Franklin Mason e-mails (mid-June 2007):
I'd meant to get back to a little point you'd made a few days ago.
You said this: "I think of creation as an ongoing 'process': God sustains the world in being moment by moment. But at each moment, the totality of what exists is completely determinate: for each individual x and for each property P, either x has P or x has the complement of P. I would say that all and only the complete exists. Creation is bestowal of existence. So if at time t God is sustaining the world in existence, and what exists is complete, it is hard to see how God could add anything to it. The world at t is complete; anything added to it would precipitate a contradiction."
I agree with everything you say, but it doesn't seem to me to rule out the possibility of an input of new energy into space-time. It would of course be a contradiction if God were to both sustain the world at a time such that no new energy was anywhere present and, by a special act of will, bring it about at that time that there was new energy. But the creation of new energy at a time need not entail this contradiction. Rather, if there's new energy at time t, its existence is part of the complete world-whole at t; and God does not, at up to and at t, sustain the world-whole such that no new energy is present. Completeness does not imply a lack of novelty. Rather all that it implies is that novelty, when it occurs, is part of the world-whole at the time of its introduction and thereafter.
What Mason says in response to what I said is correct, but I didn't say enough. I will now set forth some theses that appeal to me but without explaining them in detail let alone defending them in detail. These theses taken together give me a principled reason to doubt the possibility of miracles ontically (as opposed to epistemically) construed.
T1. Necessarily, x exists iff x is complete. That is, nothing incomplete exists, where an incomplete item is one that violates the Law of Excluded Middle in its property form.
T2. Existence is not identical to completeness. The biconditional relation asserted by (T1) does not sanction the identification of existence with completeness. The contingent existence of the universe is not entailed by its completeness: there is need of a universe-transcendent ground of its existence.
T3. This transcendent ground of existence "all men call God," to cop a signature phrase from the doctor angelicus. But God is a cosmic sustainer, not an interferer. He acts upon the world as a whole 'vertically' if you will to maintain it in existence, but he does not insinuate himself 'horizontally' into its internal workings.
T4. If S is an instantaneous state of the universe U at time t, then the determinacy of S is determined by the states prior to t under the aegis of the laws of nature. The existence of S has a transcendent cause; but the 'nature' of S is determined, and thus necessitated, by the earlier states of U under the 'aegis' of the laws of nature. This implies that what happens just before t is sufficient for what happens at t. If this is right, then there is no conceptual room for divine interference. I quoted Kant to make this very point:
It is equally wrong to posit a concursum Dei for events given in nature. For we can always think of a causa proxima for these events, operating in accordance with laws of nature; since otherwise they would eo ipso not be events given in nature. So it is likewise unthinkable that God, who is the causa prima of the whole of nature, might also operate as a concausa in each particular event. For then these events would only be so many miracles. Every case where God himself acts immediately is an exception to the rule of nature. But if God is to cooperate as a special concausa of every particular event given in nature, then every event would be an exception to the laws of nature. Or rather there would be no order at all in nature, because events in it would not happen according to universal rules, but in each God would have to give a complementum ad sufficientiam to anything which was to be set up in accordance with his will. But we could not think of such an imperfect world united to a wise author. (Lectures on Philosophical Theology, p. 151.)
If Franklin wants to defend the possibility of miracles ontically construed, then it seems he must reject (T4). But I wonder if he is willing to reject (T4) and accept the consequences of the rejection.