<!g>Peacocke’s View of Divine Action
The best way to compare theories of divine
action in detail is to ask - what, for each theory, is ‘the causal joint’ at
which God - as a <!g>transcendent, immaterial world cause - interacts particularly
with causative factors in the material world?
Arthur Peacocke wants to use the analogy of
God as mind, world as body, but with a very proper caution - ‘in a human body,
the “I” does not transcend the body <!g>ontologically in the way that God
transcends the world.’ He is also very cautious about explicating the causal joint - such a
description of the problem ‘does not do justice to the many levels in which
causality operates in a world of complex systems interlocking in many ways at
many levels.’ He does not find any theologically-relevant
gaps in the causal order, and is temperamentally most reluctant to contemplate
anything smacking of divine intervention
in the natural order (see <!g>the question of miracle).
So Peacocke follows Kaufman and Wilesin postulating that God’s action is on the-world-as-a-whole, but he goes
further than either in that:
-
he offers a metaphor for divine action
in terms of the way in which the properties of a whole system, such as a
chemical system far from equilibrium, or a biological ecosystem, affect the
behaviour of individual parts. The nature of the whole, and its environment,
exerts constraints on the behaviour of the parts. This he originally called
‘top-down causation’ but now prefers to call ‘whole-part influence.’The material world, on this model, has God as its boundary or environment;
relationship with God is the highest emergent property of any physical system.
-
Peacocke allows the possibility that
this general action of God’s on the-world-as-whole might have particular
effects - just as a boundary constraint in one of the systems described above
might generate a particular, localised pattern.
Peacocke’s God, then, is the environment of
the <!g>cosmos. His God’s
interaction with the world, by means of the input of information - is the
highest-level emergent property (see <!g>the concept of emergence) of the cosmos as
system, a system within which God is radically and totally <!g>immanent, as well as
transcendent.
As <!g>Willem B Drees points out,speaking of the environment of the whole universe can never be more than a
metaphor, but it is the strength of <!g>panentheism that it can offer such a telling
metaphor. <!g>Thomas Tracy also takes Peacocke to task for stretching a concept too
far - he points out that the examples of ‘top-down’ causation we know about are
all analysable in ‘bottom-up’ terms.Top-down causation is a purely explanatory procedure, it is a bold strategy to
invoke it for ontological purposes, and to suppose that a ‘whole’ can be
invoked as an actual cause within a system.
To examine these views in detail see Peacocke and Polkinghorne compared.
Email
link | Feedback | Contributed by: <!g>Dr.
Christopher Southgate
Source: God, Humanity and the
Cosmos (<!g>T&T Clark, 1999)
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