Friday 19 October 2018

Can God Make a Picasso?

That God ultimately produced everything besides himself mediaeval philosophers had no doubt. But precisely what this creative act amounts to, whether and in what way it is ongoing, and how divine production relates to, say, human production—all these were important open questions. The title of this article is meant to focus our attention on one of the most interesting of these open questions, as it was discussed by Oxford philosophers Walter Chatton (d. 1343) and William Ockham (d. 1347). For while Chatton and Ockham would certainly have agreed that God is ultimately responsible for the existence of the works of Pablo Picasso (and indeed Picasso himself), they would not have agreed in precise detail about how to answer the question I intend in my title, that is: Does it violate God’s omnipotence to say that he cannot make something that Picasso made—for example, the painting Guernica—without using Picasso himself as an intermediate cause?

Rondo Keele. "Can God Make a Picasso? William Ockham and Walter Chatton on Divine Power and Real Relations". http://muse.jhu.edu/article/218279/pdf.

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