Divine Action, Determinism, and the Laws of Nature

Jeffrey Koperski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429639586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

A longstanding question at the intersection of science, philosophy, and theology is how God might act, or not, when governing the universe. Many believe that determinism would prevent God from acting at all, since to do so would require violating the laws of nature. However, when a robust view of these laws is coupled with the kind of determinism now used in dynamics, a new model of divine action emerges.

This book presents a new approach to divine action beyond the current focus on quantum mechanics and esoteric gaps in the causal order. It bases this approach on two general points. First, that there are laws of nature is not merely a metaphor. Second, laws and physical determinism are now understood in mathematically precise ways that have important implications for metaphysics. The explication of these two claims shows not only that nonviolationist divine action is possible, but there is considerably more freedom available for God to act than current models allow.

By bringing a philosophical perspective to an issue often dominated by theologians and scientists, this text redresses an imbalance in the discussion around divine action. It will, therefore, be of keen interest to scholars of Philosophy and Religion, the Philosophy of Science, and Theology.

1 Philosophy and divine action

Deists believe in God but not “organized religion.” God created the universe, but that exhausts the deistic job description. Theists – organized or not – believe that God also continuously upholds the universe in existence. Whatever else God might do goes by the name special divine action. This might refer in part to miracles, although what a miracle is precisely is a matter of some debate. The term is typically used for God’s activity within nature, regardless of whether anyone knows about it.

For the most part, the question of special divine action has been the purview of theologians. There has long been a division between those who believe that God sometimes breaks the laws of nature and those who deny it. Most laypersons and even scholars are initially puzzled by this second camp. “Why can’t God break the laws of nature?” As we will see in Chapter 2, some theologians believe that God cannot; others believe that God will not – or at least not often.

Some in this debate not only have backgrounds in theology but were once well-credentialed scientists: John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke, and Robert Russell are prominent among them. I have observed over the years, however, that many of the arguments in the literature are, properly speaking, neither issues in theology nor issues in science; rather, they are matters of philosophy. A few philosophers of religion have made important contributions to the question of divine action, but there is one corner of analytic philosophy that has largely remained silent: the philosophy of science. This book is a step toward breaking this silence, bringing something of an outsider’s perspective to the debate. This is sometimes useful. Robert Griffiths was a condensed matter physicist who turned his attention to quantum mechanics only after being asked to teach a course in it. He went on to found one of the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics: the consistent histories approach. Philosopher of science John Earman wrote a short book on David Hume’s argument against miracles some years ago, refuting Hume through the rigorous application of Bayesian probability theory (2000). (As one might imagine, Hume scholars were not altogether pleased by this intrusion.) My hope is that bringing philosophy of science to bear on the question of divine action will suggest new ways of approaching the main arguments.¹ At the very least, I intend to present material that one will not generally find outside philosophy of science journals.

Some will not find this perspective helpful. Others will be puzzled by my conclusions, especially those that do not fit well with current trends in theology. Such is the messiness of interdisciplinary work. Among the theologians mentioned in the next two chapters, there is broad agreement on two doctrines: The first is nonviolation: if God acts within nature postcreation, this action ought not violate the laws of nature. The second is determinism: if nature were deterministic, special divine action would entail the breaking of natural laws. Without some sort of openness or plasticity within the natural realm, there is nothing God can do that would not thereby count as a violation. Many believe that the second issue has been resolved by quantum mechanics, which is normally thought to be indeterministic. In other words, nature is not deterministic, and so the second of these two doctrines is no longer a worry.

Philosophers of science reading this literature will have two questions: The first is, what do theologians mean by “laws of nature”? There are a variety of ways in which one might understand natural laws, ranging from those with no metaphysical significance to others that determine every physical event. What, precisely, a “violation of law” amounts to changes depending on which interpretation one holds. This relationship between laws and violations need be made explicit to even know whether there is a problem of divine action to be resolved.

