In the spring of 2010 I was asked to teach a class at my Father’s church about miracles and divine action from my perspective as a scientist. It took several months of preparation, but as I prepared for the class and read from many different sources, my views on the subject changed substantially. Here is essentially what I said. Keep in mind that this was an hour talk. Typed up in a word document it is 11 pages single space. I plan to revise it into a more compact and compartmentalized form, but in the event I never get around to it, here it is.
Scientists Perspective
To begin the discussion, I think it is helpful to give you a taste of what my world view used to be like, show you the issues I wrestled with because of that view, what I have found, and ultimately how I see things today.
Figure 1 – A double rainbow
To do this, it will be helpful if you understand how I think. We all live in this modern world so although my worldview may amplify the scientific perspective, we all share a similar worldview to some extent. That is why we’re talking about this in the first place. But I think it is necessary that I at least try to demonstrate to you the full extent of my worldview.
Figures 1-4 show four different pictures. With each picture I will tell you what I see. There will hopefully be both commonality and difference between what I see and what you as the reader see. The differences, assuming you do not share the same background as I do, should give the reader a small taste of how I see things so that you can better understand my worldview.
Figure 2 – A campfire.
In Fig. 1, I see a beautiful rainbow. I also see an aerosol water mist in the air that scatters the suns rays and reveals to the photographer’s camera the visible spectrum of light. The brighter and more concentrated inner circle occurs at an angle of 40-42 degrees. The darker and less concentrated outer circle occurs from double reflections inside each droplet and occurs at angles of 50-53 degrees.
Figure 2 shows a heat source that pyrolizes the wood fuel so that the volatile compounds contained in the wood evaporate. The pyrolized gases burn when they come in contact with the air because the temperature of the gas is higher than its minimum ignition temperature.
Figure 3- A cloud or thunderhead.
In Figure 3 I see a large thunder head forming with rain beneath it. I also see a warm summer day with the sun heating the moist ground and evaporating the moisture on the ground. This water vapor is less dense than air so it rises upwards until it passes an altitude whose pressure is equal to water’s vaporization pressure. Once it passes below this pressure, marked by the discrete altitude plane, the water condenses into water droplets to form a dense mist at a significant density that scatters the light causes a white visible cloud to form. The updraft has significant upwards momentum that the flow is turbulent, which is what makes the cloud have a bumpy upper surface.
Figure 4 – A picture of a sunset taken from midway up Mt. Baker in Washington.
In Figure 4 I see a beautiful mountain sunset. I see blue mountains. The reason I see blue mountains is because the sun’s heat during the day has pyrolized the volatile compounds in the wood trees and caused them to sit over the mountains. The evaporated hydrocarbons are the distinct smell that is associated with evergreen forests in the mountains. These molecules scatter light in the same way that the sky appears blue, which is what causes the mountains to appear blue.
The sky is yellow in this picture because the sun is just above the horizon and the more direct rays coming from the sun allow us to see other colors beyond blue such as yellow, orange and then red as the sunset finishes.
My World View
I do not expect you to understand my explanations in detail, but rather understand that I see the world as a very predictable place. The physical world does not hold much mystery for me anymore. I was amazed in college, as I learned about the physical world and the laws we have to describe it, to discover just how predictable the world was. I couldn’t help but share it with other people. If you knew me during college you may have remembered how I liked to explain to others why things work the way they do. At some point I stopped explaining things to people, or at least I didn’t do it as much. Perhaps I stopped because I discovered that people don’t always want to hear about how things work. I may have also realized that through my gaining of knowledge I had also lost something, namely the mystery in the world. My worldview had changed. It is a predictable and understandable place. If there is anything I don’t understand, I should be able to find an answer. And if I don’t succeed, someone else will.
But I don’t think my worldview is all that different from others. I see the beauty and magnificence of the cosmos just like everyone else. Many people, including me, believe there is a reason for why things happen or work the way they do, but my reasons do not require God. God is unnecessary to explain how things work. I, as well as most other scientists, believe that there is always a logical explanation for natural processes. It is this assumption that has produced the technology that we all rely on today. The world to me appears to be very predictable and deterministic.
