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Is the Notion of a Divine Basic Act a Necessary and Sufficient Way of Talking about God's Actions in the World?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Affiliation:
Department of Religion, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 06106-3100
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Extract

It has seemed to a number of recent scholars that God's acts in the world must have the fundamental character of being ‘basic acts’. Grace Jantzen has argued that ‘a theist wants to say that all of God's actions in the world are direct and basic…he does everything directly, without intervening apparatus…God can perform any physical action, and any such action on God's part is direct, basic’. Robert Ellis has claimed that ‘if we limit “basic” action to action upon/within one's body then God's immediate action upon the physical universe may qualify under such a description whether or not one holds to a view of the world as the body of God [a view endorsed by Jantzen] … All God's actions would [therefore] seem to be “basic”. And William P. Alston has suggested that ‘it is a live possibility that all God's actions are basic’. The question to be addressed is what theological and/or philosophical reasons can be advanced to make the case for regarding all divine action as basic? Would there be any significant diminution in affirming divine power if most or many of God's actions were non-basic?

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 181 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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2 Ellis, Robert, ‘The Vulnerability of Action’, Religious Studies, xxv (1989), 232.Google Scholar

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10 Alston, op. cit., 59. This is consistent with Goldman's claim that a basic act, while necessarily intentional and while causally dependent on certain processes, does not require the agent to know about these processes in order to exemplify the act ‘at will’ (Goldman, op. cit. p. 69).

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18 Alston, Ibid. pp. 61–2.

19 Ibid. p. 62.

20 Ibid. p. 61.

21 Goldman, op. cit. pp. 88–9.

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