[asa] concurrence, co-operation, etc.

George:

Yes, I agree with you that the term "concurrence" has the connotations that you suggest. That's why I have never found the notion, whether with reference to the Medieval Latin "concurro" or the English "concur", very convincing. Concurrence always reminds me of the role of the Governor-General in my own country, who gives "royal assent", i.e., signs all laws into existence, but does nothing to produce them -- does not think them up, work out the details, debate them, administer them, etc. Further, in practice sometimes the law is put into effect a few days or weeks or months before it is "proclaimed" by the Governor-General, and there is not a whit of difference between what happens in the country whether the law is operating before the Governor-General proclaims it, or afterward. (I am not arguing that the office of the Governor-General is of no value -- there are reasons to maintain it -- but as far as the contents or operation of the laws go, we could get along without a Governor-General just fine.) The term "concurrence", then, suggests to me a passive God who merely "goes along with" the laws of nature, laws which function by the very fact that nature is what it is. It suggests to me a Deistic God who nods approvingly at the steady working of the clock he has constructed.

The question is, if there is to be a "nature" at all -- if occasionalism is to be avoided -- does nature not have to be in some sense autonomous? This is a nettle which neither David Campbell nor Terry Gray has been willing to grasp. Even their hero Calvin was (unless I am mistaken) no occasionalist, but granted nature a set of powers of its own. So if we say that the sun rises and sets (or that the earth orbits the sun) due to "nature", are we not saying that God has endowed nature with the power to carry on in a certain way? And what is the point of God endowing nature with the power to carry on in a certain way, if it needs something else beyond what he has endowed it with? And what would the extra element be? For example, does he endow planets with the "natural" ability to travel around the sun, but does he have to do something extra to make the orbit an ellipse rather than a circle? I doubt very much that any TE -- or any scientist -- would conceive of God as doing something "extra" in that way. I think that all TEs, and all scientists, conceive of nature as operating in a more integral way than that.

Also, there is this strong TE theme about God respecting or honouring the creative powers he has given to nature, that it would be unfitting for God to, say, give nature the power of microevolution, but then have to do something extra for macroevolution. There is the strong sense among many TEs that God would have given nature the power to generate the whole sequence of macroevolution by itself. People here have said this, and Ken Miller talks about God treating nature as a grown-up, with creative responsibility, able to do things on its own. So the question is: how can God do *anything* without disrespecting the adulthood of his created world, or without implying that his created world is somehow defective, that it needs supplementation?

You use the word "co-operation", and I agree with you that it is a much better word for suggesting that God actually *does* something in the normal operations of nature, whereas "concurrence" sounds vacuous. Nonetheless, if we are strict about the usage of words -- and while metaphors can never be perfect, we should choose them with care -- "co-operation" means literally "working together". When two people or things "co-operate" to get a job done, *both are necessary*. If either of the two co-operating agents ceases to do its part, *the action does not get done*. So if the relation of God to nature in the orbit of a planet of the growth of a plant is one of co-operation, then it is necessary to have some conception of what "nature's part" is, and what "God's part" is. And this I have never clearly heard articulated, whether by the medieval theologians, or the Reformers, or the modern theologians. If God sustained the laws of nature *but did no more than that* (and people here are suggesting that in the orbit of Mars, the growth of plants, etc. he does more than that), what would nature be able to accomplish? Where would it fall short of what it accomplishes now, *with* God's "co-operation"?

The difficulty lies in the notion of "nature" itself. "Nature" is not a Biblical concept (see the aforementioned work of mine), but a Greek one. It was "naturalized" so to speak, within Christianity, and Christians became quite comfortable with it, in a way that some Islamic theologians never did. It was precisely the belief in "nature" -- albeit a transformed notion of nature, not quite the original Greek one -- that allowed modern natural science to proceed in the 17th century. God created a natural world characterized by mathematical regularity and had *commanded* all its parts always and everywhere to follow natural laws, and he is omnipotent, so that nature cannot disobey that command but must always carry it out to perfection. This is actually a stricter notion of nature than that held by the Greeks, who allowed for some chaotic disobedience of matter, an imperfect orderliness which partly obscured the plan of the divine Mind. Within the more rigorous post-17th-century conception of nature, what is there left for God to do, other than to "power" the natural laws, so to speak? How does a "natural law" decreed by an unambiguously omnipotent God leave any room for any additional "co-operation" on God's part?

