Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (50 page)

10.
Clayton,
God and Contemporary Science
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 195, 203, 206.

11.
Wildman, “The Divine Action Project,” p. 38.

12.
Ellis, “The Theology of the Anthropic Principle,”
Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature
, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and C. J. Isham (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications and Berkeley: The Center for Theology and the Natural Science, 1999), p. 384.

13.
Ellis, “Ordinary and Extraordinary Divine Action” in
Chaos and Complexity
, p. 383.

14.
Ellis, “Ordinary and Extraordinary Divine Action,” p. 384.

15.
Saunders,
Divine Action and Modern Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 48.

16.
Ellis, “Ordinary and Extraordinary Divine Action,” p. 384. This objection is widely shared. In the course of a defense of deism, Maurice Wiles responds to the testimony of Christians claiming to benefit from divine intervention: “In many cases the nature of such claimed interventions seems trivial when set in the context of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, which no providential action prevented.” “Divine Action: Some Moral Considerations” in
The God Who Acts
, ed. Thomas Tracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 22.

17.
Compare St. Paul: “How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”
Romans
11:33.

18.
Some make the same suggestion about science: scientific investigation, they say, would be impossible if God intervened in the world.

19.
Note its occurrence also in the quotations from Bultmann, p. 72; Mackie (pp. 81–82) uses the word “intrusion.”

20.
The same goes with respect to science and technology. Surely the occasional miraculous cure of cancer, for example, wouldn’t make it impossible to seek a more ordinary cure for the disease.

21.
Tillich,
Systematic Theology
(London: Nisbet, 1953), vol. 1, p. 129; quoted in William Alston’s “God’s Action in the World,” in
Evolution and Creation
, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 209.

22.
Saunders,
Divine Action and Modern Science
, p. 48.

23.
McMullin, “Evolution and Special Creation,”
Zygon
vol. 28, no. 3 (September 1993), p. 324. Note that McMullin doesn’t object to “intervention” and miracles in
Heilsgeschichte
(salvation history); he’s talking just about
Naturgeschichte
(the history of the natural world).

24.
Murray,
Nature Red in Tooth and Claw; Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 146.

25.
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.

26.
See section IV of this chapter.

27.
And even if we thought of a law as the result of deleting the antecedent from (LN), taking a law to be an exceptionless generalization, it still wouldn’t be possible for God to act in a way contrary to a natural law (although it would be possible for him to act in such a way as to falsify a proposition that would have been a natural law but for that act).

28.
Indeed, how
could
an intervention occur at t
_o
? What occurs at t
_o
would be the initial conditions, and presumably the initial conditions would simply be a result of the initial divine creative act, in which case the action resulting in the initial conditions would not be an action that goes beyond creation and conservation.

29.
The unduly scrupulous might object that while there is a time
t*
after
t
such that
S(t)&L
does not entail
S(t*)
, perhaps there is no first such time: perhaps the interval in question is open. I leave to them the project of making the necessary repairs.

30.
As Luke Van Horn pointed out (personal communication), this (arguably) isn’t exactly right: what if God simultaneously suppresses some natural cause of an event, and then specially causes that event himself? That would seem to be a case of special divine action, but it wouldn’t qualify as such on (INT).

31.
On “violating the laws” see Robert Russell, “Divine Action and Quantum Mechanics” in
Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action
, ed. Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk Wegter-McNelly, and John Polkinghorne (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications, and Berkeley: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 2001), p. 295 and Wesley Wildman, “The Divine Action Project,” p. 50. On “setting aside natural law” see Philip Clayton, “Wildman’s Kantian Skepticism: a Rubicon for the Divine Action Debate,”
Theology and Science
2, 2 (October, 2004), p. 187. On “overriding” those laws see Thomas Tracy, “Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action? Mapping the Options,”
Theology and Science
2, 2 (October, 2004), p. 197.

32.
Wildman, “The Divine Action Project,” p. 38.

33.
“The Divine Action Project: Reflections on the Compatibilism/Incompatibilism Divide,”
Theology and Science
2, 2 (October, 2004), p. 194.

34.
Pollard,
Chance and Providence
(New York: Scribner, 1958); see also Robert Russell, “Quantum Physics in Philosophical and Theological Perspective,”
Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding
, ed. Russell, William Stoeger, and George Coyne (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1988), pp. 343ff., and “Divine Action and Quantum Mechanics: a Fresh Assessment,”
Quantum Mechanics
, pp. 293ff; Nancey Murphy, “Divine Action in the Natural Order: Buridan’s Ass and Schrödinger’s Cat,”
Chaos and Complexity
, pp. 325ff.; Thomas Tracy, “Particular Providence,”
Chaos and Complexity
, pp. 315–22, and “Creation, Providence, and Quantum Chance,”
Quantum Mechanics
, 235ff. See also the pieces by Philip Clayton and George Ellis in
Quantum Mechanics
.

35.
Polkinghorne, “The Metaphysics of Divine Action,”
Chaos and Complexity
, pp. 152–53.

36.
G. C. Ghirardi, A. Rimini, and T. Weber, “Unified dynamics of microscopic and macroscopic systems”
Physical Review D
, 34 (1986), pp. 470ff.; see also G. C. Ghirardi, “Collapse Theories,”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Fall 2007 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, available at
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2007/entries/qm-collapse/
.