The second question has to do with physical determinism. For most philosophers and theologians, determinism is an obstacle to be overcome. Determinism of this sort, with its roots in the seventeenth-century thought of Spinoza and Leibniz, would preclude moral responsibility. In short, you aren’t responsible for your actions if you literally do not have any choice in the matter. This attitude is in contrast with physicists who work hard to uphold determinism in the face of prima facie violations. They typically take breakdowns in determinism to indicate an error of some kind, with the (possible) exception of quantum mechanics. These differing attitudes between philosophers and theologians on one hand and physicists on the other are due to an important conceptual shift. What “determinism” now means in mathematical physics is only distantly related to its philosophical counterpart.

Sorting this out is important since current models of divine action presuppose indeterminism of some sort. For many of those models, physical determinism in a world of robust laws would prevent special divine action. “Not to worry,” we are told, “since quantum mechanics is famously indeterministic.” Well, maybe. Deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics continue to gain adherents, especially Everettian many-worlds. By the end of this century, physicists and philosophers of physics might no longer consider quantum mechanics to be the realm of ontological randomness.

For most science-and-religion scholars working on divine action, the return of deterministic physics would be bad news indeed. Indeterminism opens a range of possibilities that would otherwise have been closed in the deterministic world of classical mechanics (or so it is commonly thought).² Consider a parallel argument regarding free will, understood as libertarian freedom.³ In a deterministic world, there is no free will. One’s “choices” are as much the product of the laws of nature as is the trajectory of a tennis ball. Libertarians rejoice, then, that quantum mechanics has refuted physical determinism. Free will is at least possible, although indeterminism alone is not sufficient for freedom. This same indeterminism is likewise thought to allow for avenues of divine action that would be impossible in a Newtonian world. That physics might reembrace determinism is therefore a source of great concern.

For my part, I will argue that this worry is misplaced. Determinism need not be the bugaboo that it is normally portrayed – “bugaboo” being a technical term in philosophy of science. If an older understanding of natural laws is coupled with a physicist’s view of determinism, a new approach to divine action emerges whereby God would no longer be constrained to work within the indeterministic gaps of exotic physics. The neoclassical model of special divine action is not dependent on any one interpretation of quantum mechanics.⁴ But that’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Let’s first consider where things stand today.

1.1 Distinction

There are broadly speaking three approaches to divine action, although the latter two are usually collapsed into one. Interventionists believe that God sometimes violates the laws of nature. Many theologians reject this view as naïve, and we will consider some of their arguments in the next chapter. Noninterventionism will be restricted here to the view that God created and sustains the universe but does not immediately bring about specific events within nature. Remove the clause about sustaining, and one is left with deism, which few are willing to embrace.⁵ Panentheists and others focused on the God–world relationship also fall into this category. What I will call nonviolationism, which is usually subsumed under the second group, is a middle position. Like interventionism, it holds that God actively governs creation, causing events that would not likely to have happened otherwise. Like noninterventionism, it holds that God seldom if ever breaks the laws of nature.

Why invent a new category, especially when nonviolationists refer to themselves as noninterventionists? There are two answers. The first is that failing to do so causes confusion. There are important differences between the two approaches to the degree to which God is active in the universe. Second, arguments aimed at one are not always relevant to the other. Consider Alvin Plantinga’s work on the question of divine intervention. He begins by showing that, for theologians such as Langdon Gilkey, divine action is limited to God’s creating and sustaining the universe. Here Plantinga quotes Gilkey himself:

Thus contemporary theology does not expect … wondrous divine events on the surface of natural and historical life. The causal nexus in space and time which the Enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into the Western mind … is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars; since they participate in the modern world of science both intellectually and existentially, they can scarcely do anything else. Now this assumption of a causal order among phenomenal events, and therefore of the authority of the scientific interpretation of observable events, makes a great difference. Suddenly a vast panoply of divine deeds and events recorded in scripture are no longer regarded as having actually happened… . Whatever the Hebrews believed, we believe that the biblical people lived in the same causal continuum of space and time in which we live, and so one in which no divine wonders transpired and no divine voices were heard.