No one here has suggested that when lightning strikes a barn, God does something special to "help the lightning down"; the laws of static electricity which he has created can entirely explain the phenomenon. If God is "co-operating" with the laws of static electricity, what exactly does his co-operation consist in? If his "co-operation" in the case of the lightning bolt is identical with his "co-operation" with the shock one gets after shuffling one's feet on a rug and touching metal, then God's co-operation is nothing more than concurrence -- mere assent to the laws. And if his co-operation in the two cases is different, uniquely personal in each case, what does he do in the case of the lightning bolt that he doesn't do in the case of the shock, or vice versa? More generally speaking, I have never heard an account of God's "co-operation" that makes sense. If "natural laws" mean anything, then God never acts in a *particular* way to accomplish electric shocks, plant growth, etc., and "co-operation" in particular cases seems a redundancy. (Would you run along beside your wife's car, pushing it, to help her get to work, as if the laws governing the internal combustion engine needed some assistance?) Conversely, if God really does co-operate in every natural action, then natural laws must be in some sense deficient. They must be incapable of particular application without a unique intelligent intervention in every case. But this goes against everyone's intuitive conception of what a "natural law" is.

In other words, nothing is solved by switching from "concurrence" to "co-operation", unless the nature of the "co-operation" is spelled out. And that spelling out must do justice to the idea that nature is governed by "laws" -- a conception at the foundation of natural science. It must show how "natural laws" do not lead inevitably to Deism, but allow for a genuine, not merely verbal, form of co-operation between God and nature.

For such reasons, I've found much of the discussion here unsatisfying. What does it mean to say that God is involved when Mars orbits the sun? I've suggested that this means merely that he sustains the law of gravity, inertia, etc. But David Campbell tells me no, God is doing something else. And when I ask what that something else is, he gives me an answer which is neither scientific nor philosophical, but based on Calvinistic theology. But I do not find Calvinistic theology either intellectually persuasive or religiously binding (or for that matter even religiously attractive). Further, David's account is, to put it bluntly, vague. God is involved specifically, says David, yet natural laws can produce man from slime by themselves. Or maybe that last part comes from Terry Gray, not David Campbell. It is hard for me to tell, because their two accounts blur together. They both seem to me to be saying, in different ways, that God does nothing and everything at the same time. (Except when they seem to be saying that God does neither nothing nor everything, but rather does something -- but then cannot specify what that something is.)

I think that one of the problems is that very few (as far as I can tell) TEs have studied philosophy in an intense way. I have the very strong impression that TEs are mainly scientists with an interest (though often little training) in theology, and in a few cases theologians with an interest (though usually little training) in science. (And then there are cases like your own George, where the TE has advanced training in both science and theology. But those cases are rare.) But I have a strong sense that almost no TE has even an undergraduate degree in philosophy, let alone a graduate degree, and it is my impression that no TE has any academic standing in the world of philosophy. I think this is a serious problem, as the core issues we are addressing -- the nature of God, the nature of nature, etc. -- require a sustained philosophical treatment. It is not enough to pick up a bit of philosophy that some Calvinist theologian relays secondhand, and so on.

One thing that philosophers dislike about theologians is the tendency of theologians to want to have everything both ways. Theologians seem to want God to be personally active in the fall of every sparrow, yet when they want to impress modern scientists with how much they respect science, they will argue very aggressively that everything in nature works by general natural laws, to the point where they will insist that even the origin of life itself must be explained naturalistically and so on. So they simply assert both propositions, side by side. And when pressed regarding the apparent incompatibility between the two propositions, they take refuge in the mysterious nature of divine action. "Mystery" is the great trump card which allows theologians to have everything both ways. Philosophers are not allowed that luxury, and it rankles them that theologians think they are entitled to avoid difficulties in this way.

