Theism and Creatures Accidentally Created

This passage is the second strangest thing I've ever read from Plantinga.

When I think about the debates about the compatibility of evolution with theism, I thought a standard line, if not the standard line, was that the theist can say that while we evolved the evolutionary process is guided. Of course, that suggests a picture on which a chain of events (perhaps one that is exceptionally unlikely to have occurred with an intentional agent setting up the conditions just right or intervening now and again) led to our existence. These natural events are the proximate cause. Divine agency is a distal cause. I don't see how Plantinga's view is consistent with this picture. It seems that on this view, divine agency cannot be some mere distal cause, for if the proximate cause were to occur and that cause could be constituted by purely natural elements, there would be nothing to rule out the possibility of a swampman.

Clayton:

I had always understood the "Standard" line in the same way that you do, and, like you, I am not sure that Plantinga's position is consistent with it.
I guess I don't understand why Plantinga would want to press the idea that God can't be "just" the distal cause of the universe, since insisting that God proximally causes everything to be as it is cuts off some very good solutions to the problem of evil, and, even if God is "only" the distal cause of all that there is, would we not have reason to love God nonetheless?

Andrew, it's an interesting question.

I think it is fair to assume that nothing happens without God's permission (even if he permits things he does not approve). I also think there is good reason to suppose that God would not permit a rational being to come into existence that had no possibility of participating in the ultimate goal of creation, that had no possibility of either sinless existence or redemption. In other words, although creatures are not perfect, there are certain things that would constitute design flaws so great that God should not permit them.

If one is looking for reasons within the Christian tradition to hold this view, I would focus on the doctrine of creation. God is the creator of everything, and this means that everything has some role to play within God's plan, even if rational beings are also given the option of resisting God's will. God would not allow a being to come into existence who is not at home in his creation. To spell it out a bit further, God has a plan for his creation, and for every rational being, x, that is part of God's creation, God has a plan for x. Furthermore, God would not permit the existence of a rational being, y, such that God has no plan for y.

This line of thought leads to the same conclusion as Plantinga: God would not allow a being to pop into existence unintended.

Incidentally, the works of Tolkien are relevant to this issue. As many readers will know, Tolkien speculated a lot about sub-creation, whereby humans are allowed to participate in God's creative process. In 'Leaf By Niggle', the painter Niggle encounters, in Heaven, the tree that he spent his life trying to paint - not because the tree was there all along, but because God chose to give life to Niggle's creation. When you write about Theodore, do you have Aule's creation of dwarves in mind (in The Silmarillion?)

Andrew, thanks for the background about Theodore: certainly analogous to dwarves in The Silmarillion.

As to whether there can be a creature that isn't designed by God, I think that, for any creature, God has a plan for that creature, the plan is prior to the existence of the creature, and the creature cannot have a design flaw that makes the plan for that creature impossible (although perhaps the creature chooses to reject the plan).

Let me take the analogy with Honda a stage further. The CEO of Honda plans to make environmentally-friendly cars. He asks the designer to design a car that will be very fuel-efficient. The designer does so. However, the designer overlooks the fact that it will take a huge amount of energy to produce the special alloy from which the car's engine is made. Producing the car will undermine the CEO's plan. The CEO of Honda might not realize this until it is too late, but God would be aware of such fundamental design flaws - flaws that undermine his plan for creation - and so refuse to allow production to proceed.

So, my thinking would be, God can certainly delegate features of design to creatures. There might be a creature such that many aspects of its being were the result of the free choice of another creature, and that other creature could be termed the 'designer'. However, the design would have taken place within parameters set by God, who has, so to speak, the final authority over the design of any creature.

I don't see why God's being a distal cause (if I understand what you mean by this term) of a being X at all implies that God didn't intend for X to exist or God didn't design X.

It doesn't. I took it that P's point was that there could not be creatures with beliefs and the capacities necessary for moral agency unless they were designed. In saying that there were evolutionary processes that led from creatures that lacked these capacities to creatures with these capacities, it does not follow that this didn't follow God's intended plan. The point is that if we substract the intention while keeping the naturalistic processes fixed, we get the same outcome. Or, so it seems. You can deny that swampman is a possibility, but that looks a lot like denying that there could have been processes of the sort just described that were part of the causal chain that sufficed to take us from earlier stages in evolutionary development to the present. That's to make God play a much more intimate role in the process than, say, just the first toppling domino.