Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (14 page)

According to George Ellis, another prominent member of this group,

Nevertheless it seems probable that fixed laws of behavior of matter, independent of interference by a Creator or any other agency, is a requisite basis of existence of independent beings able to exercise free will, for they make possible meaningful complex organized activity without outside interference (physical laws providing a determinate frame within which definite local causal relations are possible). Thus we envisage the Creator choosing such a framework for the universe (thus giving up all the other possibilities allowed by the power available to him, such as the power to directly intervene in events by overruling the laws of physics from time to time).
¹²

Elsewhere Ellis goes on:

The problem of allowing miraculous intervention, to turn water into wine, to heal the sick, to raise the dead… is that this involves either a suspension or alteration of the natural order. Thus the question arises as to why this happens so seldom. If this is allowed at all to achieve some good, why is it not allowed all the time, to assuage my toothache as well as the evils of Auschwitz?
¹³

He adds that what we need, in order to understand divine action of this sort, is a criterion:

What one would like here—if one is to make sense of the idea of miracles—is some kind of rock-solid criterion of choice underlying such decisions to act in a miraculous manner, for if there is the necessity to hold to these laws during times of the persecutions and Hitler’s Final Solution, during famines and floods, in order that morality be possible, then how can it be that sometimes this iron necessity can fade away and allow turning water to wine or the raising of Lazarus?
¹⁴

Finally, Nicholas Saunders explains why Philip Hefner, another member of the group, objects to intervention: “He feels it challenges the concepts of divine faithfulness and self-consistency: how can God uphold the laws of nature with one hand, whilst simultaneously overriding them by performing miracles with the other?”
¹⁵

So how shall we understand these objections to intervention? What exactly (or even approximately) is the problem? I’m not quite
sure, but the authors quoted seem to see essentially three problems; I’ll say just a bit about each. First, there is that connection with the problem of evil noted by Ellis: “The problem of allowing miraculous intervention,” he says, is that if God intervenes some of the time—for example, raising Jesus from the dead, parting the Red Sea—why doesn’t he intervene more often, “to assuage my toothache as well as the evils of Auschwitz?”
¹⁶
I begin with a small protest: Ellis speaks of the “problem of allowing miraculous intervention.” But of course that isn’t actually a problem for us (or anyone else); it isn’t up to us whether or not to allow miraculous intervention. God will intervene, miraculously or otherwise, if and when he sees fit.

What Ellis means, of course, is that we can’t
sensibly suppose
that God intervenes unless we have “some kind of rock-solid criterion of choice underlying such decisions to act in a miraculous manner”—that is, unless we have a rock-solid criterion saying when God would intervene and when he wouldn’t. Surely that’s demanding too much? God will intervene (if that’s the right word) when he has a good reason for doing so; but why suppose we human beings would be in a position to know when he does and when he doesn’t? Perhaps we are in a position like the Biblical Job; what happened to him was a result of mysterious transactions among beings some of whom were wholly unknown to him. Couldn’t something similar hold for us? True; perhaps we can’t say what God’s reason is for intervening (if that’s the right word) in raising Lazarus from the dead and not intervening at Auschwitz; but why should that incline us to think he never
intervenes at all? It’s not as if, if he has such a reason, we’d be the first to know. His options and possibilities are far beyond our ken; his ways are “past finding out”; we can hardly expect to come up with a “rock-solid criterion” underlying God’s decisions to act.
¹⁷

Second, Ellis suggests that “fixed laws of behavior of matter, independent of interference by a Creator or any other agency, is a requisite basis of existence of independent beings able to exercise free will.” The idea seems to be that if the creator “interfered” in the workings of the world, we couldn’t exercise free will.
¹⁸
Again, first a protest. “Interfering” is clearly pejorative: one who interferes, meddles in something where he has no business, and should therefore be ashamed of himself.
¹⁹
But God is the creator and sustainer of the world; it’s really his world. So how could he be “interfering” or “meddling” by acting in it? What Ellis means, I take it, is that if God (often?) intervened in our world, we wouldn’t be able to make sensible decisions as to what to do. What’s at issue here is not so much freedom; Ellis’s point, I take it, is that if God constantly intervened, the regularities we must rely on in deciding how to act would be absent. (If God often and unaccountably turned automobiles into small elephants, for example, it would be much more difficult to drive to the grocery store.)

