Divine Intervention

Metaphysical and Epistemological Puzzles

Evan Fales

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135149772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The central theme of this book is that it's not enough to invoke omnipotence and omniscience as answers to the questions of God's ability to create and causally affect the world (i.e., perform miracles) and human beings (i.e., to cause mystical experiences) and, conversely, God's ability to perceive, or otherwise know about the world. Rather, it is incumbent upon theists to explain just how a personal, immaterial being such as God could cause mundane events, could institute (and sometimes circumvent) laws of nature, could be causally affected by the world (as in perception), and the like. That requires examining current thinking (which is diverse) about the very nature of causation, laws of nature, and agency, all of which Fales endeavors to do in this study.

1
Introduction

Questions about the nature of God and His relation to creation engage our interest on several different levels. Considered philosophically, they bring together basic issues in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology; this is in part why the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion is so fascinating. There are other reasons, of course, not the least of them being the quite personal significance that the facts of the matter have for many of us.

In this volume, I want to examine a number of problems that appear when we think hard about the very possibility of God causally interacting with the familiar space-time world in which we live. The topics I wish to discuss, while they will force us to journey to the very frontiers of philosophical reflection on such fundamental matters as the nature of causation and time, also have direct bearing on more popular contemporary debates, such as the one concerning Intelligent Design.

There is, for example, a view that has gained wide currency, both among theists and atheists, according to which claims about the supernatural are banished, on at least methodological grounds, from scientific investigation or evaluation. This view, methodological naturalism as it is usually called, is congenial to some of its advocates because it certifies a welcome separation between science and religion, relegating religion to the domain of “faith” or of values and other allegedly nonempirical matters, and leaving to science the task of settling factual questions.

But methodological naturalism should not be embraced by any sane theist. Consistently applied, it would not only spell the end of natural theology, but also count as irrelevant to theology historical scholarship concerning the past that (insofar as it purports to verify the occurrence of miracles) is critically important to historical religions such as Judaism and Christianity. According to the methodological naturalist, science somehow cannot investigate the supernatural. But what is the force of this “cannot”?

Is it that science can teach us nothing about the supernatural because supernatural beings are not observable? That won’t do. Science regularly concerns itself with items that are not, in any ordinary sense, observable: quarks, extra spatial dimensions, the distant past and much else. And on the other hand, there are many individuals who claim to have perceived God. Is it that God is not in space or (arguably) time? That might seem closer to the mark; but it avails nothing unless it can be shown that beings that are not spatiotemporal lie beyond the purview of scientific theorizing and investigation. Perhaps it is that God would be too capricious to provide a suitable subject for scientific treatment. But human beings are notoriously capricious, and this has not dampened our appetite for gaining a scientific understanding of ourselves. Or finally, it might be ruled a matter simply of stipulation that the proper domain of science is the study of matter and its behavior. But why should science be restricted by such a mere stipulation? Surely, the proper purposes of science include, minimally, discovering the causes of things. Reasoning from known effects to their conjectured causes is pervasive in the sciences. If God is causally responsible for any of the features of or events in our world, then, on the face of it, His agency should be something that could be discovered in this way.

This brings us close to the heart of the matter, which is, as I see it: can God cause things to happen in a spatiotemporal world inhabited by matter and (if not reducible to material processes) finite minds? If God can, then it is hard to see why, in principle, this could not be discovered by scientific investigation (by which I mean here simply properly careful and controlled empirical observation and suitable inferences therefrom). If God cannot, then it is hard to see why He would be of any religious significance at all. He would, after all, be both impotent and unknowable. So a major portion of this book will be devoted to inquiries concerning whether, and how, God could create and influence the minds and matter that make up our world.

Not everyone, of course, has sympathy for methodological naturalism. In some quarters, there are proposals for a strongly opposed view, a view that defends the desirability (and of course the possibility) of an expressly religious science, a Christian, or perhaps Jewish or Islamic science, whose substantive or methodological commitments include doctrines central to some religious tradition.

There have, for example, been calls for a Christian approach in the sciences, most notably, perhaps, by Alvin Plantinga (1997). What Plantinga intends is that scientists who are Christian should, while making use of all the helpful theoretical and experimental tools that science can provide, approach their subject from a Christian perspective. That is, they should take as given the basic Christian doctrines that Christians take themselves to know by way of revelation, and employ those doctrines in their scientific work—minimally, as constraints on scientific theorizing.

Is this a legitimate way to conduct scientific inquiry? Surely not, if Christian doctrines are merely assumed to be true. But what if they are known to be so? In this volume, I do not propose to enter directly into this question, either by way of the debates over scientific method—e.g., over whether doing science involves certain presuppositions or prior commitments—or by way of a critical analysis of Plantinga’s own Reformed epistemology.¹ But this is certainly a matter that needs attention in the debate over methodological naturalism.

