Introduction
Religious belief in general and Christian belief in
particular is committed to the belief that God acts in the world.[1]
Heidelberg Catechism:
Providence
is the almighty and ever present power of God by which he upholds, as with his
hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that lead and
blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and
sickness, prosperity and poverty – all things, in fact, come to us not by
chance but from his fatherly hand.[2]
Plantinga: Why is
this a problem?
à
According to Christian and theistic views of God…
(1) God
is a person.
He
is thus a being who has knowledge; he also has affections (he loves some
things, hates others); he has ends and aims, and acts on the basis of his
knowledge to achieve his ends. Furthermore, God is all-powerful, all-knowing,
and wholly good. These properties are essential to him: it isn’t possible that
he should fail to have them.[3]
(2) God
has created our world out of nothing.
(3) God
conserves the world, sustains it in being…[A]part from that sustaining,
supporting activity, the world would simply fail to exist.
(4) God
so governs the world that whatever happens is to be thought of as “coming for
his fatherly hand”; he either causes or permits whatever does in fact happen;
none of it is to be thought of as a result of mere chance.
[T]his
governing…comes in at least two parts. First of all, God governs the world in
such a way that is displays regularity and predictability…According to the
Christian belief, however, it is also true that God sometimes does things
differently; he sometimes deviates from the usual way in which he treats the
stuff he has made. Examples would be miracles…[4]
Examples include:
(1) Miracles
– Parting of the Red Sea, converting water into wine, raising Lazarus from the
dead, Jesus’ own resurrection, etc.
(2) God
does something special in enabling Christians to see the truth of the central
teachings of the gospel[5]
(3) Grace
(4) Inspiration
(5) Providence
(6) Answering
prayer
Q1: Do you agree
with Plantinga that Christians are committed to the view that God acts
specially in the world? Why or why not?
I. The Problem
Langdon Gilkey: Modern theologians don’t really believe that
God did any of those things – or,
indeed, that he did anything at all.
The historical method
includes the presuppositions that history is a unity in the sense of a closed
continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession
of cause and effect…This closedness means that the continuum of historical
happenings cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent
powers and that therefore there is no “miracle” in this sense of the word. Such
a miracle would be an event whose cause did not lie with history…It is in
accordance with such a method as this that the science of history goes to work
on all historical documents. And there cannot be any exceptions in the case of
biblical texts if the latter are at all to be understood historically.[6]
Whatever
the Hebrews believed, we believe that
the biblical people lived in the same causal continuum of space and time in
which we live, and so one in which no divine wonders transpired and no divine
voices were hears.[7]
Deism (Medes and
Persian conception): God has perhaps created the world and established the way
it works; perhaps he has ordained and promulgated the natural laws; but once he
has done so, not even he can act in that world.[8]
It is special divine action that…is the problem[, e.g.,
miracles and divine intervention].[9]
Plantinga: What’s
the problem with special divine action? Why should anyone object to it?
à
Incompatibility with modern science, specifically:
Science
is often identified with determinism. In a purely deterministic universe there
would be so room for God to work in the world except through the sort of
miraculous intervention that Hume…found to be so insupportable.[11]
(2) The
conservation laws
The
problem…is this. Science discovers and endorses natural laws; if God did
miracles or acted specially in the world, he would have to contravene these
laws and miraculously intervene; and that is incompatible with science.
Religion and science, therefore, are in conflict, which does not bode well for
religion.
Plantinga: But is
all this really true?
II. The Old Picture
[A]ccording
to Newton and classical mechanics, natural laws describe how the world works when, or provided that the world is a closed
(isolated) system, subject to no outside causal influence. In classical physics,
the great conservation laws deduced form Newton’s laws are seated for closed or isolated systems.[12]
A. The Newtonian Picture
These
principles, therefore, apply to isolated
or closed systems. If so, however,
there is nothing in this principle to prevent God from changing the velocity or
direction of a particle. If he did so, obviously, energy would not be conserved
in the system in question; but equally obviously, that system would not be
closed, in which case the principle of conservation of energy would not apply
to it.[13]
Furthermore,
it is no part of Newtonian mechanics or classical science to declare that the
material universe is a closed
system…[T]hat claim isn’t physics, but a theological or metaphysical add-on.[14]
The argument is made that because of natural laws, God cannot
or does not intervene. However, one can simply argue that the correct view
of a natural law is that “When the universe is causally closed (when God is not
acting specially in the world), P.”
Q2: What do you
think about Plantinga’s claim that the “classical scientific (Newtonian)”
picture doesn’t hold that our universe is a closed system?
