“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.
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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.
“I don’t find that thinkable. I can think of choosing only as a response in face of a state of affairs upon which the chooser is in a sense dependent. If God is described as choosing, this can mean for me only that he finds himself faced with ‘possibles’ soliciting his will and therefore in a certain respect acting upon him and so making him dependent on them. Besides, I thought it was good Thomism not to allow that there are relations in God to creatures, but only in creatures to God.
“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.
“I admit that this language of relations has its drawbacks. But you seem to suppose that, just because we cannot conceive of an act which combines freedom of choice with freedom from external solicitation, we cannot allow that God’s act of creation is of this kind. You are dragging God down to your own level.
“I don’t see that. Cousin’s doctrine as given by Fr Boedder seems to me not only intelligible but inevitable. He is saying, surely, that without the act of creation God would not be God, because (as all agree) he is his acts. It is meaningless, then, to envisage the possibility that there could have been no such act. And it does not even begin to follow that the term of God’s Act, ‘creation’ in the sense of the created universe, adds anything to God. It is a commonplace in this connexion that you cannot add chalk to cheese. Lewis is not suggesting that God and his creatures add up, when he rejects the use of the conditional mood in statements which have God as their subject. Indeed, I find it hard to see how the transcendence, the immutability, of God, is to be safeguarded on any other showing.
“Against these assertions we maintain that God has created only because He freely willed the existence of creatures, being equally free not to will had He pleased.
“I thought you would say that. You will agree that it is often not so much what is said in a condemned proposition as why it is said that is the reason for the condemnation. But before we discuss that, I wish you would explain to me the metaphysical principles on which you base your own position. For I suppose you don’t just take the answer ‘on Faith’. Let me say at once that I don’t find the ‘necessity of creation’ in Lewis, if by this we mean that the created universe contains within it the reason for its own existence. That is plainly a contradiction, for God is that reason.