Abstract
I start by way of clarifying briefly the problem of special divine intervention. Once this is done, I argue that laws of nature are generalizations that derive from the dispositional behaviour of natural kinds. Based on this conception of laws of nature I provide a metaphysical model according to which God can realize acts of special divine providence by way of temporarily changing the dispositions of natural entities. I show that this model does not contradict scientific practice and is consistent with the assumption that the physical realm is causally closed. I then argue that prima facie any putative candidate for an act of God could also be seen as a random event or as indicating that there is something wrong with our formulation of the corresponding law of nature. While there is no sufficient philosophical or scientific reason to prefer one of these models, I argue that there are sufficient and legitimate theological reasons to endorse a framework in which at least the obtaining of some anomic states of affairs is seen as the effect of special divine intervention. Doing so, theology has the hermeneutic resources to uncover a dimension of meaningful reality, which without faith could not be seen.
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Notes
See, for instance, Gen 45,5, Ps. 148:8–10, Phil. 2:12–13 and Cor 3.5.
Since there are many different ways to deploy the term “God” (cf. Göcke 2013) it is to be expected that the problem of special divine intervention only arises given certain presuppositions as regards our conception of God. For the sake of this paper, I follow Alston (1999, p. 185): “First, I am taking seriously and realistically the idea of God as a personal agent, an agent Who performs actions in the light of knowledge and in order to realize divine purposes. I am taking seriously in that I do not construe talk of God’s doing this or that as ‘symbolic,’ ‘pictorial,’ or ‘poetic’ ways of making points about human life or the natural world or history, or about anything else that leaves God and God’s activity out of account. To put it crudely, if what we say about divine action is true, then God really does what we are saying God does! To put it less crudely, in attributing to God one or another action we are [...] making truth claims, the truth conditions of which involve God actually engaging in the appropriate sort of activity.” Cf. Rohs (2013) for an ethico-theological justification of the idea that God has to be able to intervene in the world. Cf. Polkinghorne (1995) for a summary of some of the most popular models of divine action discussed.
Cf. Peacocke (2001, p. 56): ,,The success of the sciences in unravelling the intricate, often complex, yet beautifully articulated web of relationships between structures, processes and entities in the world have made it increasingly problematic to regard God as ‘intervening’ in the world to bring about events that are not in accordance with these divinely created patterns and regularities that the sciences are unravelling.” Cf. also Polkinghorne (1990, p. 7): “Indeed, has not the advance of science made this view of divine action incredible, for the world seems so well described by the regularity of natural law.”
If one supposes that determinism presupposes causal closure, the first problem will lead automatically to the second problem. Cf. Plantinga (2011, pp. 92–93): “Classical mechanics is deterministic in the following sense. Suppose you are given an initial configuration of a material system—that is, a system of particles together with their positions, masses and velocities—at a time t. Now consider any time t* future with respect to t; if the system is causally closed, there is just one outcome consistent with classical mechanics.” Cf. also Alston (1999, p. 187): “The traditional view of divine action adumbrated above is obviously in direct contradiction with the doctrine that the universe exhibits a closed causal determinism, that every happening is uniquely determined to be just what it is by natural causes within the universe. (I will refer to this doctrine simply as ‘determinism’)”. Cf. Earman (1986, p. 4–22) for a discussion of some problems concerning causal closure and the formulation of determinism.
According to Papineau (2002, p. 17), the completeness of physics can be states as follows: “All physical effects are fully caused by purely physical prior histories.” Cf. Papineau (2000) for a justification of the validity of the principle of causal closure. See Göcke (2008) and Lowe (2008) for a critical discussion of the plausibility of causal closure. Although the assumption that the world is causally closed is controversial as a metaphysical assumption and not an implication of science itself, I assume for the sake of this paper that it is true that the actual world is causally closed. Without the assumption of causal closure, there is no problem of special divine intervention. Cf. Polkinghorne (2006, p. 67): “It is clear that physical closure of the causal nexus of the world has not been established, so that claims that science has disproved the possibility of providential agency can be seen to be false. Belief in divine action is no more necessarily negated by an honest science than is belief in free human agency.”
