Month: July 2026

Tom Carroll comments:

Moments ago I imagined a red sailboat. Now that imagined sailboat is blue. Immaterial things change constantly, rapidly, ceaselessly. So there *must* be a principle of change operating at the immaterial level. Potency — understood as the principle of change — must apply beyond the matter/form of the mundane world.

In an earlier comment, Tom had written,

[Gavin] Kerr says, “In bringing the potentially existing essence into existence, esse is not received in some distinct pre-existing essence bringing about a change therein, but actuates the essence whole and complete… [W]hen God creates, He brings into existence the essence-esse composite all at once.”

The earlier comment got me thinking about whether it makes sense to apply the potency-act distinction, which first surfaces in Greek philosophy in an attempt to understand change in the material world, to the problem of divine creation, given that creating, though not a material process, has as one of its products the material world of space, time, and change.   In classical theism, the main representative of which I take to be Thomas Aquinas, divine creation is creatio ex nihilo, not ex possibilitate.  Accordingly, God creates out of nothing, not out of mere possibles.

Although Kerr is surely right that on classical theism God does not create out of mere possibles, he seems to hold, in line with traditional doctrine, that divine creating is an actuating of potencies.  This raises the question of the difference between the actuating of mere possibles and the actuating of potencies, which in turn raises the question of the difference between mere possibles and potencies.  It occurred to me that this might involve an illicit metabasis eis allo genos, which is something like a Rylean category mistake, where a term is transferred from a sphere where it belongs to a sphere where it doesn’t belong.  Can we legitimately speak of change, i.e., the conversion of potency  into act, with respect to a spiritual (and thus immaterial) process such as divine creating?  Again, the creating of a material world is not a material process.

The problem assumes an even sharper form when we consider that God creates not only  material things, but also immaterial spirits.  He creates angels  — which in their ‘natural and proper state’ are unembodied — and he creates human beings — which in their ‘natural and proper state’ are embodied, but possibly such as to exist in a disembodied state between death and resurrection.

Angels are contingent beings, which is why they need creating.  Now if the creating of an angel is the actuating of a potency, and not the actuating of a pre-existent essence (a mere possible),  what and ‘where’ is the potency which, when actuated, becomes the angel Gabriel, say, or for that matter, the angel Lucifer, the light-bearer?  Don’t potencies need to be grounded in something actual?  And what might that be in the case of angels? Closer to the ground, what might that be in the case of material things?  If there are no ‘free-floating’ mere possibles, then how could there be ‘free-floating’ unactuated potencies?  Are we forced to say that these potencies are grounded in God? But then we are drifting toward the heretical view that divine creation is creatio ex Deo.

The orthodox — miniscule ‘o’ — position is creatio ex nihilo.  It aims to avoid three competing views: creatio ex Deo; demiurgic creation out of a pre-existent uncreated stuff; creatio ex possibilitate.

This is all  very tricky, but to a guy like me unutterably fascinating.  It lurks in the background of my conversation with Tom.  I will now address Tom’s first comment above. He is attempting to refute my suggestion (not a dogmatic pronunciamento — that the potency-act distinction is legitimately deployed only in the analysis of change in the material world and thus not in the analysis of divine creating which, again, is not a material process like the calcification of the aortic valve.

RESPONSE TO TOM CARROLL

First of all, is a boat an immaterial thing?  No, a boat, whether merely imagined or real, is a material thing.  I of course grant that there are immaterial things.  But a boat is not one of them. A merely imagined boat is not an immaterial thing, but a nonexistent material thing.  I do not grant that to exist is to be material. And so I do not grant that not to exist is to be immaterial.

Second, how does Tom know that the blue boat he imagines at time t* (t*> t) is numerically the same as the boat he imagined at t?  Suppose Tom owns a red boat, which he then paints blue.  In this case we naturally say that numerically one and the same boat that was red is now blue. A scholastic would call this a case of accidental (as opposed to substantial) change. I call it diachronic alterational change and distinguish it from diachronic existential change, as when a thing first comes into existence and then later passes out of existence. That too is change, but surely not an accidental or alterational change.  Before a thing comes to exist it is not there to undergo a change, and the same holds after it ceases to exist. On either end there is no substrate of alteration. No substrate, no alteration of a substrate.

But in the case of the merely imagined red boat and the merely imagined blue boat, the natural thing to say is that the two boats are numerically distinct. They are numerically distinct merely intentional objects. They are numerically distinct because they differ property-wise: one is red while the other is blue (and therefore not red).  I am assuming the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived. Roughly formulated, it states that if x = y, then x, y share all properties.  Contrapositively, if x, y are such that x has a property that y lacks, or vice versa, then it is not the case that x = y. Call it the Discernibility of the Diverse. The two principles are logically equivalent. And note that despite the traditional terminology, eith its epistemic flavor, neither are epistemological principles.  Both are ontological.

I am making the following points against Tom. First, merely imagined material things are not immaterial but nonexistent. Second, there is no reason to think that a merely imagined red boat is numerically the same as a merely imagined blue boat, even if all the non-color properties of the boats are imagined to be the same. Third, no alteration of one and the same item has taken place in his example. Fourth, the view that alterational change is the conversion of potency into act is just one theory of such change among others and cannot just be assumed but must be argued for.  Fifth, the very notion of potency is unclear especially if thought to float free of an actual item in which it is grounded.