Another think that philosophers dislike about theologians is that theologians do so much arbitrary picking and choosing, making distinctions where no rational distinction is evident, in order to preserve a favoured theological conclusion. A TE theologian will attack Behe for allegedly suggesting that intervention was necessary for macroevolution, and the philosophical basis for preferring non-interventionist explanations of origins can be clearly traced back to Lessing, Kant, Hume, etc. Yet the TE theologian does not follow Lessing, Kant, Hume, etc. in their skepticism about the miracles of Jesus, and does not even shrink (in most cases) from saying that God actually altered the normal course of nature in the New Testament case. There is no *philosophically* coherent reason for this half-Enlightenment, half-supernaturalist account of divine action. The assertion of any difference between the two cases springs from theological preferences, and, as the history of Christianity shows, these theological preferences are conditioned by everything from the spirit of the age in which the theologian lives to current notions of Biblical interpretation to the theologian's personal taste. Many of the things asserted about divine action in nature by current TEs would be found blasphemous by Luther, Calvin, and even later scientific figures such a Robert Boyle (who according to Ted believed that living things were created by special divine action, not by a naturalistic evolutionary process). And philosophers by their nature distrust an enterprise (theology) which is so subject to the whims of prevailing taste. They find it hard to take seriously theology's claims to be a "science" or a systematic body of knowledge, when it is so evidently coloured by its historical context and the personalities of its leading figures.

Philosophers can live with occasionalist God of Islam, who does everything himself; they can live with the God of Deism, who lets nature do everything itself; and they can live with a God who generally lets nature do everything itself, but sometimes does a few things himself. Philosophers have a problem with TE, because it is simply not clear about what, if anything, God does in the natural realm. Its "concurrence" is passive and vacuous; its "co-operation" is undefined; its appeal to both/and paradoxes (God does it *and* nature does it all by itself; God designed it *and* it all arose by chance and necessity) is theology, not philosophy, and theology of questionable merit and dubious logic at that; its methodological/metaphysical distinction is not used (to the end that TE puts it, anyway) by professional philosophers anywhere; and generally speaking, it smells of intellectual ad-hockery from top to bottom.

I know that all of these comments are broad-brushing, and cannot be applied in every point to every TE, and not even to every TE here. For example, George, you have shown more awareness of the theoretical difficulties than many. And certainly most people here (Terry and David included) have shown more theoretical subtlety than Ken Miller or Francisco Ayala or Francis Collins. Nonetheless, TE does need a major philosophical treatment. Someone needs to write a book on TE from a philosophical point of view: "A Philosophical Analysis and Defense of Theistic Evolutionism" or something like that. And the book needs to be written by someone who knows in depth the discussions of God and nature found in Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, Scotus, Calvin, Luther, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Bergson, Whitehead, etc. Without such a philosophical analysis and defense, TE will remain, to put it bluntly, fuzzy, and very much on the margins of serious academic and philosophical discourse, however popular a theme it may be at conferences of Christian scientists. So who will stand up and be TE's philosophical champion? Is such a person in the offing?

Cameron.
   
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: George Murphy
  To: Terry M. Gray ; ASA
  Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 8:30 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] TE/EC Response

  I'm in general agreement with Terry here. Just one comment on #2. Yes, concurrence should be understood as "active governance." But it's just for that reason that the term "concurrence," which means literally "running together," suggests that God merely "goes along with" what creatures do. (The German Begleitung, "accompaniment," which Barth, e.g., uses, is similar.) For that reason the other term that the tradition has used, "cooperation," is prefereable. God "works with" creatures. & for that reason I think that speaking of God "not lifting a finger" is quite misleading.

  Shalom
  George
  http://home.roadrunner.com/~scitheologyglm

   
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: "Terry M. Gray" <grayt@lamar.colostate.edu>
  To: "ASA" <asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Tuesday, July 07, 2009 11:48 PM
  Subject: [asa] TE/EC Response

