c CUNYB/Clarke December, :
Descartes and Princess Elizabeth forthis deficiency was that the concepts that we use when talking about
God were invented originally to describe the mundane realities of every-
day experience, and they apply only by analogy (and with significant dis-
claimers) to God, who transcends human experience. For example, we
know what it means for one thing or event to cause another, because we
have experience of apparent causal connections in our day-to-day expo-
sure to natural phenomena. Even here, however, we have no guarantee
of perfect knowledge. Therefore, if we are bold enough to stretch the
meaning of the term ‘cause’ so that it applies to God’s actions, we can-
not conclude that the original causal connections in nature are redun-
dant or inefficacious, because that would undermine even the limited
use of the very concepts on which their analogical application to God
depends.
Descartes had argued the previous year, in thePrinciples of Philosophy,
that we have a direct experience within ourselves of causal activity when
wedecide to perform some action, such as walking, and then find that
weare walking as we had decided. He had no coherent account of how
God is the ultimate cause of everything and, at the same time, of how
human beings are the causes of their voluntary actions. In fact, there
were independent reasons to argue that God so transcends the limits of
human intelligence that we could never understand His free causality. The
solution recommended in thePrincipleswas to hold onto both claims – that
wemake free choices, and that God causes everything – while conceding
that we cannot understand how they are compatible. ‘It would be absurd
just because we do not understand one thing which, of its very nature, we
know should be incomprehensible to us, to doubt something else of which
wehave an intimate understanding and which we experience in ourselves’
(viii-.).
Something along those lines might have satisfied Elizabeth in reply to
her query. Instead, Descartes simply states that the same reasons that show
that God exists and is the immutable cause of all natural events also prove
that He is ‘the cause of all the effects that depend on human free will’.
Thus God is the cause of every event, free or otherwise, and ‘nothing can
occur without his will’ (iv.). This merely restated the problem, without
providing any resolution. Elizabeth was quick to point this out in her next
letter (October). She agreed that it was possible for God not to have
given human beings free will. But, having done so, ‘it seems to me to be
inconsistent with common sense to believe that free will depends on God,