Possible ways of divine action

In the previous post, we saw that chaotic determinism, quantum indeterminism and free will can be considered the three vertices of a bi-dimensional triangle that, together, define the material-immaterial coordinates of the world. God in his Providence can interact with the world through the three vertices of the triangle.

• Upon the deterministic vertex, God can act by manipulating the initial conditions of the universe. For God, such conditions would not be affected by chaos theory: He would be capable of setting them to an infinite number of decimal figures. Also, the restriction of the principle of uncertainty is applicable to us, but not to the Creator. Given that God is also outside time, He would be able to use his global knowledge of the cosmos to settle the initial conditions in such a way that certain events may take place in any subsequent future. This possibility was offered by C.S. Lewis as a solution to the problem of the efficacy of prayer.



C.S. Lewis

Upon the indeterministic vertex, God would act by manipulating the random subatomic quantum effects, carefully maintaining statistical equilibrium, in such a way that those effects were for us indistinguishable from chance. This operation would be within the reach of an intellect capable of designing and creating this universe, in a similar way (saving the differences) that I am able to manipulate at will the features of the computer programs in my artificial life experiments.


• Upon the free will vertex, God can use conscious human beings as a direct entry point of divine action in the material world. This would be done by suggesting  that a concrete human being should perform a given action. In this case, however, as different from the two previous cases, God runs the risk of failure, for we can fail him: He would never thwart our freedom.

The third form of divine action is not the only one which God can use to manipulate the universe. Otherwise, we would have an impotent creator, who would depend exclusively on human beings or other intelligent beings in the cosmos, in the style of the gods of the imaginary world described by Lois McMaster Bujold in her World of the Five Gods series.



Looking at what is happening in the world, it looks like God has decided to abstain of acting directly when He can do it through human beings, even though we can fail. Perhaps, if He corrected our failures and the negative effects of human egoism and wickedness, He would be promoting quietism. This could be one of the answers to the atheistic argument that says that Auschwitz horrors prove that God does not exist. What they prove, in fact, is that man is responsible, that God is not a machine who automatically corrects all the damages we cause.

On the other hand, during most of the duration of the cosmos, the third mode of divine action would have been impossible. At the origin of man, a second dimension would have entered the structure of the universe, making a triangle of the original one-dimensional segment.

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Manuel Alfonseca

This is a part of an article which was published in Spanish in the magazine Religión y Cultura, Vol. LIII:240, Jan.-Mar. 2007, pp. 137-153.