Cf. also Pollard (1958, p. 12): “I found extraordinary difficulty, when I thought about events in scientific terms, in imagining any kind of loophole through which God could influence them.”
Cf. again (Papineau 2002, p. 17 FN): “What about quantum indeterminacy? A stricter version [of causal closure] would say that the chances of physical effects are always fully fixed by their prior physical histories.” Cf. also Plantinga (2011, p. 92–93): “[In quantum mechanics,] we don’t get a prediction of a unique configuration for the system at t, but only a distribution of probabilities across many possible outcomes.”
Very roughly, the idea is that God acts in some way on the quantum level of reality that is consistent with the indeterministic nature of the laws in question. God, it is said, can act at the quantum level in such a way that it is consistent with science. Cf. Murphy (1995, p. 342): “God’s governance at the quantum level consists in activating or actualizing one or other of the quantum entity’s innate powers at particular instants.” Cf. also Tracy (1995) and Russell (1997).
Cf. also Barbour (1966, p. 46), and Foster (1934, p. 465): “The method of natural science depends upon the presuppositions which are held about nature, and the presuppositions about nature in turn upon the doctrine of God. Modern natural science could begin only when the modern presuppositions about nature displaced the Greek [...] but this displacement itself was possible only when the Christian concept of God had displaced the pagan, as the object of systematic understanding. To achieve this displacement was the work of medieval theology, which thus laid the foundations both of much else in the modern world which is specifically modern, and of modern natural science.”
Here are some arbitrarily picked up examples from the literature as regards the specification of what it means to say that something is a law of nature. Tooley (2004, p. 39) says: “Perhaps the most popular account of the nature of laws is that a generalization expresses a law if and only if it is both lawlike and true, where lawlikeness is a property that a statement has, or lacks, simply in virtue of its meaning. Different accounts of lawlikeness have been advanced, but one requirement is invariably taken to be essential: a lawlike statement cannot contain any essential reference to specific individuals.” According to Craver, laws of nature are “(1) logically contingent, (2) true (without exception), (3) universal generalisations, that are (4) unlimited in scope [and] (5) hold by physical necessity” (Craver 2007, pp. 56–57). Third, according to Woodward, “laws are said (1) to be exceptionless generalizations, (2) to contain only purely qualitative predicates and make no reference to particular objects or spatiotemporal locations, (3) to support counterfactuals, (4) to be confirmable by a limited number of instances in a way that accidental generalizations are not, and (5) to be integrated into some body of systematic theory and play a unifying role in inquiry in a way that accidental generalizations do not” (Woodward 2007, p. 38–39). Finally, according to Davies, laws of nature are (1) universal, that is, valid at every place and time, (2) absolute because not depending on the nature of the observer, (3) eternal, and (4) omnipotent because nothing is outside of their scope (cf. Davies 1992, pp. 72–92 and McGrath 2006, pp. 227–228).
Armstrong (1983), Dretske (1977), and Tooley (2004) provide loci classici of ontologies of laws of nature in terms of universals, whereas (Mill 1904, p. 230) and Lewis (1986a, b, 1994) provide a Humean account of laws of nature. Cf. Karakostas (2009); Loewer (1996) and Fraassen (1987) for critical discussions of the respective views.
In what follows, I am only interested in conceptions of laws of nature that concern themselves with causation. Craver (2007, p. 66) sums up Suppe’s (1989) distinction of three different kinds of law of nature “laws of coexistence, laws of succession and laws of interaction. Each of these may be deterministic or statistical. Laws of coexistence, such as the Boyle-Charles gas law, specify possible positions in the state space by describing equations fixing possible overall states of the system. Laws of succession, such as Newton’s laws of motion, specify possible trajectories through the state space and so specify how the system, left to itself, will change over time. Finally, laws of interaction, specify the results of interaction between two or more systems, such as the interaction of a particle with a measuring device. These laws together define the class of models of the theory.”
