Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (10 page)

The Enlightenment case against supernaturalism, therefore, has little to be said for it; the various strands of this case have been examined at length, and for a very long time, and they have been found wanting. In the present case, furthermore, the Enlightenment case isn’t really relevant; we are thinking about the bearing of evolutionary theory on religious belief, but the Enlightenment case against supernaturalism has little to do either with evolution or with science more generally.

In this chapter and the one previous, we have been looking into the claim that current scientific evolutionary theory is incompatible
with Christian belief. This claim, as we saw, is false. The scientific theory of evolution as such is not incompatible with Christian belief; what is incompatible with it is the idea that evolution, natural selection, is
unguided
. But that idea isn’t part of evolutionary theory as such; it’s instead a metaphysical or theological addition. In the next chapter we’ll look into another alleged area of conflict: that between science and special divine action.

Our topic is alleged conflict between religion and science. In the last two chapters we examined one claim along these lines: the claim that current evolutionary theory is incompatible with Christian belief. This claim, as we saw, has little to be said for it.

We turn now to quite a different allegation of conflict. Religious belief in general and Christian belief in particular is committed to the belief that God
acts in the world
; but this belief is somehow incompatible, so some claim, with contemporary science.

Now Christians do indeed believe that God acts in the world. Most would concur with the Heidelberg Catechism:

Providence is the almighty and ever present power of God by which he upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty—all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but from his fatherly hand.
¹

Most Christians have concurred, that is, with the thought that God
acts
in the world he has created; and many other theists, Muslims and
Jews for example, would agree with this sentiment, even if they are less than enthusiastic about the Heidelberg Catechism.

But why should this be a problem? Here we need a bit of background. According to Christian and theistic views of God, he is a
person
. He is thus a being who has knowledge; he also has affections (he loves some things, hates others); he has ends and aims, and acts on the basis of his knowledge to achieve his ends. Furthermore, God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good. These properties are essential to him: it isn’t possible that he should fail to have them. (Philosophers would state this by saying that he has these properties in every possible world in which he exists.) Still further, God is a necessary being. Philosophers would state this by saying that God exists in every possible world; therefore he has the properties of being all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good in every possible world. God is therefore a necessarily existent concrete being (and the only necessarily existent concrete being).

Second, God has created our world. He may have done it in many different ways; he may have employed many different means; he may have done it all at once, or in stages; he may have done it relatively recently, or, more likely (given current science) billions of years ago. However he did it, Christians and other theists believe that he has in fact done it. Furthermore, he has created it “out of nothing.” This is not, of course, the absurd suggestion that “nothing” names a sort of substance or material or gunk—perhaps extremely thin and gossamer—out of which God fashioned the world; it is instead simply the denial that there was any such pre-existing material out of which God made the world.

Third, God
conserves
the world, sustains it in being. Apart from his sustaining hand, our universe—and if there are other universes, the same goes for them—would disappear like a candle flame in a high wind. Descartes and Jonathan Edwards, indeed, thought of this divine sustenance as a matter of re-creation: at every moment God
recreates his world. Maybe so, maybe not. The present point is only that God does indeed sustain his world in being, and, apart from that sustaining, supporting activity, the world would simply fail to exist. Some, including Thomas Aquinas, go even further: every causal transaction that takes place is such that God performs a special act of
concurring
with it; without that divine concurrence, no causal transaction could take place.
²

Fourth, according to the Heidelberg Catechism (and again, classical theists of all stripes would agree) God so governs the world that whatever happens is to be thought of as “coming from his fatherly hand”; he either causes or permits whatever does in fact happen; none of it is to be thought of as a result of mere chance.
³
And this governing—“ruling,” as the Catechism has it—comes in at least two parts. First of all, God governs the world in such a way that it displays regularity and predictability. Day follows night and night follows day; when there is rain and sun, plants grow; bread is good to eat but mud is not; if you drop a rock from a cliff top, it will fall down, not up. It is only because of this regularity that we can build a house, design and manufacture automobiles and aircraft, cure strep throat, raise crops, or pursue scientific projects. Indeed, it is only because of this regularity that we can act in any way at all.

According to Christian belief, however, it is also true that God sometimes does things differently; he sometimes deviates from the usual way in which he treats the stuff he has made. Examples would be miracles: in the Old Testament, the parting of the Red Sea; in the New Testament, Jesus’ changing water into wine, walking on water, restoring a blind man’s sight, raising Lazarus, and, towering above all, Jesus himself rising from the dead.