> With Cameron and Gregory so eloquently summarizing the state of our
> recent discussions from their perspective, let me try to provide a
> similar summary from my perspective.
>
> 1. In light of the recent exchange between Cameron and David, it seems
> to me that perhaps the bottom line difference has to doing with how
> convincing we regard the evidence for a secondary cause based
> evolutionary account. I fully agree with David's assessment of the
> state of the art. I would probably go even one step further and say
> that due to the historical nature of biological evolution and due to
> contingent nature of some of critical events (chance mutations, cross-
> overs, genome acquisitions, extinctions, etc.) and due to the
> antiquity of these events, that it may not be possible to construct
> the kind of detailed scenario that Cameron insists upon. To him, it
> seems, these sorts of provisos casts a dark cloud over our confidence.
> Others of us (and most professional practicing life scientists) find
> the current state of affairs to be good enough to assert with
> confidence appropriate for any scientific theory that the key pieces
> of the story are in place and convincing enough. I, for one, have had
> that bent since the late 70's and have only seen gaps filled,
> questions answered, and more and more success of the general
> evolutionary biological story. The evo-devo developments of the past
> two decades have addressed in principle in my mind many of the
> difficult questions that Cameron keeps raising.
>
> Perhaps it's a different psychological bent between TE's and ID's.
> Maybe TE's do have a lower bar. But, Cameron or Denton or Behe is not
> giving me any new information when they tell me how much we don't
> know. I know full well. Yet, I am convinced of the general story by
> the evidence that is there. Perhaps there is a difference between the
> way biologists think and the way chemists think. I am trained
> primarily as a biologist but have straddled the fence with a strong
> chemistry and biophysics history as well. It is probably the case the
> most non-life scientists take the word of their biologists colleagues,
> but, as I said before, most professional life scientists are convinced.
>
> If this is the case, then we are at an impasse of sorts. I don't
> really see a problem with that. I'm convinced; the community of
> practicing scientists is convinced. That's the way it is. There may
> come a day when that's not the case and the voices of ID advocates,
> Denton, et al. will turn the tables. I may someday be convinced
> otherwise. But today is not that day and I think through the
> theological implications of my science in light of how the world looks
> to me today. Since Gregory has been so fond of reminding us of the
> sociology of science, he should not be overly shocked to hear that
> science is what scientists think (today). May or may not be right. In
> fact, in light of history, it's likely not to be right. However,
> today, in our science education we teach what we (the scientific
> community) think is the best explanation for things.
>
> What to do? Well, let's keep working: those trying to fill in the gaps
> of the current theoretical framework (science as usual) and the
> critics (the revolutionaries). The critics have a tougher go at it and
> may find it difficult to get funding, to publish, etc. But that's the
> way it works. Time will tell who is right (if we are realists of any
> sort, which I am).
>
> 2. As for the term "Darwinism". Most of us on the TE/EC side of things
> reject the arguments that Cameron and Gregory and perhaps others have
> put forth that "Darwinism" is intrinsically anti-theistic. To think so
> is a conflation of secondary causes (nature, creation, etc.) with
> primary causation (God's role) (as David Siemens eloquently put it).
> Darwin committed that error--Asa Gray answered it in his day. Dawkins
> commits the error today. As does Cameron and most ID folks. To state
> it boldly: my option #4 is identical to Cameron's option #1 from the
> secondary causation point of view. Macroevolution does not require
> miracles--it can all happen "without God lifting a finger"--is that
> clear enough? (although I unequivocally reject Cameron's way of
> putting that--concurrence is not merely sustaining the laws of nature--
> it is active governance--micromanaging, if you will). However, from
> the primary causation point of view evolution is guided (as are all
> secondary causes, even the actions of free agents). So, I, as most
> life scientists, think that Darwinism is a scientific idea (and not a
> ideology) embodying the Darwinian mechanisms of "random" mutation that
> does not anticipate the need of the organism, natural selection,
> gradualism, etc. All of these say nothing about God's role in the
> process. It seems that in principle Cameron agrees that it's possible
> for divine governance to be "hidden" in stochastic processes, but the
> fact that he can't distinguish between his option #3 and my option #4
> and his belief that improbable sequences of mutations are not possible
> without divine guidance suggest otherwise.
>
> 3. This is not to say that God cannot perform a miracle during
> evolutionary history. I strongly affirm that he is fully able to work
> outside of normal secondary causes and believe that we have several
> reported events of such in scripture. I don't see any reason to appeal
> to such in the course of cosmic history. In scripture miracles seem to
> be associated with special redemptive and revelatory events. I don't
> expect to see them normally. In fact, the "normal" (God's regular
