2. Divine Action
The second example involves the relation between divine and
natural causality, often formulated in terms of divine action. It is a central issue in philosophical theology which underlies the entire scope
of constructive, systematic theology from creation to redemption. It surfaces
explicitly in discussions of special providence (or continuous creation) and of
miracles, including the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Typically, one starts with a theology of creation in two inter-related forms:
according to creatio ex nihilo, God eternally brings the world as a
whole of space and time into existence and gives creation its rational, intelligible
structure reflected in the laws of nature. God also in time continuously
creates (creatio continua) the world and providentially directs all
processes and events in general towards their telos and consummation in
the eschatological future, where they return to God. Given the dynamic
character of the universe as we now know it from science, general providence is
usually reformulated in terms of continuous creation. Special providence adds
to this the claim that God also acts occasionally in individual processes and
particular events with special intentions.The mighty acts of God signify events in history and in nature which would
not have happened the way they did had God not acted there and then in special
ways. Miracles, in particular, refer to events which actually occurred and
which are coherent with an overall theological understanding of Gods
intentions but which seem to fall outside what nature on its own might be
sufficient to cause, although God may indeed work in, with and through natural
processes to bring about miracles and events of special providence.(We will return to the subject of miracles under Part 2, E, redemption theology
below.)
The possibility of objective special providence has divided
conservatives and liberals over the past two centuries. A crucial factor in
causing this division is the radical change in our view of nature brought about
by the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and
the philosophical responses science triggered in the eighteenth century
Enlightenment.
Science minisummary: Classical physics and the rise of a
mechanical philosophy of nature.Recall that in classical physics, nature is described as a closed causal system
of matter in motion and governed by Newtons deterministic equations of
motion. This means that the future is, in principle, entirely predictable as
long as we know all the forces acting on a system and if we obtain an exact
knowledge of its initial conditions. This view, rooted in classical physics, was
carried over and applied to all macroscopic systems in nature, including those
described by thermodynamics, geology, meteorology, evolutionary biology, and
even those now studied using chaos theory. Chance events occur in all these
fields, but the notion of chance here is purely epistemic, the ignorance of
underlying causes. There are two distinct kinds of epistemic chance:
i) Random walk: Individual events can occur along a given trajectory, from the
motion of microscopic plankton to tossing a coin.ii) Crossed trajectories: Epistemic chance also denotes the juxtaposition of
two apparently unrelated causal trajectories, such as a car crash or the
combination of a genetic mutation expressed in a phenotype and the adaptivity
of that phenotype to a changing environment.In either case, even when statistical methods are used, they are used for
practical purposes and do not indicate ontological indeterminism;
indeed the ubiquitous role of the Gaussian distribution (the bell curve) in
classical science underscores this fact.As Murphy depicts it, the combination of determinism in physics, epistemic and
causal reduction in philosophy, and an ontology of atomism, completed the case
for the mechanistic world view by the nineteenth century.
In essence, Newtonian physics led to a philosophy of causal
determinism and thus to the mechanistic world view which has re-shaped
Western thought and undermined the intelligibility of both human and
divine agency. For God to act objectively in special events in nature means
that God must intervene in the causal order of the world, either breaking or
suspending the laws of nature. Human free will would seem an illusionif our bodies are completely subject to Newtonian physics.This led to a theological forced option: Conservatives would maintain that
God acts objectively in special events in nature, even at the cost of divine
interventionism.Liberals would adopt a non-interventionist approach though this led to a
strictly subjectivist account of special divine action: we attribute particular
religious significance to what are in themselves ordinary natural events.Even such powerful movements as neo-Orthodoxy and Biblical theology in the
first half of the twentieth century were unable to overcome this deep divide coherently,
as Langdon Gilkey eloquently recounts.
Remarkably, even as science played a key role in creating
this division, science may now play a pivotal role in overcoming it. Wide
ranging changes in 20th century science from quantum physics to evolutionary
biology may move us beyond Newtonian mechanism in ways that make possible a
variety of new views of divine action. These in turn could have wide-ranging
implications for a renewed defense of theism and for the construction of robust
theologies of providence and continuous creation, as well as to the
plausibility of miracles, as many scholars in theology and science have urged.
(See for example Part 2,C,2 below.) Of particular importance to the
intra-Christian rift over divine action and the inability of neo-Orthodoxy to
heal it, such views seek to combine the crucial elements of both liberal and
conservative positions into what can be called non-interventionist, objective,
special divine action.
There are actually several approaches here.A) Agential models of Gods interaction with the world make explicit use
of science in reshaping the concept of divine action; there are at least three
varieties of such models, as described below. B) Agential models in combination
with embodiment models of the God/world relation (i.e., the world as the
body of God), as well as C) agential models deployed within the context of
broad metaphysical systems which include Gods action in every event,
make a more generic use of science in reshaping the concept of divine action.
Contributed by: Dr. Robert Russell
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