Miracles are not the only examples of God’s special action. Most Christians would endorse something like John Calvin’s “Internal Witness of the Holy Spirit” and Thomas Aquinas’s “Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit.”
⁴
“The believer,” says Aquinas, “has sufficient motive for believing, for he is moved by the authority of divine teaching confirmed by miracles and, what is more,
by the inward instigation of the divine invitation
.”
⁵
So Aquinas and Calvin concur in the thought that God does something special in enabling Christians to see the truth of the central teachings of the gospel; the Holy Spirit gets them to see the “great truths of the gospel,” as Jonathan Edwards calls them. This too would be action beyond creation and conservation, although presumably not miraculous, if only because it is so widespread.

In short, God regularly causes events in the world. Divine action of this sort is action beyond creation and conservation; we could think of it as
special
divine action.

Several theologians, curiously enough, have thought there is a serious problem in this neighborhood. In 1961, Langdon Gilkey wrote a widely influential article lamenting the condition of Biblical theology. The problem, as he put it, is that theologians speak the language of divine action in the world, the language of miracle and divine intervention. God has done wonderful things, so they say: he parted the Red Sea so that the children of Israel could pass through on dry ground, he sent them manna in the wilderness; he made the sun stand still. Jesus turned water into wine, fed a multitude with just five loaves and two fish, raised Lazarus from the dead, and was himself raised from the dead.

So far so good: where exactly is the problem? The problem, he says, is that modern theologians (Gilkey apparently includes himself) don’t really believe that God
did
any of those things—or, indeed, that he did anything at all:

Thus contemporary theology does not expect, nor does it speak of, 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.
⁶

These theologians, says Gilkey, speak the language of divine action, but they don’t actually believe that God has acted: thus there is a lamentable hiatus between what they say (at least straightforwardly construed) and what they believe.

Other theologians agree that God does not act in the world. For example, Rudolph Bultmann asserts that:

The historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect. [This continuum, furthermore,] cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers.
⁷

Bultmann apparently believes that no supernatural powers, not even God himself, can interfere with this closed continuum of cause and effect. He seems to endorse something like the Medes and Persians’ conception of natural law: God has perhaps created the world and established the way it works; perhaps he has ordained
and promulgated the natural laws; but once he has done so, not even he can act in that world.
⁸
We can add Bultmann’s most famous comment: “it is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”
⁹

John Macquarrie also agrees:

The way of understanding miracle that appeals to breaks in the natural order and to supernatural interventions belongs to the mythological outlook and cannot commend itself in a post-mythological climate of thought…. 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.
¹⁰

I reported Gilkey as saying that the theologians of whom he speaks don’t believe that God does anything at all in the world; but this isn’t quite accurate. These theologians don’t object to the idea that God creates and sustains the world. Their view is therefore entirely compatible with God’s acting in such a way as to preserve it in being. Where they have difficulty is with the claim that God does or has done anything
in addition to
creating the world and sustaining it in existence; creation and preservation, they think (or fear, or suspect) exhaust the divine activity. They have no objection to the thought that God has created the world, and works in it at a general level to preserve and sustain it; their objection is to the idea that God sometimes does something special, something beyond creation and preservation (and concurrence), something like changing water into wine, or feeding five thousand with a few loaves and fishes, or raising someone from the dead. It is
special
divine action that, from their point of view, is the problem. And when they speak of special divine action, they are thinking, among other things, of what are commonly called miracles (those “mighty acts”), and of divine
intervention
in the world. Their idea is that God couldn’t or wouldn’t do a thing like that. According to Bultmann, a divinely caused miracle or any other special divine action would constitute God’s “interfering” in the world; and that, he says, can’t happen. Bultmann’s idea, shared by the others I mentioned and many others, is what we might call “hand-off theology”: God creates the world and upholds it, but for the rest can’t or at least doesn’t act in it; he steps aside and lets it evolve according to the laws he has set for it.

But what’s the problem with special divine action? Why should anyone object to it? Why do these theologians think that the causal continuum “cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers,” that appeal to supernatural activity “cannot commend itself in a post-mythological climate of thought,” and that “no wondrous divine events occur on the surface of natural and historical life”? In a word (or two): incompatibility with modern science.
Modern science, they think, shows, or perhaps assumes, or presupposes, that God does not act in that way. As Gilkey puts it, “modern theologians and scholars participate in the world of science,” and because they do, they can’t help but think of creation as a closed continuum of cause and effect, closed to intervention or interference on the part of beings outside that continuum, including God himself. As he says, “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.”
¹¹
The thought seems to be that one who participates in the modern world of science both intellectually and existentially cannot help believing that God (if there is such a person) never acts specially or intervenes in the world. And according to Bultmann, someone who avails herself of modern medicine and the wireless (not to mention, I suppose, television, computers, electric scooters, and smart phones that do everything but mow your lawn) simply can’t also believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.