There are, notoriously, empirical studies that import religiously motivated ideas in a more covert way, as witness, prominently, the Intelligent Design movement. Here we find a studied refusal to identify (officially, at least) the Designer, sometimes on grounds that sound like those offered for methodological naturalism. But whatever its motivations, such an attempt to cut short investigation once the existence of a Designer has been argued for—to refrain from pursuing obvious questions about the nature and modus operandi of the hypothesized Creator—strikes me as a profoundly unscientific, indeed anti-intellectual, attitude.

When we think we’ve discovered a cause of something, scientific practice, to say nothing of normal intellectual curiosity, presses us to find out, not only as much as we can about the intrinsic nature of this cause, but about its exact manner of operation (as well as how its nature underwrites its causal powers). We cannot always achieve this, but the fact that intelligent design officially abjures this task belies its scientific pretensions. That should, however, not divert us from asking those very questions—questions concerning which the literature is surprisingly sparse.

How exactly does God make things happen in our world? Indeed, how can the sort of being that God is cause such things to happen? These are not trivial questions. They may be made to look trivial by appeal to God’s omnipotence and omniscience. But the theologian’s appeal to these features of the divine nature rather resembles the waving of a magician’s wand. When a magician waves his wand with his right hand, we may reasonably wonder what, while our attention is momentarily distracted, he is doing with his left. Appeal to omnipotence and omniscience does not answer our question so much as it merely repeats it. How are we to understand divine omnipotence? How is it that God can do all the things He is understood to be able to do? Or, to put the question a bit differently: Omnipotence is a dispositional property. What categorical properties of God underwrite it, and how, exactly, do they do so?

It is obvious that there are reasons to suspect that the answers to these questions are not easy; after all, as already noted, God is a nonnatural being, not situated in space or—arguably—even in time. Moreover, some of the things He is taken to have done are extraordinary: for example, creating the material universe (and the human minds in it) from nothing. We need to trouble ourselves, more than perhaps we have, over how such a being can make such things happen.

Think, for a moment, about the way scientists investigate newly inferred causal processes and the entities which initiate them. Consider a somewhat exotic, but nicely illustrative example. Experimentalists examining a bubble chamber photograph suspect the production of a novel elementary particle from the observed tracks in the photo. Immediately, precise measurements of the visible tracks made by the interacting particles are undertaken, so as to infer as much as possible about the characteristics of the hypothesized new particle. Efforts are made to produce more such particles, to determine as many of their properties and interactions as possible. At the same time, theoreticians pounce upon the findings, examining how such a new particle might be fit into existing theories, and whether and how its causal interactions can be explained in terms of the known basic forces of nature. If the particle proves to be anomalous, much effort is expended in seeking new, adequate theories. We cannot always manipulate newly discovered objects: think of distant astronomical entities. But we do try, in as many ways as possible, to measure their behavior, and to search for similar items. Much more mundane cases of scientific discovery display these same features.

But nothing much resembling this attitude has attended discussions of divine activity. Why not? One answer is that actions of supernatural agents are by their nature beyond the purview of scientific investigation. The reasons given for this claim are several, but none of them has much force. Elaborating on the observations made above, I mention just four. First, it might be said that science can investigate only things that can be located, and God has no location. He is not in space and perhaps not in time either. That certainly qualifies God as unusual; perhaps it even entails that God cannot be causally related to the world. But it hardly establishes that claim merely to invoke God’s a-spatiality. After all, many of the things scientists study are not—not straightforwardly, at any rate—locatable in space: space itself, properties, human minds.

Second, it may be alleged that supernatural beings can’t be studied precisely because they are “supernatural”—and science can study only natural things. This merely begs the question. Indeed, it lacks content until we are told exactly what demarcates natural from supernatural beings and properties—no easy task. However, the main point is, I think, rather a simple one. A central task of science is to discover and study the causes of things, to discover, indeed, the causal structure of the world. If anything is part of that causal structure, if anything is causally connected to other things that are, in their turn, causally connected to yet others, then that thing makes a difference in the structure of the world, and to what happens in the world. It can, in principle, be detected and described by us, in terms of the differences it makes that ultimately make their causal impact on us.

“Zeroing in” on something via its causal impacts is a complex matter; it can be shown to require, among other things, taking advantage of multiple independent causal processes set into motion when a thing interacts with its surroundings, causal processes some of which we must put ourselves in a position to intercept. The scientist’s task is to see how these multiple causal processes, traced backwards, converge on the sought-after cause.

