Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (49 page)

3.
But what is “mere chance”? And is it even possible that something happen by chance in a world created by an all-powerful and all-knowing God?

4.
See Calvin,
Institutes of the Christian Religion
III, ii, 7; Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae
II-II q. 2, a.9; and see my
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 8.

5.
Summa Theologiae
II-II, q. 2, a. 9, reply ob. 3 (my emphasis). According to Aquinas, therefore, faith is produced in human beings by God’s action; “for since in assenting to the things of faith a person is raised above his own nature, he has this assent from a supernatural source influencing him; this source is God. The assent of faith, which is its principal act, therefore, has as its cause God, moving us inwardly through grace.”
ST
II-II, q. 6, a. 1,
respondeo
.

6.
Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology and the Travail of Biblical Language,”
Journal of Religion
41 (1961), p. 31. See also, e.g., Gordon Kaufman, “On the Meaning of ‘Act of God’,” in
God the Problem
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 134–35. Gilkey goes on to say that from this perspective the Bible becomes, not a description of God’s mighty acts, but a book of Hebrew interpretation: “the Bible is a book of the acts Hebrews believed God might have done and the words he might have said had he done and said them—but of course we recognize he did not” (p. 33).

In speaking of what “contemporary theology” does or doesn’t expect, Gilkey is obviously not speaking for all his contemporaries; there were (and are) many theologians who are vastly less impressed by the Enlightenment picture, some because they see that contemporary science has moved far beyond that picture. See this volume, chapter 4.

7.
Bultmann,
Existence and Faith
, ed. Schubert Ogden (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), pp. 291–92.

8.
Among the members of the court of King Darius, Daniel was the King’s favorite, which occasioned jealousy among the other courtiers. They knew that Daniel worshipped the God of Israel; they therefore persuaded King Darius to make it a crime to pray to anyone but King Darius himself (this may not have required excessive effort on their part); the penalty was being thrown into the lion’s den. Daniel continued to pray to God; the courtiers pointed this out to Darius, who was greatly distressed at the thought of throwing Daniel into the lion’s den. But the courtiers replied “Remember, O king, that according to the law of the Medes and Persians no decree or edict that the king issues can be changed”—not even by the king (Daniel 6:15).

9.
Bultmann,
New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings
selected, edited and translated by Schubert Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 4.

10.
Macquarrie,
Principles of Sacred Theology
, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), p. 248.

11.
Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology and the Travail of Biblical Language,” p. 291.

12.
E. J. Larson and L. Witham, “Scientists Still Keeping the Faith,”
Nature
386 (April 3, 1997), pp. 435–36.

13.
A less charitable explanation: these theologians suffer from disciplinary low self-esteem, want desperately to be accepted by the rest of the academic world, and thus adopt a more-secular-than-thou attitude. For another less charitable explanation, see my
Warranted Christian Belief
, pp. 404ff.

14.
Clayton,
God and Contemporary Science
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University press, 1997), p. 209; emphasis added.

15.
Orr, “A Passion for Evolution,”
New York Review of Books
, February 26, 2004.

16.
New York Review of Books
, May 13, 2004.

17.
See, e.g., Y. Elkana,
The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy
(London: Hutchinson, 1974), chapter 2.

18.
Although not (contrary to Leibniz) what we might call a
strictly
mechanical machine, i.e., a machine where all the forces operate by contact; Newtonian gravity, of course, is a force that acts at a distance.

19.
See William P. Alston, “God’s Action in the World, in
Divine Nature and Human Language
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 211–13, and “Divine Action, Human Freedom, and the Laws of Nature,”
Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature; Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action
, ed. by Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and C. J. Isham (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications, and Berkeley: The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1999), pp. 189–91. As some might now like to put it, the natural laws describe the material universe provided the time and space derivatives of the Lagrangian of the material universe considered as a physical system are zero.

20.
Sears and Zemanski,
University Physics
(Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1963), pp. 186, 415 (their emphasis). General relativity presents even more problems for conservation laws taken as objections to special divine action. According to physicist Robert Wald, “In general relativity there exists no meaningful local expression for gravitation stress-energy and thus there is no meaningful local energy conservation law which leads to a statement of energy conservation” (
General Relativity
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 70, note 6). Quoted in Robin Collins, “The Energy-Conservation Objection to Mind-body Dualism,”
American Philosophical Quarterly
vol. 45, no. 1 (January, 2008), p. 36. Collins explores in satisfying depth the bearing of general relativity on energy conservation.

21.
Mackie,
The Miracle of Theism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 19–20.

22.
It is by no means trivial to say just what a physical state of the universe
is
; on pain of triviality, we must suppose at least that a description of the state of the universe at a time
t
doesn’t implicitly refer to or describe the universe or parts of it at some other time
t*
. Thus, for example, S(
t
) couldn’t properly include the existence of a person described as the grandmother of someone born at
t*
(
t ≠ t*
); nor could S(
t
) include the laws holding then. Perhaps it would do to take the relevant description as a function assigning to each particle a mass, position and velocity.

23.
Taken as descriptive of the natural world. Theists also think of the laws prescriptively, as something like rules as prescribed for the world by God, who at creation says something like “Let it be that energy is conserved in causally closed systems!”

