Historical events almost never come about solely through the actions of one person. At the beginning of WW1, the proximate trigger for the war appeared to have been the assignation of the heir to Austria-Hungry. At the end of WW1, if you had of asked the allies what caused the war many would have said that it was the Germans greed for power. But historical hindsight has exposed a plethora of contributing factors such as the arms race, imperialistic foreign policies, political agendas and superiority complexes (some scientists have even suggested the selfish gene theory as an underlying factor of conflict and racism). Causality is often irreducibly complex: removing any one of an event’s contributing factors would have stopped the event from happening. Just think of how many things had to happen for you to have been born, if any one of the events that led to your parents (or their parents) meeting each other had not have happened then you wouldn’t exist.
And yet when it comes to the contributing factors of human decisions, people often demand that we put causality down to the will of a single person. To a degree, this is necessary so that we can hold people responsible for their actions, but every decision is influenced by an uncountable number of factors and influences, some from our genetic makeup (nature), and some from our past experience (nurture). Some philosophers press this point too far and conclude that people are basically robots who can only do what our nature and nurture has programmed us to do, denying the unpredictable human factor of conscious decisions. Others however swing too far the other way in reducing causality to the choices of one, often in order to have someone to blame or reward.
The bible introduces another agent of causality, namely God. In the bible God is consistently referred to as the sovereign Lord. He is the ultimate cause of everything in the sense that if he had not of created the universe nothing would ever have happened, ever. God began and is sovereign over human history, nothing happens outside of his sovereign control; “who resists his will?” (Romans 9:19). God does however, stand behind good and evil asymmetrically; goodness comes from the hand of God (Gen 1:31, 1 Tim 4:4), evil from the desires of our hearts (Matthew 15:18-19 // Mark 7:21-22, James 1:15). When it comes to sin and evil, God allows what he hates in order to achieve what he loves. Thomas Aquinas described God as the first cause (or the uncaused cause). Human decisions cannot be viewed as being made behind God’s back as if he is completely removed from them. We cannot draw a dichotomy between God’s will and our will as if it’s one or the other. If God is truly sovereign then his sovereign will is achieved through human will, not despite human will.
The transcendency of God’s sovereign will is often a stumbling block for Christians. We would much prefer to reduce causality to human decision, but this is an over simplification. Consider the causality of rain, as our knowledge of weather patterns has increased we have been able to understand more and more of the natural processes that cause it to rain. Water evaporates from an ocean or lake, the sun heats up the air over the land causing it to rise, the cooler air containing water vapour rushes in to take its place, and when these clouds gather and cool down the water condensates into rain drops and gravity pulls it down to us as rain. However, Christians don’t see this as in any way detracting from the fact that God sends the rain (Matt 5:45). God’s sovereign will transcends the processes that we observe on earth, whether they are scientific processes controlling the weather, or the processes of human will controlling our decisions.
Consider also what people describe as random chance. If God is sovereign over all things, then everything that we perceive as random or chance or luck is under God’s sovereign control. “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord” (Prov 16:33). A dice roll is about as random as you can get, and most Christians don’t have any qualms with God controlling dice. But even without considering the sovereignty of God, it isn’t too difficult to see that “chance” and “luck” have nothing to do with determining the roll of the dice. It all depends on the height from which the dice is thrown, its three dimensional angular velocity (spin), and the surface on which it bounces. If these values are known then the roll of the dice can by predicted by mathematical equations (fairly quickly using computers). To make it easier to visualise, think about tossing a coin, most people consider a coin toss to be random but if you knew its vertical speed then you can calculate its time in the air, if you also knew how quickly the coin was spinning then it’s not too difficult to calculate whether it will be heads or tails (time in the air × speed the coin is spinning = number of spins). When the math gets too complicated (like the three dimensional angular velocity of the dice, and then subsequent trajectories as it bounces on the surface), we call it “chance”. I submit that “chance” and “luck” are terms we use when we don’t know the cause; they are not causes in and of themselves.
Causality is often irreducibly complex, whether we are talking about dice or rain or people. To a certain degree we can often explain the causality of each in terms of natural causes and/or human causes, but God’s sovereign will transcends them all. Being able to explain how things happen scientifically doesn’t undermine why they happen theologically. God is the uncaused cause who is not affected or influenced by anything except his own character. Nothing happens outside of his sovereign will, God’s sovereignty transcends the sovereignty human decisions just as it transcends the decisions of the lot and the weather. God doesn’t need to work against his creation to bring about his sovereign plan, God works in and through his creation to liberate it from its bondage to decay and bring it into the glorious freedom of the children of God (Rom 8:21).