> governance) is a necessary milieu for the miraculous (God's irregular
> governance). Given the historical nature of evolution, I'm not sure
> how you can tell the difference between a miracle and a God-governed
> chance event.
>
> 4. As for storing up genotypic changes...this is exactly what
> exaptation does. All the pieces are present already and when they are
> combined something novel emerges which can now be selected upon.
> Irreducible complexity is no mystery. Gene duplication, sexual
> recombination, horizontal gene transfer, genome acquistions are all
> mechanisms that accomplish this. It is true that I am not able to come
> up with the detailed account of how this has happened, but I can give
> credible scenarios that combined with the record in the genomes, gives
> striking confirmation of the theory. And the evidence keeps coming...a
> few weeks ago there was some discussion of the origin of the immune
> system in Science (including a picture from the Dover trial with a
> stack of books and papers confounding Behe's claim that there was no
> theory of the origin of this complex system). It appears that
> vertebrates got it via some lateral gene transfer in a viral
> infection. Once the incipient function is there (and it didn't arise
> gradualistically), Darwinian mechanisms have their fodder. So the
> modern account involves both Darwinian mechanism and newly discovered
> non-Darwinian mechanism. All the pieces of the eye, even at the
> biochemical level, are homologs of pieces of other functioning
> systems. Perhaps an eye evolves in the twinkling of an eye (as Dawkins
> cleverly put it--I guess he knows his Bible even if he doesn't believe
> it).
>
> 5. Cameron speaks of the Laplacian universe where God must be the most
> skilled Fats Domino that one can imagine. While I have no trouble
> imagining that God can do this, I'm not sure I believe it's necessary
> to think this way. While I have a reductionist and mechanist bent, I
> don't think they work at every level or through every level. All the
> usually things can be said here--quantum indeterminacy, chaos, etc.
> But, I don't find it necessary to do that. This is a critique of some
> of my TE/EC colleagues. As under point #2 I don't want to conflate
> God's role with any particular creational dimension. God can do what
> he want how he wants. And I don't really think we can explain how and
> where it happens in creaturely terms. If a key mutation occurs whether
> it's via a radiation event that God tweaked to pop out at a certain
> time (or even specially created) or a spontaneous low probability
> isomeric transition of a nucleotide at the point of replication. It
> doesn't bother me that God tweaks. What seems to be the case is that
> God tweaks in a way that we usually can't tell.
>
> 6. Cameron's view that the sequence of evolutionary events seems
> improbable is an argument for design just is wrong in my opinion. I've
> commented on this before. The probability of the next mutation is the
> same no matter what mutation occurred before it. Relevant to this is
> Gould's essay about batting average records. There's only one way for
> the distribution to go--similar, he argues, to biological complexity.
>
> 7. The pattern of evolution or the "fact" of evolution (trees of
> relatedness from classification or sequence comparisons or Bernie's
> appeals recently to chromosome fusions, etc) are convincing especially
> in light of known mechanisms of reproduction and inheritance and the
> kinds of changes that we not only infer but actually do see as we
> compare sequences from generation to generation. No I don't have the
> detailed mechanism for how all evolutionary change occurred. Neither
> have I a detailed mechanism for development from fertilized egg to
> adult organism. But the pattern is there and there is nothing
> inconsistent (with my level of credulity) with thinking that it
> happens without special intervention. Figuring out the mechanism in
> more detail is part of our task.
>
> 8. As for Bill's question about the connection between "apparent age"
> and "apparent randomness". If I believed that the Bible taught that
> the earth is young, I'd probably adopt some kind of apparent age view.
> I don't believe the Bible requires that viewpoint. I do believe that
> the Bible teaches that God governs all events even those that appear
> to be random. Thus, even with the most hideous of events, I believe
> that God is in control and has his reasons, although I don't always
> fathom them. I don't believe that I'm at the mercy of chance and
> necessity (or even my own brilliant and not-so-brilliant choices) and
> I trust God in his wisdom and plan to do what he will in my life that
> will accomplish his purposes for me. My kids' genetic and biological
> makeup are the result of multitude of chance events, yet I believe
> that they have been fearfully and wonderfully made and knitted
> together by their sovereign Lord. Their psychological and social
> histories are similarly contingent, and influenced by their own free
> choices. Yet even those are directed by their sovereign Lord. Do I
> have empirical evidence of this divine governance? Probably not
> anything that is convincing even to a moderately skeptical person.
> Yet, the Bible tells me so.
>
> TG
>
> ________________
> Terry M. Gray, Ph.D.
> Computer Support Scientist
> Chemistry Department
> Colorado State University
> Fort Collins, CO 80523
> (o) 970-491-7003 (f) 970-491-1801
>
>
>
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Received on Wed Jul 8 14:15:03 2009