Now, if God causally interacts with the world, it should be possible, by these very same means, to identify His effects upon the world and, via those effects, to identify and characterize Him. One reason such a project has not advanced beyond the relatively primitive stages represented by cosmological and teleological arguments is that theoretical proposals concerning how divine action operates have been so threadbare. But it is surely worth examining the question whether they must be, or whether theists can hope to do better.

A third argument for the claim that God is beyond the reach of scientific study stems from the notion that He is an agent whose action in the world would involve abrogating the laws of nature in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways. Robert Pennock has made this argument:

Empirical testing relies fundamentally upon use of the lawful regularities of nature that science has been able to discover and sometimes codify in natural laws. For example, telescopic observations implicitly depend upon the laws governing optical phenomena. If we could not rely upon these laws … we could not trust telescopic observations as evidence. … Lawful regularity is at the very heart of the naturalistic worldview and to say that some power is supernatural is, by definition, to say that it can violate natural laws…

Supernatural theories, on the other hand, can give no guidance about what follows or does not follow from their supernatural components. For instance, nothing definite can be said about the processes that would connect a given effect with the will of the supernatural agent—God may simply say the word and zap anything into or out of existence.²

Three preliminary remarks are in order. First, Pennock cannot mean to be saying that the discovery of every lawful regularity requires testing of a sort that itself relies upon knowledge of lawful regularities. That would generate a vicious epistemic regress. But he is correct in saying that our understanding of such regularities plays a fundamental role in our ability to make measurements and observations. Second, it is over-reaching to suggest that supernatural beings are definitionally able to violate laws of nature. The matter of definition is vexed—it is not even clear that usage is fixed—but we will want to leave open, initially, the question of whether every (or even any) supernatural being has that sort of power.³ Finally, we should not prejudge the question whether “nothing definite” can be said about how divine action is causally connected to mundane effects.

The basic weakness of Pennock’s argument, however, is that it is hard to see how the odd miracle, here and there, would undermine our confidence in the general operation of the laws of nature, and hence in measurement and the experimental method. This has been pointed out by a number of philosophers (see, for example, Plantinga [1997]). But there is a deeper point. It does not follow from the fact that God is a free agent that His purposes and behavior (including the occasional performance of a miracle) cannot be made intelligible or studied in systematic ways. After all, the human sciences have done much to explain human behavior, and those explanations have (thus far) not relied to any significant degree upon any showing that human behavior has been, or can be, subsumed under natural laws.

Finally, I want to mention an argument from Michael Martin, to the effect that science should eschew theological explanations because the claim that a phenomenon is directly caused by God is a “science stopper.”⁴ In Martin’s view, the ascription of a direct divine cause to an event would leave nothing more to be said, and hence would abrogate further scientific inquiry, whereas naturalistic explanation leaves the door open to further investigation. Martin thinks it dubious, moreover, that empirical investigation could ever give us good reason to believe that an event was directly caused by God, on the grounds that other, naturalistic hypotheses are always in the offing.

This is mistaken in two ways. On the one hand proximate causation—if there is such a thing—would usher the end of scientific inquiry (in the sense of uncovering more structure or intermediaries) whether the proximate cause were natural or supernatural. There is nothing distinctive about supernatural causes in this respect. But philosophically speaking (at least) there might well be more to be said: about the nature of proximate causation, for example, and about what sorts of things could serve as proximate causes for what sorts of effects.

Moreover and secondly, the claim that A is the proximate cause of B certainly does not cut off inquiry in the sense that it brooks no questions about the truth of the claim. But that is equally true of claims about natural and supernatural causes. Thus Martin’s argument that a supernaturalistic explanation can never be properly final in the sense that other, naturalistic explanations may always be available amounts to nothing more than the familiar point that theory is underdetermined by data. This cuts both ways: when ultimate naturalistic explanations are offered, there may well be an alternative supernaturalistic explanation to be considered.

So appeal to God’s acts—even the finding that some event apparently was directly produced by God—need no more block continued inquiry into the possibility of a naturalistic explanation than would the apparent finding that one event was directly, and naturalistically, produced by another block further inquiry into the possibility of different or intervening causes. But above all, it seems to me that the discovery that an event has apparently been produced by God—whether directly or indirectly—should prompt the beginning of some important inquiries, not the ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Religion
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 How Does God Do Things?
• 3 Divine Governance and the Laws of Nature
• 4 Trouble With Time
• 5 Eternal God as Author of Nature
• 6 What Can God Know?
• 7 Healed Hearts, Inspired Minds
• 8 Mystical Revelations
• 9 Is Science a Mystic’s Friend?
• 10 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index