corruption from creation and annihilation. Reserve the term “creation” for the bringing of
things into existence out of nothing. Then the term for the action opposite to creation is
not “destruction” or “corruption” but “annihilation,” the returning of a thing to nonbeing.
It is easy enough to destroy a bicycle—by hydraulic press, oxyacetylene torch, or teenage
children. These are familiar types of corruption. To annihilate a bicycle, in contrast,
would entail the elimination, not just the transformation, of a certain amount of the
universe's mass/energy. Just as no natural agent can build the bicycle out of nothing, so
no natural agent can annihilate it.
The second maneuver is to insist that despite the apparent inviolability of the universe's
mass/energy, it has no inherent potentiality to continue to exist from one moment to the
next. This claim has sometimes been put forward as a consequence of the doctrine of
creation ex nihilo: anything having its origin in nonbeing will, left to its own devices,
collapse back immediately into nonbeing. Alternatively, the claim has sometimes been
defended by arguing that although the laws of nature along with the initial conditions of
things at an instant may entail (in a suitably deterministic universe) what will occur at a
future instant, since every instant of time is logically independent from every other
instant, the laws and initial conditions are insufficient to guarantee that the future instant
will exist. It is compatible with this claim that created things have the power to bring
about changes both in themselves and among other created things. What created things
cannot do, however, is continue to exist without God's ever-present conserving activity.
Proponents of the strategy maintain that God's conserving power is “equipollent” to
God's creative power. What they mean by this claim, at a minimum, is that it takes as
much divine activity to sustain the created world from one instant to the next as it did to
create it. Divine conservation is a kind of continuous creation (see Quinn 1983 for
details).
A protest to divine conservation is that whereas the deistic portrait places God too far in
the background, divine conservation makes God appear too near. In Greek mythology,
Atlas was required to support forever the heavens on his shoulders. Divine conservation
imposes a much more monumental burden on God: not just this firmament, but all of
creation; not just to keep one body from falling through space but to keep everything
from lapsing into nonbeing. Moreover, divine conservation appears to exacerbate the
problem of evil. For it would seem that God does not merely allow atrocities to occur; he
aids and abets the perpetrators by keeping them in existence throughout the commission
of their atrocities.
end p.39
One might cast about for some position that falls between the aloofness of deism and the
coziness of divine conservation. But it is hard to see what such a position could be, such
that it would not spawn even more serious problems of its own. Will the hypothetical
position maintain that only some things must be continually sustained by God? If so,
which ones? Why are the others privileged? And would not their privileged status
encroach on divine sovereignty? Or will the position claim that some creaturely functions
occur independently of God's sustaining activity? At first blush, this version holds more
promise. Some functions can outlast their hosts: if God were to snuff out the sun, its
function of irradiating my garden would persist thereafter for approximately eight