For Aquinas, for example (in the words of one of his best modern interpreters, Timothy McDermott) God is "the one whose doing the world's being is. For his doing is not something we can identify over and above the world's being, it is the world's being as done. [Hence] Thomas's accounts of God's agency in regard to chance and free will, and in regard to evil, and the notion that he is not at work in the world side by side with nature but as the cause of nature's own natural activity" (which science investigates). --CGE
Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> "C. G. Estabrook" wrote:
>> Good, because theism is a metaphysical (that is to say philosophic)
>> conclusion. It is the unknown answer to the question that the universe
>> by its existence poses. To say that God is the reason/cause that the
>> universe exists is to say nothing about how the universe exists, which
>> science investigates.
>>
>
> I'm playing around a bit here.
>
> Suppose that we accept the answer to Why Something? as God (the
> Creator).
>
> What kind of status does the following question have?
>
> Does God create by a free act of will, or does God create by necessity?
>
> The latter answer of course 'takes care' of the 'problem of evil."
>
> Carrol