Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (11 page)

Clearly, both of these claims deserve to be taken with a grain or two of salt. First, I, personally, have met people—physicists, for example—who participate in the modern world of science intellectually and existentially (if I understand what it is to participate in a world “existentially”), but nevertheless believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, that Jesus fed the five thousand and turned water into wine, that there are miraculous healings, that both angels and even Satan and his minions are active in the world, and so on. (Furthermore, it is likely that many of these physicists have a rather better grasp of the physics of radio transmission—not to mention subsequent developments—than Bultmann and his theological allies.) Indeed, if the
relevant polls are to be trusted, some 40 percent of contemporary American scientists believe in a personal God who answers prayers—a percentage that has remained stable since 1916.
¹²
At the least, Bultmann and Gilkey seem a little optimistic about the extent to which their beliefs are shared—could it be that they are generalizing on the basis of an unrepresentative sample, themselves and their friends, perhaps?
¹³
And, second, one suspects they underestimate their own powers. If they tried really hard, they could probably stop just assuming the existence of an unbroken causal nexus in the world, a nexus that precludes special divine action, and instead ask themselves whether there is really any reason to think this assumption
true
.

Still, what they claim is that proper respect for modern science implies hands-off theology. And it isn’t only theologians who hold this view (of course I don’t mean to suggest that
all
or even
most
theologians agree with Bultmann and his friends). According to philosopher Philip Clayton, “Science has created a challenge to theology by its remarkable ability to explain and predict natural phenomena. Any theological system that ignores the picture of the world painted by scientific results is certain to be regarded with suspicion.” Well, fair enough; so far no problem. But Clayton goes on:

Science is often identified with determinism. In a purely deterministic universe there would be no room for God to work in the world except through the sort of miraculous intervention that Hume–and many of his readers–found to be so
insupportable.
Thus many, both inside and outside of theology, have abandoned any doctrine of divine action as incompatible with the natural sciences
.
¹⁴

Many scientists would concur. In addition to those dancing on the lunatic fringe such as Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins, there are perfectly reasonable scientists who reject the idea of special divine action in the world. For example, in 2004 H. Allen Orr wrote a critical review of Richard Dawkins’s book
The Devil’s Chaplin
in which he suggested that Dawkins was too hard on religion.
¹⁵
In a letter to the editor, physiologist Carter Bancroft claimed that religion really was a danger to science because of the miracles religions claim. In his reply, Orr concurred: “It is not that some sects of one religion invoke miracles but that many sects of many religions do. (Moses, after all, parted the waters and Krishna healed the sick.) I agree of course that no sensible scientists can tolerate such exceptionalism with respect to the laws of nature.”
¹⁶
(Of course, if miracles really do occur, it won’t make a whole lot of difference whether scientists, sensible or not, are prepared to tolerate them; it really isn’t up to them.)

The problem, then, as these people see it, is this. Science discovers and endorses natural laws; if God did miracles or acted specially in the world, he would have to contravene these laws and miraculously intervene; and that is incompatible with science. Religion and science, therefore, are in conflict, which does not bode well for religion.

But is all this really true?

Bultmann and his friends are evidently thinking in terms of classical science: Newtonian mechanics and the later physics of electricity and magnetism. (Gilkey mentions eighteenth-century science and philosophy.) This is the physics of Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, and the physics of electricity and magnetism represented by Maxwell’s equations. This is the physics of the great conservation laws, the conservation of momentum, for example (which follows from Newton’s third law) and most essentially and most generally, the conservation of energy, especially as developed in the second half of the nineteenth century.
¹⁷

And of course Newtonian mechanics and classical science have been enormously influential. As Alexander Pope put it in his famous epitaph for Newton,

Nature and nature’s law lay hidden in night;
God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.

But classical science, just by itself, is nowhere nearly sufficient for anti-interventionism or hands-off theology. What’s really at issue, rather, is a
Weltanschauung
, a sort of world picture suggested by classical science, endorsed by many influential eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures, and still accepted by these theologians. Or rather, there are least two importantly different pictures here.

First, there is the Newtonian picture properly so-called. This picture represents the world (or at any rate the material universe) as a vast
machine evolving or operating according to fixed laws: the laws of classical physics. These laws can be thought of as reflecting the very natures of the things God has created, so that (for example) it is part of the very nature of material particles and objects composed of them to attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Alternatively, we can think of matter as more tractable, and take the laws to be God’s decrees as to how it shall in fact behave. In either case, we consider the universe as a whole—the material universe, anyway—as a collection including material particles and the things made of them, evolving according to the laws of classical mechanics. Theologically, the idea is that the world is a great divine mechanical artifact that runs according to the fixed laws of classical science, the laws prescribed for it by God.
¹⁸
The world is mechanical in that the laws of physics are sufficient to describe its behavior; no additional laws—of chemistry or biology, for example—are needed, and if there are such laws, they are reducible (in a sense that never became very clear) to the laws of physics. On this picture, classical physics is in that respect complete. It is worth noting, of course, that it is no part of classical science as such to claim that physics
is
in this sense complete; this is a pious hope, or a philosophical add-on, or both, even if one that is at least rather naturally suggested by the success of physics.

