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3 Edward Pols and the Metaphysics of Agency Completely congruent with both John Macmurray’s and Raymond Tallis’s views of the agent, the late Edward Pols developed a conception of agency that does three significant things: one, it establishes the ontological primordiality of agency and of the agent who exercises it; two, it rejects the notion that agency can be reduced to its constituent or atomic parts fully explained by a cause-effect relationship; and three, it suggests a way by which agency can be brought into a metaphysically harmonious relationship with the concept of “Being,” a concept that points toward a notion of God. I want to explore the foundations and implications of Pols’s work on agency as a way of establishing the metaphysical grounding of the notion of God as a personal agent. I am not entirely sure Pols would have agreed with what I want to do with his basic categories and arguments as applied to God, but I completely accept the soundness and conceptual power of his arguments for understanding agency and agent as they exist in the spatio-temporal-material world (STMW). For me, the only problematic aspect of his thought has to do with whether God is best conceived of as an agent (without qualification) or whether God is best thought of as the ground of the agency, the power from which agency proceeds and in which all agents participate but is not itself an agent. We will take up that issue at the end of our discussion of Pols’s view of agency and agent. At the heart of his work is Pols’s conviction that “the most fundamental and concrete sense of power accessible to our intelligence is power in the sense of agency.”1 Pols works out the fuller implications of this foundational claim in his 1975 book Meditation on a Prisoner: Towards Understanding Action and Mind2 1. Edward Pols, “Power and Agency,” International Philosophical Quarterly 11, no. 3 (September 1971): 295. Emphasis added. 2. Edward Pols, Meditation on a Prisoner: Towards Understanding Action and Mind (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975). 79 and in The Acts of our Being: A Reflection on Agency and Responsibility3 (1982), as well as in shorter articles. This reference to power in the form of agency is religiously significant because every credible notion of God presupposes that God exercises power. If, as we said at the beginning of this study, God’s efficacy in the world is a crucial dimension of God’s being and necessary for God’s being worthy of worshipping, then efficacy in the form of agency is foundational for any conception of God. A powerless God is a (literal) non-starter. The question is always not whether but how does God exercise power? How does God effect change? How is God able to listen and respond to prayer? How does God affect the world? A non-efficacious God is not a God worthy of being worshipped. So the first religious implication of Pols’s conviction is that God must at least exercise power as an agent exercises power (in addition to whatever other kind of power God might exercise). And this drives us immediately back into an analysis of act, agency, and agent as the foundation on which the conception of God as efficacious being (or agent) must rest. Pols knows that the one of the most baneful legacies of the attempt to secure a rapprochement between classical philosophy and science has been the belief that the best and most complete explanation of occurrences in the world is by reference to intra-mundane causes (within a completely determinate causal nexus). Such an explanation is usually taken to be more basic than explanation by action since action, it is assumed, can always be broken down or reduced into more basic causal “forces” that are in principle fully explained by causal or natural laws. The problem, as Pols sees it, is that within the causal law model (what he calls the Cause-Effect or C-E relation) human agency becomes merely one cause among others, itself an effect caused by something prior to it and thus reducible to explanation by those causes. It has no ontological authenticity or uniqueness that distinguishes it from the events that have no agent-source and that constitute the causal nexus of the STMW. But if scientific causality is essentially physical or mechanistic, then acts have no ontological uniqueness that carries them “beyond” being merely...

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