“boundary between the created and the uncreated.
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“With every advance in our thought the unity of the creative act and the impossibility of tinkering with the creation as though this or that element in it could have been removed will become more apparent. Perhaps this is not the “best of all possible” universes but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean only ‘worlds which God could have made but didn’t’. The idea of that which God ‘could have’ done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than himself produces his acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that his own goodness is the root from which they all grow and his own omnipotence the air in which they may all flower.
“God’s creation is not necessary, because nothing, not even a metaphysical mechanism internal to God’s nature, necessitates it. But neither is it contingent in the sense that God confronts “Create” and “Don’t create” as alternative possibilities to deliberate or resolve upon. Creation is divine play: the spontaneous, gratuitous act of infinite goodness whose freedom consists neither in necessity nor in counterfactual choice, nor in any transcendent recipe comprising their combination. It is a metaphysical surprise and joy, unpredictable given everything God is, and yet perfectly expressive of who he is.
“The creative act is a necessary act because it results from the nature of a cause which needs must act, and it is free, for it proceeds from the proper, independent, primitive spontaneity of a cause which acts by itself, which determines itself, so that its determination, though necessary, is nevertheless its own, and is not under any influence from without.