Here is a further problem for Armstrong’s account of laws of nature. On the one hand, he asserts that “Universals, although real, are only abstractions from states of affairs, and so are incapable of existing in independence of states of affairs” (1983, p. 165). On the other hand, he argues as follows: “The Universals theory allows us to understand, and to sympathize with, the notion that laws of nature govern particular states of affairs. Because of the imperfect analogy between social law and law of nature, it is clear that there must be an element of metaphor in this notion. But if the Regularity theory is correct then the metaphor is totally misleading, a mere product of metaphysical confusion embedded in ordinary speech and thought. But if laws of nature are relations between universals (and are universals), then the laws do have a relative independence from the states which instantiate them. This explains the bite of the metaphor” (1983, p. 106). It seems to me that Armstrong cannot have it both ways: either Universals exist independently of states of affairs and therefore can be said to govern the states that fall under them or they do not exist independently and therefore cannot be said to govern the states from which they are abstracted in the first place.
Bigelow/Ellis/Lierse (2004, p. 150–151) provide another useful analogy: “Take the board [of chess] to represent the basic structure of the universe (including its space-time structure, its symmetries, and the conservation laws), the pieces to represent physical entities, and the rules of the game to represent the laws governing the relations between these entities. One salient feature of this picture is that there does not appear to be any logical connection between the matter in the world and the laws that govern its behaviour. It is possible that the rules for chess could have been formulated so that the legal moves for the rook, for instance, required that it moved only in a diagonal direction. The fact that it is the bishop which moves in this particular way is just a contingent fact about the game—it is logically possible that the rules could have been otherwise. In fact, if the rules are imposed on the pieces from above (as by irreducible, necessary relations), it can be seen that the way the rook moves has nothing to do with its essential nature. [...] This is like an image of God calling forth the subatomic zoo, letting there be a space-time to house it, and then sitting down to formulate the laws governing their interactions.”
I can only provide a glimpse of the analysis and justification of the dispositional account of laws of nature. Cf. Mumford (2008); Bird (2009), Unger (2006, p. 100–144), Ellis (2001), Martin (2010, p. 44), Heil (2005); McKitrick (2005), and Bigelow/Ellis/Lierse (2004) for an analysis of dispositions and their relations, conceptual and metaphysical, to laws of nature and law statements.
Cf. Cross (2005, p. 322): “It is thought that having a disposition entails some non-trivial subjunctive conditional. If an object has a disposition (e.g., fragility) then there are some activation conditions (jarring) such that if the object were in those conditions, some further conditions manifesting the disposition (breaking) would obtain.” Lewis (1997, p. 157) provides a more technical definition of a disposition: “Something x is disposed at time to give response r to stimulus s iff, for some intrinsic property B that x has at t, for some time t’ after t, if x were to undergo stimulus s at time t and retain property B until t’, s and x’s having of B would jointly be an x-complete cause of x’s giving response r.”
Cf. Mumford (2005, p. 409): “There is something unacceptable about the concept core of the notion of a law of nature. It suggests that the world’s properties are governed externally. There has still been no acceptable account of how this might occur.”
Again, both the Humean and the anti-Humean metaphysics of laws of nature fail to take into account the very entities the laws are said to be concerned with. Cf. in respect to Humean accounts Mumford (2008, p. 230): “Laws, qua true generalities, if they exist at all, are ontologically parasitic upon the capacities of particulars, rather than the other way round. [...] particulars do not do things because there are laws; there are laws because there are things that particulars (can) do. Put another way, the Humean understands the dispositions of things to be supervenient upon laws; the dispositionalist takes laws to be supervenient upon dispositions.” Cf. in respect to anti-Humean accounts (Bigelow et al. 2004, p. 147): “On the [anti-Humean] account, laws are viewed as correlations between the properties or the behaviour patterns of various kinds of things in the world, and their necessity is explained by the existence of certain ‘necessary’ second-order relations between the universals that are correlated. Thus, the direction of explanation is from the top-down, so to speak, from the second-order relations to the first-order correlations.”