37.
Ghirardi, “Collapse Theories.”

38.
There is also the so-called “counting problem” for collapse theories proposed by Peter Lewis (“Quantum Mechanics, Orthogonality, and Counting,”
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
, 48, pp. 313ff.): the problem alleged is that each of a large number of marbles may be in a box, while it is false that all the marbles are in the box. For a resolution, see Bradley Monton, “The Problem of Ontology for Spontaneous Collapse Theories,”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Science
, 2004.

39.
But see p. 119.

40.
In
Divine Action and Modern Science
, Saunders raises further objections to the thought that God acts at the quantum level; these objections are nicely dealt with in Thomas Tracy’s review of the book: “Divine Action and Modern Science,”
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
, October 9, 2003 (available online at
http://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews.cfm
).

41.
Current objections to dualistic interactionism are vastly overrated; see my “Against Materialism,”
Faith and Philosophy
23:1 (January 2006) and “Materialism and Christian Belief” in
Persons: Divine and Human
, ed. Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), especially pp. 120–36. One objection often raised to dualistic interactionism is that it would violate the principle of the conservation of energy. The main answer here is the same as that to the above objections to divine action in the world: this principle is stated for closed systems; but any physical system (a brain, e.g.) in which an immaterial substance caused a change would obviously not be a closed system. (It’s also worth noting, however, that spontaneous collapse theories reject the principle of conservation of energy; energy is not conserved when a GRW collapse happens. See Bradley Monton, “The Problem of Ontology for Spontaneous Collapse Theories.”)

42.
This suggestion as to the mechanism of free human action works much better for dualism than for the materialism that, sadly enough, is becoming more common among Christian thinkers. In my view this is less a limitation of the suggestion than another strike against materialism, which is in any event implausible from a Christian perspective; see the preceding footnote.

43.
See my
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), part III, especially chapters 8 and 9.

44.
Unger, “Free Will and Scientiphicalism,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
, vol. 65, issue 1 (July, 2002), p. 1. In Unger’s mind, as in mine, there is no intrinsic connection between science and scientiphicalism.

45.
Worrall, “Why Science Discredits Religion” in
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion
, ed. M. Peterson and R. Van Arragon (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

46.
Heisenberg,
Physics and Beyond
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 73–76.

47.
Just for the sake of completeness: I’m taking it for granted that science doesn’t tell us that all beliefs should be held the way religious beliefs are, and that religion doesn’t tell us either that all beliefs should be held the way scientific beliefs are held, or that all beliefs should be held the way religions beliefs are held.

48.
See Anthony Flew and Roy Varghese,
There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind
(New York: Harper and Collins, 2007).

49.
Feyerabend,
Against Method
(London: New Left Books, 1975), p. 220.

1.
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin: “Spandrels—the tapering triangular spaces formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angles—are necessary architectural byproducts of mounting a dome on rounded arches.” “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a Critique of the Adaptionist Program” (London:
Proceedings of the Royal Society
, B 205, 1979), p. 581.

2.
Pinker,
How the Mind Works
(New York: Penguin, 1997). Pinker’s statement as reported by Rodney Clapp in
The Christian Century
, February 10, 2009, p. 45.

3.
Mither,
The Singing Neanderthals
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005).

4.
Ruse and Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” in
Religion and the Natural Sciences: The Range of Engagement
, ed. James Huchingson (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 310.

5.
Ruse and Wilson, “Moral Philosophy as Applied Science,”
Philosophy
61, 1986, p. 179.

6.
There has been controversy about whether the notion of group selection is viable; for a spirited and convincing argument that it is, see Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson,
Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

7.
Simon,
Science
vol. 250 (December, 1990) pp. 1665ff. Simon won a Nobel Prize in economics, but later became professor of computer studies and psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

8.
More simply, says Simon, “Fitness simply means expected number of progeny” (p. 1665).

9.
The South Bend Tribune
, December 21, 1991.

10.
That is (in Simon’s sense), behavior that exacts a cost in terms of the agent’s fitness. “A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism,” pp. 1666–67.

11.
Pinker,
How the Mind Works
, pp. 554, 556, 557.

12.
The views of the “old” Rodney Stark must be carefully distinguished from those of the “new,” which are vastly more friendly to religion: see, e.g., (with Roger Finke)
The Churching of America
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992),
The Rise Of Christianity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), and
Discovering God
(New York: Harper Collins, 2007). As David Sloan Wilson puts it, “[For Stark] Religion is envisioned as an economic exchange between people and imagined supernatural agents for goods that are scarce (e.g., rain during a drought) or impossible (e.g. immortal life) to obtain in the real world” (
Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 52). Stark has since rejected this theory.

13.
Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
. I’ll say more about Wilson’s theory later.

14.
Boyer,
Religion Explained
(New York: Basic, 2001); Atran,
In Gods We Trust
(Oxford: Oxford University press, 2002); see also Todd Tremlin,
Minds and Gods
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and D. Jason Slone,
Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Barrett, “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,” in
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
, vol. 4, 2000, pp. 29–34; and Dennett,
Breaking the Spell
(New York: Penguin Books, 2006).