Is Ellis right? First, what counts with respect to the possibility of intelligent free action isn’t really the absence of divine intervention; it is rather
regularity
and
predictability
. (Predictability by the free creatures in question.) Intelligent free action would not be possible in a world without regularity and predictability, even if God never
intervened in it; such action
would
be possible in a world in which God often intervened, provided he did so in a regular and predictable way. Suppose, for example, that God always performed a miraculous healing whenever a witch doctor did a certain dance: this might enhance rather than compromise intelligent free action.

For purposes of argument, however, let’s temporarily assume that divine intervention always introduces irregularity. Still, isn’t it much too strong to suppose that if God sometimes intervenes in the world, intelligent free action just wouldn’t be possible? What’s required for free action is that there be enough regularity for us to know or sensibly conjecture—at least for the most part and with reasonably high probability—what will happen if we freely choose to take a given action. Ric is rock climbing; he’s half way up a vertical 150-foot face, ten feet above his last protection, and it looks as if it’s another ten feet to the next protection point; so if he fell just before reaching that point, he’d drop at least 40 feet before the rope stopped him. (In fact more, because of slack in the system, rope stretch, possible inattention on the part of his belayer, et cetera.) To decide whether to carry on or retreat, he must be able to form a decent opinion as to how likely it is that he will fall there, and on what will happen if he does fall there: will he hit a ledge on the way down? Will his top protection pull out, so that he’ll plunge still farther? If he has no answer at all to these questions, he can’t make a sensible decision as to whether to back off.

For him to be able to make a sensible decision, however, it isn’t required that God never intervene in the world’s workings. Suppose Ric thinks someone has been miraculously healed or even raised from the dead: that obviously doesn’t mean that he can’t make a sensible decision here. More to the point, suppose he thinks God sometimes intervenes in situations like the one he is in, perhaps causing a piece of protection to hold that would otherwise have failed: again, his so thinking in no way means that he can’t make a sensible decision.
Here Ric is acting under uncertainty, and the best he can do is an educated guess. But even in cases where we are very sure what will happen, sensible free action does not require that God never intervene. Ric reaches the top; the fastest way down would be to jump; he’s not tempted, though, because he knows a 150-foot fall would kill or injure him. Now suppose he also believes that God occasionally intervenes, causing someone who takes such a fall to survive unhurt; that still won’t tempt him to jump. All that’s required for purposeful free action is reasonable confidence in substantial regularity in the neighborhood of the proposed action. And that’s certainly compatible with God’s sometimes intervening.
²⁰

The third objection—what we might call “the divine consistency objection”—is apparently the one most widely urged by the members of the Divine Action Project. Paul Tillich, himself no member of the DAP, puts it in engaging if Delphic form: “Miracles cannot be interpreted in terms of supranatural interference in natural processes. If such an interpretation were true, the manifestation of the ground of being would destroy the structure of being; God would be split within himself.”
²¹
As we saw above, Wildman speaks of “theological consistency” and “coming dangerously close to outright contradiction” in this connection, and (according to Nicholas Saunders), Philip Hefner objects to intervention because he believes that it “challenges the concepts of divine faithfulness and self-consistency.” Peacocke suggests that God’s intervening in the order of nature creates problems for a rationally coherent belief in God as the creator of that order; and several of the members of DAP concur in the question “how can God
uphold the laws of nature with one hand, whilst simultaneously overriding them by performing miracles with the other?”
²²