Cf. also Armstrong (2005, p. 312): “Given all the powers, you are given the laws.” Cf. also Drewery (2005, p. 381): “Recently a radical view has gained popularity. This is that [...] the laws of nature hold of metaphysical necessity, that is, they could not be otherwise, and that this is because they follow, in some sense, from the natures of the kinds or properties involved in them. Thus these laws could not be different unless the world contained different kinds of things.”
I remember having read a discussion concerning the possibility that the laws of nature might have been different closely after the Big-bang singularity. Unfortunately, I do not remember where I have read that. However, if my memory is trustworthy, then the dispositional account could account for this simply by way of assuming that the natural kinds in the actual world used to have different dispositions. Based on the dispositional account, we can understand that laws of nature are not of necessity eternal, that is, that they are not “absolutely changeless and universally operative” (Ward 2002, p. 746).
In what follows, I ignore questions concerning God’s conservation and continuous creation of everything that exists. Plantinga suggests the following definition of divine intervention, which fits to our purpose (although Plantinga is not satisfied with it because he is interested in a conception of special divine action that does not entail intervention): “God intervenes if and only if he performs an action A thereby causing an event E that (a) goes beyond conservation and creation, and (b) is such that if he had not performed A, E would not have occurred” (Plantinga 2011, p. 112).
My account is to close to van Inwagen’s account. Cf. Inwagen (1995, p. 44): “Now suppose that God occasionally (and only momentarily) supplied a few particles with causal powers different from their normal powers. Such an action would cause a certain part of the natural world to diverge from the course that part of the world would have taken if He had continued to supply the particles in that part of the world with the usual complement of causal powers. [...] For example, imagine that God momentarily supplies unusual causal powers to the particles composing the water in a certain pot, in such a way that those particles (in virtue of their momentarily abnormal effects on one another) follow trajectories through the void that they would not normally have followed, and that, as a consequence, they rearrange themselves into the configuration we call ‘wine’—at which moment God revers to His usual policy and continues to supply each of the particles with its normal causal powers.”
I thus disagree with Alston (1999, p. 187): “The traditional view is that God acts to bring about, at particular times and places, states of affairs that would not have been realized (in that form) if only natural causal factors had been operative. This directly contradicts the thesis that every state of affairs is determined to be just what it is by (exclusively) natural causes. We can’t have it both ways.”
I take van Inwagen’s definition of chance to be a definition of epistemological chance: ,,A chance event, in other words, is one such that, if someone asks of it, ‘Why did that happen?’ the only right answer is: ‘There is no reason or explanation; it just happened” (Inwagen 1995, p. 50).
Cf. Nagel (1961, p. 334): “The main outcome of this discussion is that saying an event ‘happens by chance’ is not in general incompatible with asserting the event to be determined, except when ‘happening by chance’ is understood to mean that the event has no determining conditions for its occurrence.” Cf. also Bartholemew (2008, p. 155) has in mind what I call ontological chance when he says the following: “We come again to the problem of saying how genuinely random events can be caused if they are truly random.”
Russell The positive grounds for an alleged divine action are theological, not scientific. This hypothesis is not drawn from science even though it claims to be consistent with science. Science would not be expected to include anything explicitly about God’s action in nature as part of its scientific explanation of the world. Theology, however, in its explanation of the world, can and should include both.”
Research for this article was made possible through the grant Creation at Random? Indeterminism as a Challenge to Theism, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI (USA). I am grateful to an anonymous referee, Alexander Norman, Dennis F. Polis, Stephen Priest, Anna Sindermann, Christian Tapp and Christian Weidemann for useful discussions of the matters involved.
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Göcke, B.P. Did god do it? Metaphysical models and theological hermeneutics. Int J Philos Relig 78, 215–231 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-014-9489-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-014-9489-7