(Plantinga 2008, 371)

Gilkey is clearly a noninterventionist. Modern scientific folk cannot rationally believe in miracles or any other sort of divine action after creation itself. This view is further articulated by John Macquarrie:

The way of understanding miracle that appeals to breaks in the natural order and to supernatural interventions belongs to the mythological outlook… . The traditional conception of miracle is irreconcilable with our modern understanding of both science and history. Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever events occur in the world can be accounted for in terms of other events that also belong within the world; and if on some occasions we are unable to give a complete account of some happening … the scientific conviction is that further research will bring to light further factors in the situation, but factors that will turn out to be just as immanent and this-worldly as those already known.

(Plantinga 2008, 372)

Plantinga traces this sort of “hands-off theology” back through Rudolf Bultmann. Thomas Tracy (2009, 230) extends it further, starting with deism, through Schleiermacher and the early liberal Protestants, down through Bultmann and Gordon Kaufman. If, as we are told, science has taught us that nature is a closed continuum, theology must give up divine intervention.

One result of such thinking has been the naturalizing of biblical miracles. The feeding of the five thousand (Matthew 14:13–21) might be understood as Jesus prompting his audience to spontaneously share what little food they had with others, thereby feeding everyone. Perhaps the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus was made possible by high winds, a tsunami, an earthquake, or some combination, each of which has been proposed as a natural explanation.⁶ As William Pollard sums up, “Biblical miracles are, like that in the exodus, the result of an extraordinary and extremely improbable combination of chance and accident. They do not, on close analysis, involve, as is so frequently supposed, a violation of the laws of nature” (1958, 115).

Nonviolationists agree to an extent, consistently arguing against divine intervention. Robert Russell calls his own model of divine action noninterventionist objective divine action (NIODA). One might therefore be forgiven for lumping them in with Bultmann, Gilkey, and Macquarrie.⁷ That would be a mistake. As Russell has emphasized, he and other members of the Divine Action Project (DAP) are “hands-on,” not “hands-off,” in their theology, rejecting deism and typically believing in an active God (private discussion). It isn’t special divine action postcreation that worries them or even that God brings about specific events; it is action that requires the violation of the laws of nature. The goal of their program is to find ways in which God could act without such violations. It is unfortunate, then, that this camp self-identifies as noninterventionism. In any case, I believe it would be useful to distinguish the hands-off approach of Leibniz and Bultmann (noninterventionism) from the hands-on view of Russell et al. (nonviolationism).

Thoroughgoing noninterventionists do not like this middle position, seeing it as a kind of soft intervention. Even if there are windows through which God can act without breaking natural laws, such approaches have “simply replaced one mode of interference with the world – that in which the laws of nature are set aside – with another, in which those laws are used as tools” (Knight, 2007, 26). Noninterventionists take the other two camps to differ merely by degree of divine manipulation.

Is this fair? To a point, yes. In spirit, nonviolationists agree with interventionists that God takes a more hands-on approach to nature. In practice, however, their models allow for such a limited range of physical effects that they are functionally much closer to hands-off noninterventionists. As I will argue, there is little that God could do by way of the causal pathways proposed by nonviolationists in the divine action literature. For it to survive as a research program requires a reexamination of foundational assumptions about the laws of nature and determinism.

1.2 Overview

Here then is the plan for the rest of the book. Chapter 2 analyzes the current terrain regarding divine action. The first question is, Why not intervention? Theologians point to a variety of issues: conflicts with science, inconsistency on God’s part, and the problem of evil prominent among them. These concerns motivate both noninterventionism and nonviolationist models for divine action, several of which will be critiqued. Most of these approaches, I will argue, allow for too little freedom on God’s part. In other words, if that is the way God interacts with nature, there is not much that God can do.

Chapter 3 is an extended discussion of one nonviolationist model: God working through quantum indeterminism. The central idea behind Russell’s NIODA is that God could act through ontologically random quantum events without breaking any laws. The model presupposes that quantum fluctuations are readil...