How God Acts

Creation, Redemption, And Special Divine Action

Denis Edwards

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780800697006
• eBook ISBN: 9781451406498
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

1

Characteristics of the Universe Revealed by the Sciences

What is the proper starting point for a Christian theology of divine action? A little reflection suggests that, if it is to be truly a Christian theology, then it will certainly be grounded in the Christian tradition and the central conviction of this tradition, that God has acted to bring salvation to our world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and in the outpouring of the Spirit. This will be taken up as the theme of the next chapter. But, I believe, a theology of divine action depends as well on the worldview that the theologian brings to his or her work. And if this worldview is to be as faithful as possible to the world we actually encounter, it will be shaped by the best insights of the sciences.

When twenty-first-century cosmology describes the emergence and expansion of our universe, and when contemporary biology describes the evolution of life on Earth, the theologian takes these scientific findings seriously, because she interprets the history of the universe that cosmology describes, and the story of life that biology articulates, as the fruit of the divine act of creation. When the sciences come to a broadly held consensus that, for example, the observable universe has been expanding for 13.7 billion years from a tiny, compressed state, or that natural selection has played a fundamental role in the evolution of life on Earth, the theologian will see such a consensus as the best description we have to date of the concrete and specific ways in which God’s action takes effect in a universe of creatures. Of course, such a theology will need to be revised if and when the scientific picture changes or develops. But this is the nature of theology, to be done again anew in new contexts.

In this chapter, then, I attempt to articulate key insights from the sciences that contribute to a worldview that will form a dialogue partner for the theology of divine action that follows. I will ask this question: What are the key characteristics of the world revealed by the natural sciences that are significant for a theology of the action of God? William Stoeger offers some guidance here. He has provided a response to this question from the perspective of a cosmologist and philosopher of science.¹ He speaks of a universe that is evolving at all levels, that is relational, that has its own integrity, and that possesses some directionality. A further theme, which will be fundamental for this book, is that evolution is costly for many creatures. Stoeger’s assessment seems in general agreement with that of others involved in the contemporary discussion among science, philosophy, and theology, including Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, George Ellis, John Haught, Philip Clayton, and Christopher Southgate.² I will follow Stoeger’s line of thought, outlining an understanding of characteristics of the worldview revealed by the natural sciences that will be basic to the theology of divine action developed in the rest of this book.

A Universe That Evolves at All Levels

We owe the discovery of the evolution of life by means of natural selection to the work of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the nineteenth century. The discovery that the universe itself is expanding and evolving is the achievement of twentieth-century science, as it built on Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and Edwin Hubble’s astronomical observations. With some confidence, cosmologists can now trace the history of the observable universe back to the first second of its existence, about 13.7 billion years ago, when it was unimaginably small, dense, and hot. They think a great deal happened in the first second, including the emergence of the four fundamental forces—gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces—and the fundamental particles, such as neutrons, protons, electrons, and neutrinos.

According to many influential theories in cosmology, early in the first second, the young universe went through a period of very rapid inflation. In the first few minutes, as the universe expanded more gently and continued to cool, protons and neutrons were able to combine to form the nuclei of hydrogen, the simplest element, and the first helium. By the end of the first three minutes, the observable universe existed as an expanding and cooling fireball of hydrogen and helium nuclei. When it was about 400,000 years old, it entered a new stage of its evolution. It was cool enough for nuclei to bond with electrons to form atoms of hydrogen and helium. In this process, matter was decoupled from radiation. The universe became transparent to the radiation that fills it—the cosmic microwave radiation. This radiation, predicted by the theory of big bang cosmology, was discovered in 1967 and is now mapped by astronomers, who find it gives them a kind of snapshot of the early universe.

As the universe continued to expand, slight unevenness in density meant there were locations where large clouds of hydrogen and helium accumulated, the beginning of galaxies. Under the influence of gravity, these pockets of gas eventually stopped expanding and began to collapse, heat up, and fragment. Massive enough fragments increased in temperature to the point where nuclear fusion processes were triggered, converting hydrogen into more helium. The first stars were born, lighting up the universe. Further nuclear reactions would convert helium into heavier elements, including the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen from which we are made. Very large stars ended in supernova explosions that produced still heavier elements, seeding their galaxies with elements for the formation of further stars and their planets.