Now the members of the DAP, unlike Bultmann and the hands-off theologians, are of course perfectly aware of the quantum revolution, perfectly well aware of the ways in which quantum science has undermined Laplacean determinism. Nevertheless, they still seem to display a decided list in the Laplacean direction: Clayton speaks of God’s “breaking” natural laws, and Saunders, just quoted, speaks of “overriding” the laws of nature by performing miracles. As I argued earlier, however, it’s exceedingly difficult to see how God could override or “break” natural laws by miraculous healings or raising someone from the dead; under the new picture it’s doubtful that these things are precluded by quantum mechanical laws, even if we set aside the proviso according to which these laws apply only to closed systems. How, then, are we to understand this consistency problem? The picture seems to be that of God’s establishing a world with certain regularities, and then occasionally acting contrary to those regularities. He creates and governs the world in such a way that water ordinarily doesn’t change into wine, people don’t typically walk on water, and dead people usually don’t come back to life. Indeed, these things hardly ever happen. But then, very occasionally, God acts in a way that goes contrary to those regularities: Jesus turns water into wine, walks on water, raises Lazarus from the dead and is himself raised from the dead on the third day. And this is thought to be
inconsistent
: God doesn’t always act in the relevantly same way: he doesn’t always treat the stuff he has made in the same way.

Here the objection, obviously, is theological. It has nothing to do with science. The idea is that God simply wouldn’t do such a thing; this sort of action is inconsistent with his unfathomable augustness and unsurpassable greatness. As the late Ernan McMullin put it,

The Creator whose powers are gradually revealed in these texts [Genesis, Job, Isaiah, Psalms] is omnipotent and all-wise, far beyond the reach of human reckoning. His Providence extends to all His creatures; they are all part of His single plan, only a fragment of which we know, and that darkly. Would such a being be likely to “intervene” in the cosmic process, that is, deal in two different manners with it?
²³

Intervening, so the claim goes, would make God fall into inconsistency—not the sort of inconsistency involved in asserting inconsistent propositions, but the kind involved in, for example, sometimes treating one of your spouse’s peccadilloes with patience and good humor and other times under relevantly similar circumstances responding with tight-lipped annoyance. The problem, here, would be something like caprice or arbitrariness; there is something arbitrary and whimsical in “dealing in two different manners” with the cosmic process.

This of course is a very large subject; obviously I don’t have the space to treat it with the care it deserves. Still, what, exactly, is wrong with the idea that God should intervene (again, supposing we knew what intervention is)? The suggestion is that God would display a sort of arbitrary inconsistency if he sometimes acted contrary to the regularities he has established for his world. But is this really true? There would be arbitrariness and inconsistency only if God had no special reason for acting contrary to the usual regularities; but of course he might very well have such reasons. This is obvious for the case of raising Jesus from the dead: God intends to mark the special status accruing to Jesus by this mighty act of raising him from the dead.

In other cases too, however, he might have reasons for “dealing in two different manners” with his cosmos; how could we be even reasonably sure that he doesn’t? Perhaps he aims to establish basic regularities, thus making science and free intelligent action possible for his creatures. But perhaps he also has good reason for sometimes acting contrary to those regularities: to mark special occasions, for example, or to make clear his love or his power, or to authorize what someone says, or to guide history in a certain direction. Why should any of this be in any way incompatible with his unsurpassable greatness?

Well, many seem to think of God as like a classical artist, one who prizes economy, restraint, discipline. Thus Michael Murray, explaining the views of Leibniz and Malebranche:

There is something grand, beautiful, and artful about a universe which contains within it everything that is necessary in order for it to bring about the results God intends for it. God could cause every event that we see in the natural world directly. But a powerful and rational designer would… display his power and reason far more manifestly in a universe which is itself a machine-making machine. A universe which achieves the ends God has for it in this self-contained fashion does as much to express the glory of its creator as do the end-products of the creative process.
²⁴