This is my rejoinder to George Murphy. It will probably be my last, unless
someone comes up with something unexpected.
T.
I would like to respond to a couple of remarks made by George Murphy in his post of November 16, on the subject of the nature of divine action. I will first reproduce Mr. Murphy’s remarks, then discuss them.
a. Regarding my criticism of the “God hides behind quantum indeterminacy” argument as vague, Mr. Murphy grants me this much:
“I agree that the theological implications of quantum indeterminancy need
to be fleshed out more fully.”
However, he elsewhere says:
“The picture of God working with creatures as instruments is of course an analogy but I am wary of attempts to get closer to a precise description of the way God interacts with creatures. I think what’s sometimes called “the search for the causal joint” is misguided because it suggests that we can understand the God-world interaction in somewhat the same way physicists try
to understand the interaction between charged particles and an EM field – we know the world and God parts of the equations and just need to find the interaction terms!”
b. Regarding my comments on the relative modesty of ID theorists in comparison with TE theorists in speculating about divine motives and divine actions, Mr. Murphy seems to grant me a point in this comment:
“We should certainly be hesitant to say more about God & God’s action than what scripture & its clear implications entitle us to say. (Cf. Luther’s “scripture or cogent reason” at Worms.) I try to observe that warning ...”
But he then goes on to write:
“... but also bear in mind that some theological creativity is required in order to
deal with new circumstances, such as those with which science often confronts us. My complaint about many ID proponents in this regard is that they think – or, I would have to say
sometimes, pretend – that there are no theological issues involved in the
debate at all. It’s all a matter of science & philosophy. & that’s just
not the case, at least for anyone who believes that there is a God who is
involved with the world.”
*****************************
A. Why ID Does not Require a Theory of Divine Action
I think it is important to be clear that ID is not, and does not pretend to be, a theory of divine action. This does not mean that ID proponents do not have their own private theories of divine action. ID has support from YECs, OECs, and generally from a wide variety of Christian believers in Creation, as well from Muslims, Jews, etc. I am sure that there are dozens of notions of exactly how God interacts with the world running around in the ID community. But none of these notions belong to ID proper, and I will explain why.
Suppose I find a sheet of paper with old-fashioned typed characters on it. Let’s say it contains an argument refuting Hume’s critique of miracles. Now ID says that you can infer that this piece of typewritten work was produced by intelligence. ID does not claim to be able to tell, however, whether the typing was accomplished by an Underwood manual typewriter, and IBM Selectric electrical typewriter, or a Panasonic printer with a daisy wheel. All three devices make impressions upon paper, and nothing in the argument against Hume indicates which of the three devices was used. Nor, even supposing that we could determine, say, from the depth of the type impressions, which device was used, would that make any difference to the correct inference that the words were typed by an intelligent being. We can know the author to be intelligent without knowing how the author got the words onto the paper.
Similarly, if an archaeologist from 1,000,000 A.D. excavates Mt. Rushmore from underneath deep sand dunes, and, due to a loss of all historical records and all artifacts from the period, knows nothing about the technology available to the sculptors, he may never be 100% sure how the sculpture was carved, but he can be sure that it was carved by intelligent beings.
In these examples, the design inference does not depend on any “theory of typist action” or “theory of sculptor action”; the design inference is reliable with no knowledge of these things. Regarding living things, the design inference claims to be reliable (or at least plausible), without knowledge of exactly how God interacts with nature. God may interact via front-loading, spot miracles, or continuous guidance; God may interact with nature as soul interacts with body; God may interact through some intermediate entity, unknown to us, which is in part immaterial and in part material, and thus can bridge the gap between the divine and the physical. ID has no commitment regarding any such speculations. Its very nature requires neutrality regarding any such speculations. Thus, individual ID supporters are free to imagine the God-nature connection in any way that they like, and are welcome to have private theological discussions about divine action among themselves,!
on a voluntary basis, any time that they like. No ID theorist will ban or condemn such private thoughts or discussions. But ID as such observes a policy of strict neutrality about them. It not only does not desire to take sides; methodologically, it cannot take sides. Its methods cannot touch the divine nature, action, purpose, etc.