Plantinga: [C]learly there is a
possible world that (i) shares its past with the actual world, (ii) is not
causally closed (because, perhaps, God acts specially in it) and (iii) does not
share its future with the actual world. Therefore determinism, which entails
(6), is false.[15]
Q3: What do you
think about Plantinga’s argument above? Is this question begging?
B. The Laplacean Picture
Laplacean picture = Determinism + the causal closure of the
physical universe[16]
Why?
à
Because it is possible in principle to predict in principle the future state of
the universe given its original state plus the natural laws. “If God had ever
acted specially in the world, the Laplacean demon would be unable to make those
calculations.”[17]
Free Will Problem: The
Laplacean picture implies (or strongly suggests) that no human actions are
free.[18]
Q4: Do you agree
with Plantinga that the Laplacean picture (i.e., determinism) implies that no
human actions are free? Does he think that all varieties of compatibilism fail?
If so, what are his arguments against them?
Plantinga: Whether
determinism is incompatible with human freedom depends on the nature of the
laws. If the laws are no more than Humean descriptive generalizations, if they
merely record what actually happens, then there is no reason to think that
determinism is incompatible with human freedom.[19]
The same goes for a conception of laws like that of David
Lewis: a set of exceptionless generalizations that is maximal with respect to a
combination of strength and simplicity. Here (as in the previous case) laws
would supervene on particular matters of fact.[20]
Q5: What do you
think about the Humean and Lewisinean conception of natural laws? Do you think
they have any merit? Why or why not?
Plantinga: Just
as the Newtonian picture leaves room for divine action in the world, so it also
leaves room for human free action [(dualistically conceived)].[21]
For
suppose – along with Plato, Augustine, and Descartes and many contemporaries –
that human beings resemble God in being immaterial selves or substances. Then
just as God, who is an immaterial being, can act in the hard, heavy, massy
physical universe, so too, perhaps, can human beings; God could confer on them
the power to cause changes in the physical universe.[22]
Q6: Granting that
the situation described is possible, how is God supposed to overcome the
mind/body problem? In other words, how does God, being spirit, cause events in
the physical world?
Q7: Assuming that God does act specially in
the world, how could we detect it?
By assuming
special divine action to occur, you open the possibility to measuring God with
standard scientific tools. Depending on how active God is in the world, the
task of detecting him might range from virtually impossible to inevitable. Presumably,
though, to accomplish the types of feats that God is credited with (miracles
and the like), his activity can’t be so subtle as to evade all possibility of
detection. And when you consider some of the ingenious experiments scientists
have come up with to detect, and precisely measure, the effects of subatomic
particles, is it reasonable to think that God’s activity in the world might
evade detection if scientists went looking for it?
While I
listened to Dr. Plantinga’s argument, it struck me that such thinking is very
scientific. Indeed, scientists regularly ignore outliers in their data. If a
scientist collects 100 data points, and 99 of them show a distinct pattern but
1 is far off that pattern, it is generally considered an outlier. Often, a
scientist will ignore the outlier in trying to understand what the bulk of the
data mean. Using this reasoning, then, God intervening in nature is the
outlier. It doesn’t happen very often, and when it happens, it should be very
clear. As a result, it is easily ignored when coming to scientific conclusions.[23]
Approaching
the problem from this direction, we can construct the following argument:
(1) If God acts specially in the world, then
there are physical events in the world whose proximate cause is God
(2) If there are physical events in the world
whose proximate cause is God, then these events can be measured by science
(3) But if these events are caused by God,
then they will not be explainable by any other known (natural) cause in the
universe
(4) Therefore, if there are not any physical
events in the world that are not explainable by any other known (natural) cause
in the universe, then there are no events whose proximate cause is God
(5) There are not any physical events in the
world that are not explainable by any other known (natural) cause in the
universe
(6) Therefore, there are no events whose
proximate cause is God, i.e., ~(1)
(7) If (6), then God does not act specially
in the world
(8)
Therefore,
God does not act specially in the world
Q8:
What do you think about
the above argument? Does it prove that God doesn’t act specially in the world?
Why or why not?
Q9: What other considerations
besides scientific ones might there be to oppose a worldview in which God acts
specially in the world? E.g., does it exacerbate the problem of evil (if God
intervened in this case, why didn’t he intervene in that case?); is it
consistent with the classical notion of God (if God acting in the world is
something that human beings can really influence, then doesn’t that undermine
the assumption that God necessarily does the right/best thing in every possible
situation?); etc.
Other links and resources
(2) Interview with Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kfzD3ofUb4
(3) Plantinga lecture on divine action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5DPneR-Rtc
(4) James “Some Metaphysical Problems
Pragmatically Considered” - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm
