possibility of yourself creating a priori. I would say that I am subjectively confident that I, and some other people, have really-created *sometimes*.
It may perhaps be that exactly because that possibility is allowed-for by my metaphysical assumptions – I AM able to experience real creativity and to detect in in other persons and their works. And real-creating is – indeed – what I most value Doing in life and aspire to Do in eternity.
Indeed, I regard creativity as the natural, spontaneous, inevitable manifestation of love; and the reason or explanation, therefore, for primary creation by God.
The problem is that the notion that spirits – men, gods, angels, demons, and so forth – are eternal is logically incoherent on its own terms. It has also devastating sequelae for many basic propositions that are crucially important in understanding and conducting our lives.
Taking the latter difficulty first, if spirits are eternal then they are not creatures at all, but are, rather, ontologically equivalent to God. The category of deity then does not distinguish any being from any other, so that it is rendered otiose.
God then is not the creator of other spirits, so they owe him nothing – no duty, at all. As utterly independent gods, they are perfectly entitled to go each his own way; there is nothing in so doing that is absolutely wrong, so their doing so cannot be a problem, for them or for God. It is, rather, just the way things are.
God’s authority then vanishes. This entails the impossibility of a moral order, properly so called; for, each spirit is a law unto himself; there are therefore no such things as evil or error. With duty and thus obedience eliminated, we lose also righteousness, sin, justice, mercy, sacrifice, atonement, redemption, and salvation, and so we lose any hope either of resurrection to heavenly bliss or of the bliss of nirvana: these concepts are unintelligible in the absence of an absolute moral order.
Notice then that all this makes it impossible for God – or any other spirit – to order anything: after all, they each confront a reality crammed with spirits who have no reason to defer to any other, or to harmonize their acts, so as to fall together into any sort of order. God then is a spirit jostling like all the others to get along as best he can in a chaotic state of affairs, and the concept of order per se has no meaning. There can then be no ordered relations among entities: no consequences, no meanings, thus no decisions, no acts.
The impossibility of ordered action is the impossibility of freedom. It also prevents worlds as such.
Finally, if all spirits are gods, and cannot do wrong, and God is not essentially – i.e., categorically – different from or therefore superior to them, they can have no essential, categorical obligation – nor, even, any reason – to obey, emulate, seek, love, honor, magnify, glorify, join, or worship him. This destroys the category of the holy, ergo likewise the category of religion.
So much for the sequelae of the notion that all spirits are eternal. How then is it incoherent in its own terms?
The nature of that incoherence depends on how we construe the eternity of spirits. If they are eternal strictly speaking, time has no pertinence to or meaning for them. Rather, their lives consist each of a single now, a singular occasion of infinite duration. In that case, change and time, history and drama, learning and development are all meaningless concepts: all things rather are determined. The spirits, each individually and taken together, are motionless. Nothing happens.
If on the other hand by calling spirits eternal we mean to say that their lives consist of a temporal sequence of finite discrete moments of experience and action that stretches from infinitely far back in the past to infinitely far in the future, we run into the Kalam argument: there is no way by a series of finite steps to finish traversing the infinite sequence that stretches without beginning from infinitely far in the past to this or to any other present moment.
Thus while there is no logical difficulty with sempiternal lives – lives that begin and have no end, so that they are everlasting – there is a fundamental problem with lives that never began: if they never began, they never finished anything at all, never completed any single moment of experience or action. A series of finite acts that is without beginning turns out at all times never yet to have been.
What does the character of our experience tell us about either of these alternative ways of construing “eternal”? Phenomenologically, it does not seem to us that our lives consist entirely of a single moment. Rather, our lives are different from each moment to every next; one thing happens, and then another, and then another. Nor can we remember (although we can imagine) anything that happened infinitely long ago. Indeed, we cannot remember even being born. But we can remember beginning to remember: we have first memories. So, we can remember beginning.
The character of our experience indicates that we are neither eternal in the strict sense, nor are our lives temporal sequences without beginning.
I conclude that we are temporal creatures who began a while ago to live; whereas before we began to live, our lives were mere potentialities. And this rescues the whole panoply of morality, religion, and theology from logical vacuity, for it renders talk of God’s ultimacy and thus his authority intelligible. This enables us to see how, even though we can see that we cannot hope to understand him as he understands himself, it makes sense when he says:
@Kristor – You need, sooner or later, to understand you are ‘up-against’ a different, but broadly-coherent, set of metaphysical assumptions!
(No metaphysical system is *fully* coherent, because it must be a simplified model of reality. This is the same reason that all scientific theories are ultimately wrong. Or Godel’s thing in mathematics. The partial can never capture the whole.)
At some point; you need to try and understand what I am saying *in its own terms*. It is pretty simple, almost literal minded and based on a child’s innate understandings; but not easy to grasp – because it entails (at least temporarily) setting-aside one’s acquired and habitual assumptions — which may be unconscious and are usually taken for granted as necessarily-true.
Only then could we have a metaphysical discussion.
I get your point, but it misses the target. A metaphysics broadly like your own was the first sort that appealed to me when I began seriously reading philosophy. It seemed to me then for example quite clear that God is temporal, like us; that he changes, as we do, and that our creation is of the same sort as his – or, rather, that his is the same sort as ours. I was quite content with Process Theology. So, I have comfortably inhabited a metaphysical perspective very like your own.
The problem was that it didn’t fit with scripture, tradition, orthodox theology, mystical literature, or my own mystical experiences. So, I kept reading. My take on Process Theology now is that it wants and tries to understand God under the same terms that we use to think about ourselves: it seems to me now anthropomorphism on steroids.
Learning how to think like Whitehead had been hard. But I did it, and found that it worked well as a way of understanding our world (in particular, it accommodates QM with no difficulty). Still I kept reading. Aristotle, Aquinas, and Anselm were *much* harder than Whitehead, although my study of his work had prepared me well for them. So that, among other things, I at last understood them, and saw that Whitehead had, too; so much so, indeed, that I could see how Whitehead *agreed* with them about God. Not many Whiteheadians see that, but I did: as the primordial actual occasion, and unlike all other actualities, God is eternal. The Very First Thing, that is the basis of all others, cannot be with them in the world, but must rather *just be* their world. Acts 17:28. Likewise, the singularity is not a part of our world: rather, it *just is* our world. We are in the midst of it, right now.
It is quite clear to me, from any and every jot of introspection, that I am not eternal. I change all the time; I am temporal. If you feel that you are eternal, well then, all I can say is that you are not a man such as I. Either that, or you are using “eternal” inaccurately.
Anyway, it just won’t do to suggest that I must try to think as you do about metaphysics before we can talk about metaphysics, because I thought – and read, and studied, hard, and deeply – as you do about metaphysics *for years.*
I’ve explained the profound difficulties entailed by the notion that all beings are eternal. It’s no good to say in response only that I don’t understand the metaphysical system under question. In the first place, I do understand it. If I don’t, then *how* have I misunderstood it? If I do, then where is the defect in my arguments? If there is no such defect, then what is the right thing to do about those difficulties?
With all due respect, you have completely dodged these questions. Not that you labor under any obligation to do otherwise; apart from your duty of loyalty to Truth, that is.
Re Gödel: it is critical to recall that he showed, not that all metaphysical systems are incoherent, but rather that all coherent logical calculi are *incomplete.* Coherent logical calculi can be quite accurate and useful, so far as they go; we just need to avoid the error of thinking they can go all the way (just as we must all in the end humbly, with Saint Thomas, and at the furthest extent of our understanding of the Ultimate, ascend to apophatic ecstasy; or else, lapse into idolatrous slavery to our own ideas).
A coherent logical calculus is like an airplane that must sooner or later run out of gas, so that it has a limited range. Incoherent logical calculi, on the other hand, can never even get off the ground.
@Kristor
I ‘dodged the questions’ because I found that I was covering ground we have already covered before, on more than one occasion – I was, in a sense, trying to rewrite 100s of 1000s of words of my blog, written over the past decade – condensed into the form of a blog comment!
You are misled by trying to fit my metaphysics into that which you already know – and you won’t believe me when I say it is qualitatively different – being derived from different traditions of philosophy. It just confuses you. Yes there are similarities, but so what when there are fundamental distinctions?
The nearest official philosopher is William James, who highlighted the qualitative and most-profound differentness of pluralism to all other philosophy – but who didn’t take this very far. WJ was preceded by Joseph Smith – as James himself acknowledged.
Pluralism explains everything differently; because reality is envisaged differently. I’ll take one brief example. I don’t have the same basic categories and concepts as you, so there is no analogous problem or explanation.
Something somewhat related is explained for me by the fact that God is the *primary* creator, who created that which has purpose and is meaningful and which we inhabit. This is the sense in which there is One God. We (and all beings) are confronted with a choice between joining with that creation, adding our creativity to it (from the motivation of love); or else not.