So, do most ID theorists believe that there is a “God who is involved with the world”, as Mr. Murphy puts it? I would say, overwhelmingly, they do. There might be a few front-loaders who have a more deistic picture, and who think that God sets it all up, then retires. But my impression is that most ID supporters are theists, not deists, and that most of them are conservative, church-going Christians, and I know of very few conservative, church-going Christians who do not believe that God is involved with the world. I think that most ID supporters believe in the continuing possibility of miracles, for example. I know for a fact that many of them pray for things like healing, which fits in very well with this. And in my experience, most of them don’t suppose that God’s involvement with nature was merely to build it, like a machine, and set it running; they think that God sustains the world in continued existence as well. So I cannot imagine where Mr. Murphy or a!
nyone might get the idea that ID people have a tendency not to think that God is involved with the world.
(Indeed, ID people often have this same notion about TE people! They see TEs as very “iffy” about historical, Biblical miracles, and they have some doubts whether TEs believe in things like prayer for healing today. They wonder if TE really takes seriously the notion that “God is involved in the world” in any meaningful way, i.e., in any way that would make the slightest difference how we study nature, or how we employ nature technologically. Some ID people have therefore accused TEs of deism. I am not saying that the accusation is true, but it is important for any TE who suggests that ID does not believe in God’s involvement in the world to realize that ID people have the same impression about many TEs. Obviously, there is some miscommunication going on.)
B. How TE Could Avoid a Theory of Divine Action
I believe that TE could avoid a theory of divine action altogether, and in this respect be in accord with ID. It could do so by limiting its assertions to these:
1. Evolution, understood as a process, occurred.
2. This process did not occur through chance and natural laws alone, but was guided at least partly by God, to ensure that at least certain results (e.g., the creation of man) occurred.
3. We do not specify the ways (e.g., front-loading, miraculous interventions, continuous interaction, etc.), but we are confident that God’s intelligence has guided the outcome.
Now if TE limited “theistic evolution” to these claims, it would not need a detailed theory of divine action. Certainly it would not need to specify any “causal joint” between God and nature. Further, it would be compatible with forms of ID.
C. Why TE Is Compelled to Wade into Theories of Divine Action
The above assertions (1-3) are all logically compatible with each other. It is undeniably possible that all three of them are true simultaneously. Since there is no logical incompatibility, there is no need to make an issue of any particular theory of divine action which any TE might hold. Indeed, TEs who held to this bare-bones summary would not even be required to state their detailed beliefs on divine action, which could remain (as in the case of ID) entirely private, and no part of the TE position as such.
However, TE, or at least, many TEs, are not willing to stop at the bare-bones theory given above. They insist ALSO on commenting on a couple of other matters, i.e.:
4. Evolution has occurred according to the processes set forth by Darwin and neo-Darwinism.
5. God cannot be the direct author of evil.
(Pretty well every TE seems to agree with point 4, and a good number of them seem to agree with point 5.)
It is the addition of these statements that entangle TE in the need for a more specific and precise theory of divine action. Thus, though Mr. Murphy is “wary” of demands for too precise an account, it is his own colleagues in the TE movement who have made the claims which necessitate the more precise account. When you make big, complex claims, you have to expect that people are going to ask you for the details.
So, for example, when Russell (a very intelligent and learned man, I hasten to add), in his essay in *PEC*, affirms both the truth of Darwinism and God’s guidance simultaneously, he is going to be asked how he reconciles the two, and is going to be asked for some details. Does God make a difference in what would evolve, in the sense that evolution would be different without his “special action” or “special providence” (as opposed to “general action” or “general providence”)? Russell says clearly, yes, at the beginning of his essay. I applaud, cheer, whistle, and stamp my feet. But then he ALSO says, a few words later, and throughout the rest of the essay, that God’s “special action” in relation to nature is just as “naturalistic” as his “general action”. If it’s just as naturalistic as God’s general action, how does it allow for God’s steering of evolution, since Darwinian naturalism rejects the very notion of steering? And if the !
answer is that “quantum indeterminacy” allows for a naturalistic yet steering intervention of God, well, since God’s “general action” in relation to nature ALREADY includes quantum indeterminacy, and hence the requisite “openness” for divine steering, why introduce the added category of God’s “special action”?