Our Milky Way is one of about 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. The Milky Way contains more than 100 billion stars. Because of the material produced by stars and supernova explosions, and the subsequent chemical processing in cooler astronomical environments, interstellar clouds, comets, asteroids, planets, and moons contain complex organic molecules and amino acids. These are fundamental to the emergence of life on Earth. Our own solar system formed from a great molecular cloud of gas about 4.6 billion years ago. The raw materials for life were assembled as Earth took shape from the matter circling the newly emerged Sun and through the bombardment of the young Earth by meteorites.

Within about a billion years, life appeared on Earth in the form of bacterial cells without a nucleus (called prokaryotes). The next big step was the emergence of creatures that possess a developed cell nucleus (the eukaryotes). Early microbial forms of life began to change the atmosphere to one that was oxygen rich through photosynthesis. Developed multicellular animals appear in the fossil record from about 570 million years ago and took new and diverse forms in the seas of the Cambrian period (545 million to 495 million years ago). Dinosaurs, flying reptiles, and mammals appeared in the Triassic (248 million to 206 million years ago) and Jurassic (206 million to 144 million years ago) periods. Birds and flowering plants emerged at the beginning of the Cretaceous period (144 million to 65 million years ago). Various hominid species evolved between 4 million and 2 million years ago. Homo erectus emerged about 2 million years ago with a large brain and an athletic body and soon spread from Africa to other parts of the world. Modern humans seem to have evolved about 200,000 years ago, lighter than Homo erectus and possessing a much larger brain.

The universe and everything in it evolves in time. According to quantum cosmologists, time as we know it could not have been a characteristic of our universe in the tiniest fraction of the first second of its history (the Planck era), but emerged as the universe expanded from its primordial state. But ever since the first part of the first second, long periods of time have been essential to the emergence of the universe—above all of its galaxies and stars, with their capacity to produce elements like carbon, which then set the scene for the emergence of life and consciousness on a planet like Earth. The emergence of this kind of complexity requires something like the 13.7 billion years that have passed since the first second of our universe.

In a theological vision, this great story of an evolving universe is not only our story, but also God’s story, the story of God’s creation. The first particles, the emergence of stars, the production of heavier elements necessary for life, the development of complex molecules, the evolution of life on Earth—all of this is God’s work, brought about by God working in and through the laws of nature over immense lengths of time and with great patience. Reflecting on this leads one to think that God must be a Creator who not only enables but respects and waits upon the processes by which things evolve in more and more complex ways. It seems that it is characteristic of God to create in an emergent and evolutionary way.

A Universe Constituted by Patterns of Relationship

When the various sciences look at an atom, a galaxy, or the most complex thing we know, the human brain, they find patterns of relationships. Quarks are the building blocks for protons and neutrons, and these combine in various ways to form the ninety-two kinds of atoms. Atoms form the basis of molecules, which combine to form macromolecules. Combinations of these make life possible in single-celled bacteria, in multi-cellular organisms, in neurologically developed animals with their social structure, and in human beings with their developed brains and their participation in and dependence upon society and culture.

At each level, entities are constituted from other entities structured in differentiated and cooperative interrelationships. Arthur Peacocke, among others, has described the picture of the world that the natural sciences give us as a complex “hierarchy.” This word points to the way patterns of relationship nest upon one another: there is a series of levels of organization of matter, in which each member in the series is a new whole yet is constituted of parts that precede it in the series.³

Stoeger describes the patterns discovered by the natural sciences as “constitutive relationships.” Constitutive relationships are “those interactions among components and with the larger context which jointly effect the composition of a given system and establish its functional characteristic within the larger whole of which it is a part, and thereby enable it to manifest the particular properties and behavior it does.”⁴ These relationships make an entity what it is, endowing it with unity of structure and consistency of action. Entities emerge and exist in such patterns of interrelationship. These include not only the interrelationship between the constituents that make up an entity, but also the interrelationship between the entity and its environment.

Each entity is constituted by more fundamental entities; each entity is interrelated with others to form a larger system. Thus, a carbon atom is constituted from subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons). But a carbon atom in my body is constituted as part of a molecule, which forms part of a cell, which belongs to an organ of my body. I am part of a family, a human society, and a community of interrelated living creatures on Earth. The Earth community depends upon and is interrelated with the Sun, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the whole universe.