But the Newtonian picture is nowhere nearly sufficient for hands-off theology. First, Newton himself (one hopes) accepted the Newtonian picture, but he didn’t accept hands-off theology. He believed that God providentially guides the world. He also believed that God regularly adjusts the orbits of the planets; according to his calculations, their orbits would otherwise spiral off into chaos. More
important, however: according to Newton and classical mechanics, natural laws describe how the world works
when, or provided that the world is a closed (isolated) system, subject to no outside causal influence
.
¹⁹
In classical physics, the great conservation laws deduced from Newton’s laws are stated for
closed
or
isolated
systems. Thus Sears and Zemanski’s standard text
University Physics
: “This is the
principle of
conservation of linear momentum:
When
no resultant external force
acts on a system
, the total momentum of the system remains constant in magnitude and direction.” They add that “
the internal energy of an isolated system remains constant
. This is the most general statement of
the principle of conservation of energy
.”
²⁰

These principles, therefore, apply to
isolated
or
closed
systems. If so, however, there is nothing in them to prevent God from changing the velocity or direction of a particle. If he did so, obviously, energy would not be conserved in the system in question; but equally obviously, that system would not be closed, in which case the principle of conservation of energy would not apply to it. Indeed, there is nothing here to prevent God from miraculously parting the Red Sea, or changing water into wine, or bringing someone back to life, or, for
that matter, creating
ex nihilo
a full-grown horse in the middle of Times Square. It is entirely possible for God to create a full-grown horse in the middle of Times Square without violating the principle of conservation of energy. That is because the systems including the horse would not be closed or isolated. For that very reason, there would be no violation of the principle of conservation of energy, which says only that energy is conserved in closed or causally isolated systems—ones not subject to any outside causal influence. It says nothing at all about conservation of energy in systems that are
not
closed; and, of course, if God created a horse
ex nihilo
in Times Square, no system containing that horse, including the whole of the material universe, would be closed.

Furthermore, it is no part of Newtonian mechanics or classical science generally to declare that the material universe
is
a closed system. You won’t find that claim in physics textbooks—naturally enough, because that claim isn’t physics, but a theological or metaphysical add-on. (How could this question of the causal closure of the physical universe be addressed by scientific means?)

Classical science, therefore, doesn’t assert or include causal closure. The laws, furthermore, describe how things go when the universe is causally closed, subject to no outside causal influence. They don’t purport to tell us how things
always
go; they tell us, instead, how things go when no agency outside the universe acts in it. They tell us how things go when the universe (apart from divine conservation) is causally closed. John Mackie (himself no friend of theism) put it like this:

What we want to do here is to contrast the order of nature with a possible divine or supernatural intervention. The laws of nature, we must say, describe the ways in which the world—including, of course, human beings—works when left to itself, when not interfered with. A miracle occurs when the world is not left to
itself, when something distinct from the natural order as a whole intrudes into it.
²¹

If we think of the laws of nature as describing how the universe works when the universe is causally closed (when God isn’t acting specially in the world), they would be of the following form:

(LN) When the universe is causally closed (when God is not acting specially in the world), P.

For example, Newton’s law of gravity would go as follows:

(G) When the universe is causally closed, any two material objects attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Note that on (LN), the currently canonical account of determinism implies that determinism is false. According to that account, determinism holds just if the natural laws conjoined with the state of the universe at any one time entails the state of the universe at any other time. A bit more exactly: let “L” be the conjunction of the natural laws, and S(
t
) and S(
t*
) be the states of the universe at any times
t
and
t*
: then,

Necessarily, for any
t
and
t*
, if L & S(
t
), then S(
t*
).
²²

(If we wish to accommodate the intuition that it is the past that determines the future, we may add, “such that
t
precedes
t*
.”) It is worth noting that if the above account of natural law is correct, determinism so understood is false and indeed necessarily false. For suppose determinism is true. According to (LN), a natural law is of the form

If the universe (call it “U”) is causally closed, then P.

Take the conjunction of the natural laws to be

If U is causally closed, then P,

where now P is the conjunction of the consequents of all the laws. Let “PAST” denote a specific past state of the universe. Now suppose determinism is true. Then

(1) (If U is causally closed, then P) and PAST

entails

F (the future (the actual future)),

that is, (using ‘N’ to mean ‘Necessarily’),

(2) N (if (1) then F).

(2) is equivalent to

(3) N [if (if U is causally closed then P) and PAST, then F],

that is,

(4) N [if (either U is not causally closed or P) and PAST, then F],

that is,

(5) N {if [(PAST and P) or (PAST and U is not causally closed)] then F}.

(5) is of the form

N if (p or q) then r;

but then each of p and q entail r; hence

(6) N [if (PAST and P) then F] and N[if (PAST and U is not causally closed) then F].