24.
Is there any conception of law on which it
is
possible that God “break” a law of nature? David Hume and David Lewis think of a law as an exceptionless generalization, one that (according to Lewis) displays a best combination of simplicity and strength; but then any generalization that gets “broken” wasn’t a law after all. If laws are exceptionless generalizations, then it isn’t possible for anyone, including God, to break what is in fact a law; what is not ruled out is the possibility of acting in such a way that a proposition which is in fact a law, would not have been one. The whole idea of breaking natural law seems to arise from an unhappy (if historically explicable) analogy between the moral law promulgated by God and the natural laws he ordains for his creation.

25.
Laplace,
A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
, tr. F. W. Truscott and E. L. Emory (New York: Dover, [1812] 1951), p. 4.

26.
Arthur Peacocke, “God’s Interaction with the World,”
Chaos and Complexity
, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy and Arthur Peacocke (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, and Berkeley: the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, second edition, 2000), p. 267. Peacocke refers, in this connection, to Michael Berry, “Breaking the Paradigms of Classical Physics from Within,” 1983 Cercy Symposium
Logique et Théorie des Catastrophes
.

27.
You might think causal closure, for Newtonian mechanics, implies determinism. That is because causal closure together with the conjunction of the laws taken as above, i.e., with the prefix “When God is not acting specially” is substantially equivalent to the conjunction of the laws with that prefix omitted; and the result is ordinarily taken to be a deterministic theory. This isn’t exactly right, however; in his
Primer on Determinism
(Dordrect and Boston: D. Reidel, 1986) John Earman shows that there are some special circumstances that violate determinism in Newtonian mechanics. Since these circumstances are extremely special (for example, space invader systems of particles that, coming from infinity, enter an empty space), I’ll proceed as if causal closure does imply determinism.

28.
See, for example, David Papineau, “The Rise of Physicalism” in
Physicalism and its Discontents
(Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2001), pp. 15, 17.

29.
Here I assume that the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition of free action. For the canonical version of the argument that freedom is incompatible with determinism, see Peter van Inwagen’s “Consequence Argument” in
An Essay on Free Will
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

30.
It isn’t only hands-off theology that we owe to the Laplacean picture; it is also (anachronism aside) partly responsible for the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. If the material universe is a closed system, there is no room for free human action. The material universe, of course, includes human bodies; and it is this picture of the material universe, including our own bodies, going its own merry way, each preceding state of it sufficient for the succeeding state, with no room in it for free human action, that absorbed Kant’s attention.

Of course Kant tried to solve the problem by a sort of radical segregation: causal closure reigns supreme in the phenomenal world; the noumenal realm, however, somehow permits or involves or underwrites human freedom. The details (and indeed the main lines) are a bit baroque and more than a bit obscure; what is of present interest, though, is that Kant’s problem was set by his endorsing the Laplacean picture. It is also worth noting that in his case, as in the case of the hands-off theologians, it isn’t at all the physics or the classical science as such that sets the problem: the difficulty really arises from the assumption of the causal closure of the physical.

31.
See (among many others) Richard Swinburne,
The Evolution of the Soul
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Foster,
The Immaterial Self
, and my “Against Materialism,”
Faith and Philosophy
23:1 (January 2006), pp. 3–32, and “Materialism and Christian Belief (above, footnote 2, p. 67).”

1.
For present purposes I suggest we understand quantum mechanics
realistically
: that is, take the theory as an effort to describe the world (as opposed, e.g., to an attempt to come up with a theory that is empirically adequate, whether or not true). This is a nontrivial suggestion; given the weird, fitful, intermittent, shadowy, evanescent, nature of the quantum world, anti-realism of the sort proposed by Bas van Fraassen is certainly attractive. See, e.g., his
The Scientific Image
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

2.
Maudlin,
Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics
, ed. Dean Zimmerman and Michael Loux (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 461. Maudlin gives a particularly clear and cogent explanation of the essentials of quantum mechanics and the relation between the quantum mechanical formalism and its interpretations.

3.
So, at any rate, the usual story goes. Not all is well with this story, however; there are certain exceptions. See the caveat in footnote 27 of the last chapter.

4.
Things are complicated by the fact that there are interpretations of or, better, approaches to QM that are said to be deterministic; the best known of these is Bohmian mechanics. Since Bohmian mechanics is empirically equivalent to QM
simpliciter
, it is also indeterministic in the same sense as QM
simpliciter
: it predicts, not specific outcomes, but statistical patterns of probabilities. But it is deterministic in another sense, in that it postulates a further law (the “guiding equation”) that together with the Schrödinger equation for the universe and the initial configuration of mass/energy at the beginning of the universe (and given causal closure of the physical) completely determines its subsequent states. Of course that initial configuration isn’t available to us.

5.
We could put this more exactly as follows. Let L be the conjunction of the consequents of the laws; L is not incompatible with special divine action.

6.
Personal communication from John Earman, August 9, 2007.

7.
Personal communication from Bradley Monton, August 8, 2007.

8.
I take the name from Wesley Wildman, “The Divine Action Project, 1988–2003,”
Theology and Science
vol. 2, no. 1, April 2004.

9.
Peacocke, “God’s Interaction with the World,” in
Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action
, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and Arthur Peacocke (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, and Berkeley: The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 2000), pp. 277–78. Elsewhere he adds that, “So we have to accept the interplay of chance and laws as the node of God’s creativity. It seems to me to be more consistent with the fundamental creativity of reality than the belief—stemming from a Newtonian, mechanistic, determinist view of the universe with a wholly transcendent God as the great lawgiver—that God intervenes in the natural nexus for the good or ill of individuals or society” (“Chance and Law” in
Chaos and Complexity
, p. 142).