At all levels from fundamental particles to atoms, molecules, cells, and the universe, one level of reality is articulated upon another in new patterns of relationship. Stoeger finds that this kind of articulated structuring is a universal feature of the world revealed by the natural and social sciences. At every level, this nested organization is realized through the interrelationships among the components, together with the whole–part relationships that determine the distribution and collective function of components.⁵ Constitutive relationships involve all those interactions that incorporate components into a more complex whole, and relate that complex whole into another level of unity. They may be physical, biological, or social in character.

We human beings depend upon many different systems both inside and outside ourselves. Atoms that make up the neurons of our brains were formed in long-dead stars. We are dependent upon and interrelated with the universe. Closer to home, we become who we are in relationship to families, communities, and the land to which we belong, with its animals, birds, trees, flowers, insects, and bacteria.

When we move beyond science to theology, we can add that the most important constitutive relationship of all, one that operates on a radically different level from all the others and is not accessible to empirical research, is the relationship of ongoing creation. This is the relationship by which the indwelling Creator Spirit is present to each creature, enabling it to be and to become in a world of interconnected relationships. This relationship with the Creator endows all things with existence in an interrelational and ordered world. While science suggests a world of constitutive relationships, a Christian theology locates this in relation to a Trinitarian God of mutual relations. It sees God’s being as Communion. While it insists that there is an infinite difference between all the interrelationships of creatures and the divine Communion, a Trinitarian theology of creation sees every creature, whether it be an insect, a tree, a star, or a human being, as participating in the life of divine Communion. It sees their differentiated relationships with each other as already a limited, creaturely reflection of this divine life, and as in some way a sacrament of Communion.

A Universe Where Natural Processes Have Their Own Integrity

While science sees everything in our universe as interrelated, it also sees each entity and process as possessing a level of integrity. And as new systems and new organisms emerge in the course of evolutionary history, the sciences see them as emerging and being maintained by natural processes with their own integrity. Some scientists are convinced that within nature itself, there are self-ordering and self-organizing principles and processes that can adequately account, at the level of science, for the emergence of complexity and novelty.⁶ While some of these principles and processes are already well known, others remain a matter of speculation. The gaps in scientific knowledge have not all been filled, but more are being filled every day.

Appealing to outside intervention is not an accepted option for science. Science is rightly committed to methodological naturalism, seeking natural explanations for empirical reality. There is no need to appeal to the “god of the gaps.” At the level of empirical reality, the level at which all the sciences work, the natural world is understood as possessing a kind of autonomy, in the sense that it evolves and functions on its own, according to its own laws. Science has learned to be confident that natural processes are to be explained by the laws of nature. Even when, at a particular stage of research, something cannot be explained, there is still a well-based assumption that a natural explanation is to be sought and found. There is an expectation that science, working with its understanding of the laws and processes of the natural world, will be able to explain the origin and existence of atoms, stars, cells, the world of plants and animals and human beings.

There are, of course, important questions to ask that take us beyond the empirical sciences. These sciences cannot tell us why there is anything at all. They cannot tell us why there is a universe or why there is order in it. They cannot tell us the meaning of our own lives and deaths. They cannot tell us the significance of this immense cosmos in which we find ourselves or our own place in it. They cannot deal with the endless searching of the human mind and heart. They cannot tell us whether the ultimate meaning of the whole universe is personal love or bleak emptiness. They cannot tell us whether we are ultimately forgiven and loved. These are all urgent human questions, but they are philosophical and theological questions rather than scientific ones.

Christian theology sees God as the Creator who is profoundly and intimately present to every aspect of the universe, enabling it to be and to become...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Characteristics of the Universe Revealed by the Sciences
• 2. Divine Action in the Christ­Event
• 3. Creation as Divine Self­Bestowal
• 4. Special Divine Acts
• 5. Miracles and the Laws of Nature
• 6. The Divine Act of Resurrection
• 7. God’s Redeeming Act: Deifying Transformation
• 8. God’s Redeeming Act: Evolution, Original Sin, and the Lamb of God
• 9. Final Fulfillment: The Deifying Transformation of Creation
• 10. Prayers of Intercession
• Notes
• Index