Apparently the answer is that a “special action” is needed to “collapse the wave function”. Russell tells us that the wave function cannot determine for itself what particular value will be settled on. So he’s apparently telling us that it’s God’s will to “collapse the wave function” so that it takes on a single, unique value. This means that God makes a particular decision which is not necessitated by the wave function, or by anything “natural”. It implies that God arbitrarily asserts his will, to ensure that this value rather than some other value of the function will be realized. God decides that, out of all the infinite possibilities within the wave function, THIS (and not some other) energy level of the electron will be realized, THIS (and not that) will be the exact time or angle or velocity of emission of the alpha particle from the radioactive nucleus. God’s will, in the form of a single, unique, unrepeatable, historically distinct physi!
cal result, therefore becomes the starting point of a new sequence of natural events, a sequence which would have been entirely different had he willed differently. Now even if Russell declines to call this “miraculous”, in the sense of God’s violating a “natural law”, it is still a contingent, historical action. It is thus, in any ordinary sense of the word, an “intervention”. God comes into nature and makes a decision which way things will go. So why is Russell dead set against calling such choices (which he fully admits that God makes) “interventions”? Why does he insist that God’s “special actions” are “non-interventionist”, when they are, given his explication of the God-nature relationship, clearly interventions?
This insistence that, beyond God’s “general” action in nature, God’s “special” action in nature is needed to make evolution work, while denying that “special” action is interventionist, makes for an argument that is, from a philosopher’s point of view, muddy. Why call the action “special” at all, if it is an action that nature would produce without intervention? What is stirring up the muddiness appears to be a contradiction between two things which Russell very dearly wants to assert, i.e.: (1) the uncompromising naturalism dogmatically asserted by Darwin and all neo-Darwinists, and by modern science generally, and which Russell, as a licensed practitioner of that science, accepts as a condition of membership in the scientific community; (2) a God who really matters because he really does something, beyond just inventing some natural laws and setting off the Big Bang. Were Russell willing to swallow deism, he wouldn’t have to invoke God’s spec!
ial action at all, and the contradiction could be resolved that way. And were his Darwinism and naturalism negotiable, Russell would not have to go to such great efforts to make it sound as if God is not really intervening, even though he is.
Russell could of course resolve this by realizing that he has already compromised on “naturalism” with regard to the Incarnation and Resurrection (p. 343). Clearly in those cases, for Russell, God performed a “special action” which was not entirely effected through naturalistic causation. For him this is true “interventionism”. But once interventionism is granted in even one case, there is no principled reason why it cannot be granted in another. If the natural processes of reproduction can’t explain the Incarnation, and if the natural physiology of death can’t explain the Resurrection, how does Russell know that the natural processes of inheritance aren’t similarly incapable of explaining macroevolutionary change? Or, put in the positive form: if he’s so sure that a full, naturalistic explanation for even the most difficult stages of macroevolution will some day be available, how can he be sure that a full, naturalistic explanation for a man risin!
g from the dead won’t some day be available? Isn’t accepting the Resurrection as miraculous just another case of “God of the gaps” reasoning? Shouldn’t Christians remain non-committal on the theological explanation for the Resurrection, just in case science some day embarrasses Christianity by providing a naturalistic explanation?
All of the above difficulties follow from Russell’s knotty and obscure account of divine action. Now when a very bright guy like Russell produces a very long, learned and complex essay, which voluntarily undertakes to explain something about divine action, and fails to convince the reader because of obscurities such as I have indicated, it is not unreasonable for the reader to demand a clearer account of the divine action. Thus, though Mr. Murphy is “wary” of the demand for full accounts, it is Mr. Russell, by claiming to have presented a coherent account, and failing, who has invited the demand for a fuller account. There’s an old saying: if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. If he can’t take the heat, Mr. Murphy isn’t obliged to stay in the kitchen while Mr. Russell’s account is being criticized. But he must make a decision to do one of two things: stay in the kitchen and defend Mr. Russell’s account, or leave Mr. Russell to handle hi!
s critics himself. The one thing Mr. Murphy can’t fairly ask is for me, or other ID critics, not to demand a clearer account of divine action, when it’s Mr. Russell, not us, who postulated the theory of divine action in the first place.
Similarly, when Francisco Ayala and Ken Miller, and Nancey Murphy (as reported by Russell), bring the problem of evil into their discussions, they commit themselves to a view of divine action: God would not be directly responsible for evil, so he must use a non-directed, i.e., Darwinian process (with a quantum twist in Nancey Murphy’s case) to produce new species, rather than a directed form of evolution. And then they embroil the TE position in theological argument, since many Christians, and the author of Isaiah, to name one Biblical author, are quite comfortable with the view that God creates evil, and will not accept the premise shared by Ayala, Miller, or Murphy.