What we call evil are the Beings who oppose God’s creation, who aim to exploit and (ultimately, when more advanced in evil) to destroy it.
Heaven was created, by the work of Jesus Christ, in order that this now cannot happen.
And so on…
Now the above is partial and abbreviated, and can easily be ‘demolished’ using categories and concepts I do not accept – but on the other hand, it is supported by the Cs & Cs I do choose to accept.
This is the root of our disagreement. I *know* that the metaphysical assumptions which explain Christianity are a choice – and that they are not dictated by ‘logic’. Ultimately, once we become aware of the choice, we each must make a choice. Those who are motivated by love will probably choose Heaven – although no-one can with certainly predict the choice until after an eternal commitment is made (Jesus also made possible that eternal commitment to live by love).
Whereas you believe (wrongly!) that there is only one coherent metaphysics for Christianity – which is the one that you espouse. My concern is that you believe this on mistaken grounds, which is that you are unwilling or unable (or whatever) to acknowledge the coherence of any alternative metaphysics.
This probably does not matter from Your point of view; but it may matter for those who cannot believe that your metaphysics is true – and infer that if they then think that yours is the only way of being a Christian – then they will (out of honesty) not be a Christian.
I think there are many ways of being a Christian; in fact I *know* this! – because I know that God is the creator and Good and loves his children.
Such a God would (obviously!) not make this world such that there was only one very restricted, localized, complex, abstract and (to many) implausible/ wrongly-emphasized, group-ish path to salvation.
Such a God would (obviously!) be able to arrange things in this world such that even an isolated individual living in a corrupt and evil society, and without any valid Christian organization of any kind, would have a path to salvation if he were capable of making that choice – ie. if he were capable of, and chose to live by, love – and thus to follow Jesus.
He would be provided with the necessary guidance (from whatever source, including the Holy Ghost) to attain whatever knowledge he needed.
But it would still be the choice of each man.
God has not made getting to heaven difficult. A child can understand how to do it. The teaching is simple. There are only 2 steps: love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbour as you love yourself. Everything hangs on those 2 principles; everything else of religion is a support of their consistent enaction. As you say, it all boils down to love.
But that getting to heaven is in principle easy does not entail that things – heaven, love, God – are going to be easy to understand. The world is hard to understand.
Still we want to understand it, not just because doing so improves life in practical terms, but because understanding is beautiful. We have to work at understanding, just as we must work at learning how to enjoy the beauty of playing the violin well. To understand anything, we must first be able to think coherently: must be able to assemble ideas in a consistent system of notions or propositions, which can then in principle specify (in greater or lesser detail) a coherent system of actually compossible entities. An incoherent understanding is not an understanding really, but rather only speciously.
Thus the Principle of Noncontradiction [PN] is a basic forecondition & prerequisite of thought per se; also, therefore, of fact.
If contradictory propositions can be true, then anything can be true, and concepts need not agree to be compatible, or compossibly actualized. Then actualities likewise need not agree; there need be no order to things; indeed, there can in that case be no order to things: no worlds, nor any parts thereof. Rather, there can in that case be only the Democritean chaos. Any appearance of order in that case would be specious: mere happenstance.
If we are to make any sense then, or to be intelligible, or to be understood, or to understand, or to know, or to think, we must adhere to the PN; likewise then to enact any concept, any notion, or to express any form or proposition in actual fact, we must adhere to the PN. Our thoughts and our acts must all agree. Contradictions cannot be carried into practice (this is why all moderns are forced to unprincipled exceptions so as to go on living).
Now then, in this thread you have said two contradictory things. You have said that beings can all create beings that can create beings – that, as you put it, beings can all really create – because they are all gods, and coeternal with God. On the other hand, you have said that all beings are eternal; so, they cannot be brought into being by any agency, since they exist from all eternity. If beings are all eternal, then none of them can be created; so that no being can really create. I.e., no being can be a god. So, no being can be primary creator: there can be no God.
You can’t have it both ways without violating the PN, thereby rejecting reason per se, and being to boot.
In short, “all Beings are eternal” and “all Beings can create Beings” are contradictory, for the simple reason that an eternal thing cannot be a created thing.
Which is it then? Are all beings eternal, or can they all really create beings that, being created, are not eternal – so that not all beings are eternal? If the former, then no beings can really create, including God – so that no beings are divine: such is a sort of atheism. If the latter, then some beings must be creatures; in which case, there can be at least one creator.
In which case, you can be a Christian. Or, even a theist. Otherwise, not.
I know that you are a theist, and a Christian. So …