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| Cover of the book Divine action & modern science by Nicholas Saunders |
As I mentioned in
previous posts, neither the existence nor the
non-existence of God can be proved by science. God, if He
exists, cannot be the object of scientific knowledge. Consequently, from the
rational point of view, the problem of the existence of God is philosophical
rather than scientific. Several solutions have been proposed for this problem:
- Atheism: According to this solution, followed today
by many, God does not exist and the existence of the universe would be a
consequence just of chance. An additional problem, suggested
by this theory, is that we really don’t know what chance is
(see this
post). Like dark matter and dark energy,
it is just a name that tries to hide our ignorance.
- Pantheism: According to this solution, proposed by such
distinguished names as Spinoza and Einstein, God is the universe. In other
words, there is something in the universe that we cannot discover through scientific
analysis, which explains in some way its own existence and ours. The
contrast of this theory with the previous one is clear in Einstein’s words
against the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: God does not play dice. With those
simple words, Einstein declared his disbelief regarding the concept of chance,
used by many atheistic solutions to the problem. In this theory, the
action of God in the world would take place only through natural causes,
without any alteration (by means of compatibilist
action).
- Deism: According to this solution, God exists and
created the universe, but then He left it evolve alone. Originated in the
eighteenth century, many French thinkers of the time (and a few later on, until
today) adopted this theory. From this point of view, the problem of the
action of God in the universe does not arise, because it denies that God
acts in the universe.
- Providential Theism: According to this solution, God exists and
created the universe, but then He doesn’t forget about it, but interacts
with it in some way, directing its evolution. The problem of divine action
only arises in the framework of this theory.
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| C.S. Lewis |
Traditionally, Christianity has considered two types of divine action
in the world: general (which keeps the universe in existence and
its laws in action) and special, where God acts by means of
concrete actions. In turn, this second form of action is divided into two
different types: interventionist through miracles, to which I
have dedicated two
previous posts of this blog, and non-interventionist, through Providence.
Here we are going to consider just this type of divine action, which is
essential so that petitionary prayer can make sense.
From the scientific point of view, God’s action on the world through
Providence is undetectable. How then can it be carried out?
- From a deterministic view of the world,
such as that formulated by Pierre Simon de Laplace based on Newton’s
physics, the universe, once created, would have no degrees of freedom, so
it would have zero dimensions and could be represented by a geometric
point. Even so, seen from the outside, there would still be a foothold for
divine action and Providence: the initial
conditions of the universe. Thus, C.S. Lewis proposes that,
as God is outside of time, He could have answered from the beginning to
the prayers of all thinking beings in the universe by adjusting those
conditions appropriately. In his own words:
He,
from His vantage point above Time, can, if He pleases, take all prayers into
account in ordaining that vast complex event which is the history of the
universe. For what we call ‘future’ prayers have always been present to Him. (The Laws of Nature, 1945).
- From the Copenhagen interpretation of of
quantum mechanics, an indeterministic dimension is added to the
deterministic dimension of the universe, which means that the
universe would have several degrees of freedom, and could be represented
by means of a line in one dimension, with one side deterministic
and the other indeterminist. The action of God could take place through
random quantum events and be totally imperceptible, by controlling the
result of quantum collapses without modifying their relative frequency. Several
theologians (Nancy Murphy, Robert Russell, Thomas Tracy, John
Polkinghorne, William Pollard, Arthur Peacocke...) have widely different
theories, none of which is totally satisfactory.
- If we believe in human freedom, from the apparition of man there was a third way through which God could act in the universe: by inspiring concrete actions to human beings. Human freedom would be a bridgehead of divine action into the material world. Of course, since God doesn’t want to force our freedom, in this case divine action can fail (for we can fail). With this third vertex of divine action, the world becomes two-dimensional, representable by a triangle, as indicated in the attached figure. We can say, therefore, that the apparition of man (or of any other hypothetical thinking endowed with freedom) introduced a new dimension into the universe.
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Manuel Alfonseca
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