Creation is God Playing

by Tom Belt

If I were to try to express my understanding of God’s creative act, I’d use this picture.

What play gives us that ordinary talk of “choice” doesn’t is an activity that can be simultaneously spontaneous and expressive of what one is. The child doesn’t stand before the bubbles calculating, analyzing, or deliberating. Must I blow this bubble rather than that one? Must I play this game? Or none at all?

Play is interesting because it isn’t normally undertaken to address deficiencies or achieve some externally imposed end, or even an internal constraint or disposition to some inevitable exercise. The child isn’t blowing bubbles because she needs bubbles. She’s expressing an abundance of life. Creation conceived as divine play would therefore be neither arbitrary manufacture nor necessitated production. It is the gratuitous expression of plenitude.

Many of us have used the phrase ‘gratuitous expression’ but then we collapse immediately into the familiar ‘necessity/contingency’ modes. Let’ s try not to do that here. The distinction between “I must do this” and “I might just as well not do this” become inadequate. Imagine asking the delighted child: “Was blowing bubbles necessary or contingent?” The question misses the phenomenon. Its spontaneity is precisely what makes it hers.

Now, Hart dislikes spontaneity when it comes to this question. He doesn’t want creation to be arbitrary, which is, I take it, what he thinks any choice between equally good alternatives would have to be. After all, if A and B are equally good (equally ‘fitting’ or ‘proper’) and nothing in the Good inclines toward A rather than B, then choosing A is sheer voluntarism. The will simply chooses (without logically antecedent explanation, and no principle of sufficient reason). Hence the resistance to counterfactual accounts of God’s creating (or of anything God does). Creation is good. But non-creation would have been equally good? God simply choses to create? For some, that “simply chooses” threatens to become arbitrary.

But perhaps we’re assuming too quickly that the only alternatives are: necessitated act or arbitrary act.

But play seems to scramble the alternatives. It is not a choice between competing goods. Nor is it instrumental action ordered toward obtaining some good the agent lacks. It is goodness expressing itself gratuitously. The child blows bubbles neither because bubbles are needed nor because she has conducted a comparative valuation in which “blow bubbles” defeats “don’t blow bubbles.”

Play suggests a third category: spontaneous self-expression.

That might give us a category for saying that God’s determination to create is neither a deliberative selection from a menu of possible worlds nor a kind of involuntary metaphysical emanation. Creation is the free spontaneity of divine plenitude.

I’m suggesting that the question Was God’s determination to create necessary or contingent? may itself impose a modal distinction that simply doesn’t apply to divine agency, and that play may be a means of extricating the divine act of creating from both ‘necessity’ and ‘contingency’. In other words, perhaps it’s not that God’s determination to create is either necessary or contingent, nor is it the transcendent combination of the two beyond the veil of human comprehension (Hart), but rather it is neither. The toolbox terms ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’ are getting in the way. God’s determination isn’t one or the other, nor is it both. It is instead neither.

Play is suggestive because when someone plays freely and spontaneously, our asking whether the play was ‘necessary’ or ‘contingent’ seems strangely external to the act. It can entirely miss the nature of play. ‘Necessary’ makes it sound entailed by antecedent nature or what have you, while ‘contingent’ makes it sound as though the agent stood before play / don’t play as equally available alternatives and selected one. But play qua play isn’t well described by either. It arises freely from the player without being necessitated by the player’s nature or elected against an equally good counterfactual alternative. And don’t make the mistake of thinking my account of play is “incomplete” because it “leaves out” the questions of necessity and contingency. Why should that be? Why can’t an adequate explanation be had without either term?

I’d put the thought something like this:

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.

Perhaps the mistake is assuming that “not necessary” entails “contingent.” In ordinary modal logic, of course, that’s precisely how the terms are defined. So my proposal is that the modal apparatus itself (necessary/contingent or could-have/could-have-not) is illegitimately applied to divine determinations. Play is interesting not as an answer within that modal framework, but as an image for why the framework is inadequate.

The little girl isn’t standing metaphysically behind her play, deciding whether to become a player. She plays. And yet “therefore she must play” is every bit as wrong as reducing the event to an arbitrary selection between play and not-play.

Raises your glasses with me. Here’s to the mystery!