“Samuel Rutherford and the Divine Origin of Possibility and Impossibility” in Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland.
- P1: God’s being is the first principle of all things (142-143).
- Which means, pace Aristotle, that the Law of Noncontradiction is not the first principle.
- The law of NC is complex, not simple: it involves both being and non-being.
- Possibilia: grounded in God’s omnipotence
- Rutherford’s specific claim is things are possible because God is omnipotent.
- Aristotle’s dictum: act precedes potency (144).
- Therefore, “the infinite active potency of God is prior to the passive and receptive potency of creatures” (Rutherford).
- Rutherford rejects the Jesuit argument that “the intrinsic possibility of things makes it possible for God’s omnipotence to create them” (144).
- This allows the Jesuits to claim middle knowledge: the possibility of things exist prior to God’s decreeing them.
- The impossible: when God creates the possible or actual essences of things, he in the same act creates the impossibilities between the nature of things.
- Impossibility in the created realm is always complex
- Future contingents
- Middle knowledge says that future contingents have a determinate truth prior to the decree of God (144).
- This is similar to the claim that possibilia are possible independently of God.
- Are possibilia real?
- As their name suggests, they are merely in potency, not actually existing.
- Christian faith incompatible with the idea of eternal essences that exist independently of God.
- God’s knowledge
- Scientia simplex intelligentiae: God knows which creature he could make in this or that order.
- Scientia libera: knowledge of ends and means.
- Practica scientia: knowledge by which God forms ideas of the possibilia and future things.
- Scientia speculativa:
- God’s will: by loving His omnipotence, God necessarily also loves the infinite possibilia within.
- Jesuit position, restated
- Jesuits locate the root of possibility and impossibility outside of God, in the things themselves (154).
- This means a future contingent is not grounded in God.
- Reformed response:
- A thing is possible because God is able to produce it., not God is able to produce it because it is possible.
- Since God’s being is prior, all possibilia must originate in God, not outside of God.