It is pertinent to note that an important issue consequent on our ac-ceptance of God as Qse-bu-uwa is that of freedom and determinism.
If God has a knowing plan for all creatures and directs them to this end, does it mean that he has already determined His creatures to follow His plan? If so, how could any creatures be said to be free in their actions? In other words, if God's activity embraces the height, depth, and breadth of created reality, is there any place for a finite activity which belongs to the being from which it comes? Or is it God rather than man, in the case of human activity, who acts as the center of man's being?
While we cannot enter the debate between thinkers down the ages, it does not hurt to mention the highlights. Two extreme posi-tions can be identified on this: that of the deists who practically ex-clude God from the world; and that of the occasionalists who deprive man of all causal influence.
In the deist camp are people like Voltaire who profess to believe in God and accepts him as the cause of order but want to have enough room for human free will to operate.1 For him God should stay in heaven and leave the world to men and to natural forces. Also David Hume, even though he rejected the deists' proof for God's existence and denied a free will in man,2 he has a deistic notion of God. For him God is an omnipotent mind whose omnipotence is not wholly effective because reason which is founded on the nature of things, has a standard "external and inflexible even by the will of the Supreme Being.")
The modem scientific thought has followed this trend and at-tempted to banish God and freedom from the world. Thus as Alex-andre Koyre put it:
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164 APPENDIX TWO
Newton had a God who 'ran' the universe accordin8 to his free will and decision, (but) the Divine Artifex had ... less and less to do in the world. He did not even need to conserve it, as the world, more and more, became able to dispense with this service. Thus the mighty energetic God of Newton ... became in quick succession, a conservative power, an intelligentia supra-mundana, a “Dieu faineant" .•. The infinite Universe of the New Cosmology ... inherited all the ontological attributes of divinity.·
In brief the modem scientific thought suppressed the causality of God. Without going into any kind of discussion of this we simply note that this mentality militates against a knowledge of God-as Chi-na-eke who is actively present in all His creatures and whose presence means care and support for His creatures.
The occasionalists, for example, Malebranche and his Cartesian followers,5 eager to preserve the primacy of God, went to the other extreme and conceived God's infinite causality in such a way that they emptied finite being of all causal effectiveness. According to them, God does everything. When, for instance,' the teacher writing on the board moves the chalk it is actually God who moves it on the occasion of the teacher's willing to move it.
Both the deists and the occasionalists cannot give any satisfac- tory explanation of human freedom because both accept basic deter-minism either by God or by natural physical laws. In fact, with the expansion of modem science, it has become' even increasingly dif-ficult for philosophers to .find any place for human freedom. Ap-parently man has become a hostage in the evolution of the universe, bound by its laws as the solar system is bound by the laws of motion.
The picture of this attitude is well painted- by Manin Buber:
The quasi-biological and quasi-historical thought of today ... have worked together to establish a more tenacious and oppressive belief in fate than has ever before existed. The might of the stars no longer controls inevitably the lot of man, many powers claim mastery, but rightly considered most of our contemporaries believe in a mixture of them ... _ This is made easier by the nature of the claim. Whether it is the 'law of life' of a universal struggled in which all must take part or renounce life, or the 'law of the soul' which completely builds up the psychical person from innate habitual instincts, or the 'social law of an irresistible social process to which will and consciousness may only be accompaniments, or the 'cultural law' of an unchangeably uniform coming and going of histori·
Freedom and determinism 165
cal structures ... it always means that man is set in the frame of an inescapable happening that he cannot, or can only in his frenzy, resist.6
In reaction to the difficulty of placing human freedom many philosophers today can now admit a common-sense type of freedom without having to justify it metaphysically.
The fears expressed by some moral philosophers that the advance of the natural sciences diminishes the field within which the moral virtues can be exercised rests on the assumption that there is some contradiction in saying that one and the same occurrence is gov- erned both by mechanical laws and by moral principles.
* * *
Not only is there plenty of room for purpose where everything is governed by mechanical laws, but there would be no place for pur-pose if things were not so governed.7
Morris Ginsberg, writing in an ethical context has the same approach:
The freedom that is required as a minimum condition of moral ac-countability is the ability to make an impartial estimate of the rela-tive worth of the alternarela-tives open to me and of acting accordingly.
If I am not capable of any measure of impartiality, if I am unable to know what I am doing, or whether what I am doing is right or wrong; or again if having such knowledge I have not the emotional or cognitive energy to act in accordance with it, then I am neither free nor responsible.-
A clear solution to the problem of freedom can hardly be found.
However, there are two alternatives. The first is to reject the reality of freedom. Should we do this; then we have to join the determinists and say that there is no paradox of divine and human causality. The second alternative is to accept the reality of freedom and then attempt to solve the paradox. A possible way of solving the paradox is to demonstrate that the affirmation of both divine and human causality is not a contradiction.
If; as we have shown; God is Chukwu, the Absolute Being; and He is Chineke, the source of all being; He is also the cause of all things. No explanation of anything in finite reality whatever can come outside of; or in spite of; the creative and providential causal·
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ity of the Absolute Being. All causality and free activity can only be understood because of divine causality and never in spite of it.
We can therefore say that the relationship between divine cau-sality and human freedom is that of cause and effect. Finite beings do actually exist. That means that they receive existence as their own and exist in themselves. If so, they should also receive activity as their own and act in themselves.
If he has communicated his likeness, as far as actual being is con·
cerned, to other things, by virtue of the fact that He has brought things into being, it follows that He has communicated to them His likeness, as far as acting is concerned, so that created things may also have their own actions.9
The key to the solution, one would say, is to realize that within the primary causality of God there can be secondary causality. The Absolute Being who is infinitely fruitful can, as Chi-na-eke in the power of His effective activity, create beings that are in turn produc-tive. If, as Chi-ukwu, God has a power that is really unlimited, then it is not unreasonable to conclude that He can not only cause activities but also cause free activities regardless of how paradoxical they may appear to our limited minds.
With this brief consideration we may end by saying that the divine causality and human freedom are not contradictory to one another but meet in a paradox of cause and effect. This paradox is well explained in the words of Martin Buber:
Destiny and freedom are solemnly promised to one another. Only the man who makes freedom real to himself meets destiny ... des-tiny confronts him as the counterpart of his freedom. It is not his boundary, but his fulfillment; freedom and destiny are linked to·
gether in meaning.10
And Soren Kierkegaard11 locates the mystery of freedom in God's omnipotence by saying that the greatest act that can be performed by any being, greater even than any end to which it can be created, is to make it free. To be able to do that omnipotence is necessary.