The aforementioned TE people give the impression that they favour Darwinism at least partly because they think it helps their theodicy. From the ID point of view, a common TE position seems to amount to this: “We must have a theory of nature which does not allow God to be the direct creator of such an evil as malaria. Therefore, we must on principle, no matter what evidence the ID people put out, deny that malaria is designed. It must have come into existence without being directly willed or planned by God. Darwinian theory is perfect for this, because it makes the production of malaria a nasty fluke contingent upon natural processes (to which God, not being a “tyrant”, has given creaturely and co-creative freedom). Therefore, nature in its freedom, not God in his sovereignty, is to be blamed for the horrors of malaria. Whew! That was a close one. Good thing for Christian theology that Darwin came along!” ID people find this sort of thinking to be an unwarra!
nted interference of theology in the realm of science (design is ruled out because it would have an unpleasant theological consequence), and also find it to be an arbitrary assertion of a private theology regarding the causes of evil, a private theology based on individual or modern sentimental preferences about what nice guy God ought to be, as opposed to what Scripture or tradition teaches about God. From the ID point of view, this is the sort of illegitimate outcome that occurs when a theory of divine action (including a theory of divine motivation) is mixed up with science.
The ID approach to the problem of evil is quite different. It does not work from the theology to the science, but from the science to the theology. Its procedure is this: (1) Decide whether or not Feature A of nature requires, in addition to mechanical causation, the imposition of design (by whatever means); (2) Deal with the theological fallout later. So if it looks as if malaria is designed, and if we suppose that the designer is God, then, from the ID perspective, God obviously wanted this deadly killer in his world. WHY he wanted this is a subject for private, non-scientific, theological discussion, and ID tolerates all kinds of differing views on that ultimate question, because it claims no authority in the theological sphere. This seems to me to be more reasonable and less doctrinaire than the TE approach, which always seems to me to be trying to peddle one TE’s theodicy as more truly Christian than anyone else’s.
By way of summary regarding points 4 and 5 above, note that, since ID theory is not committed to either proposition 4 or proposition 5 above, it does not have to become embroiled in arguments regarding either divine motivation or divine action that follow from adding points 4 and 5 to points 1, 2, and 3. The logical contradictions and theological hostilities that TE encounters by wading into the theory of divine action are of TE’s own making.
In conclusion:
1. ID as such does not offer any account of divine action, of the how or the why God does what God does.
2. This does not mean that all ID supporters believe in some mechanical form of Deism, on the grounds that Deism is all they can infer from nature. They of course believe many other things about God than that he is a Designer. But they get those other beliefs from revelation, tradition, and so on, not from science. And among those other things, for most Christian ID supporters, are the beliefs that God is active always, sustaining nature, and that he has been specially active in the past, in the form of miraculous actions, and that he sometimes performs miraculous actions even now. I don’t see how this differs from TE beliefs – unless TEs scrap the part about miracles.
3. TE could avoid any detailed discussion of divine action by (1) accepting evolution as a process, while regarding all particular explanations of evolution, e.g., the Darwinian, as tentative constructs, readily revisable, and not firm enough to deserve a fixed place in the Christian view of nature; (2) not entangling theologically derived views about the cause of evil with current evolutionary speculations.
4. TE, however, usually involves itself in discussions of divine action, because (1) it cannot untangle the mess it makes fusing Christianity and Darwinism, without getting into some fancy theological footwork to get rid of the apparently blatant contradictions between the providential God of Christianity and the non-providential god (i.e., blind nature) of Darwinism, and (2) it cannot resist the temptation to pronounce upon what kinds of evil a “loving God” or a “Triune God” or a “suffering God” would or would not create.
5. If TE wishes to entangle itself in theories of divine action, that is its business, but it is simply unjust to criticize ID for failing to do so. ID is a project of design detection. It may be a hopeless project, or it may be a project which will finally break the back of materialism and show that a designer must exist. Time will tell. But it is a project of design detection, not a theory of divine action. It does not owe to the Christian churches or to Christian theology or to neo-Darwinists like Coyne and Dawkins or to TEs any account of divine action, regarding gravity or quantum mechanics or evolution or the origin of evil or anything else. It never promised to deliver such an account. And its claims do not require one.
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Received on Mon Nov 24 15:37:03 2008
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