While I was getting my undergraduate education, a conflict evolved with my Christian belief that God is active in the world. How could God be a theistic God (intimately involved in the world) and not a deistic God (separated from the world as a bystander) if the laws of physics are so deterministic that we know them to never be violated? How can we explain the miracles in the Bible? I remember trying to find ways to explain the physical processes of how the miracles of the Bible might have occurred, like
- Parting of the red sea – high winds
- The flood – not global, but local
But some of the stories were too difficult to explain:
- Turning water into wine
- Walking on water
- Sun standing still
- Manna for food
I had a few options:
- believe that what these people saw was not an accurate account of what really happened
- believe that somehow God could cause these things to happen through quantum and chaotic manipulation – Polkinghorne’s non-energetic divine intervention (to be discussed later).
- believe that the events may never have happened at all, they were myths or stories told for purposes other than documenting a miraculous event
I must point out that I never had the option to say that science is wrong and what the Bible says is true. There is too much right about the laws of physics and how they describe the world and too much wrong about the Bible and how it describes the physical processes of the world to believe that the Bible has anything to offer on scientific issues. In reality I had to rely on all of these, but I leaned most heavily on the first two and not much on the last.
Reconciling Faith with Science
In order to survive in churches over the last 14 years (since I left Irvine Pres.) I have had to separate my faith from science. I have my faith in one box and my science in another. At the beginning of college it was not so neat and tidy, but as science began to rigorously show how it could explain most of the physical phenomena we observe in the world I began to separate the two. Because while one was maturing and establishing a solid foundation to stand on, the other was not. Science became this enormous tower of knowledge and power and my faith paled in comparison. I knew at some point I would need to apply the same level of rigor and investigation to my faith as I have done with science.
Over the last year and a half I’ve been in the process of trying to unite my faith with my science. I have been applying the same level of rigor, investigation and research I have been taught through my academic education. One of my biggest struggles as a scientist is relating to people that insist on the inerrancy of the Bible. There are different ways of reading the creation story and the Bible in general and the differences ultimately boil down to what categories you give the Bible authority over. There are basically three different authority levels that people give to the bible. They are
- Young Earth Creationist – ultimate authority with exact literal intent
- Old Earth Creationist - ultimate authority but some flexibility in intent
- Theological authority – texts read in context they were written
The young earth creationists believe that the earth and the entire universe are only about 10,000 years old. This originates out of giving the Bible ultimate authority over everything. If science conflicts with the Bible, science must be wrong because the Bible is the ultimate authority on all matters.
The old earth creationists also see the Bible as the ultimate authority on all matters, but they allow some flexibility in how it reads in order to try to accommodate other sources such as science that are authoritative. They tend to go to great lengths to explain conflicts between Biblical and scientific accounts of creation.
There are also people that believe that the Bible only has authority to answer metaphysical and theological questions.
Clearly I am not a young earth creationist. I have dabbled in old earth creation concepts a bit, but found them intellectually unsatisfactory because of the necessity for the Bible to still be inerrant. Inerrancy is a problem not just in the creation story, but the rest of the Bible. It forces one to accept the miracles that contradict the laws of physics to be truth and that science is wrong. As I have said before, there is too much consistent between science and the physical processes of the cosmos and too little consistent between the Bible and the physical processes of the cosmos.
Clearly I lie in the last category, that the Bible can answer questions of theology and not science.
Now let’s briefly revisit a bit of what my Dad discussed last week about the ancient Near Eastern people, their religious views and what that means for our discussion of divine action and modern science.
Biblical Divine Action
In a book called “Divine Action and Modern Science,” Nicolas Saunders paints a portrait of the ancient beliefs and religions around the time the Pentateuch (the first five chapters of the Old Testament) was written. He describes the early Babylonian religious view that each of the forces of nature such as harvests, storms, fire, rain, etc were all personified into deities.
Let me now quote directly from his book in different excerpts to communicate where I am going.
“The consequence of this [forces being personified into deities] was the view that natural processes were fickle and that order and regularity were not things to be taken for granted – man felt precariously balanced at the apex of many divergent intentions, most of which he could only implore to remain calm and regular.”
“What made the Hebrews account fundamentally different from its contemporaries was its radical insistence on monotheism.” “The Israelite account of nature is steeped in terminology of other Near Eastern peoples, but the Hebrews did not view regularity in nature as the product of a balancing of many personal wills, but as an expression of the faithfulness of the one supreme Yahweh.”
“Another crucial change that Israelite monotheism introduced was an elevation of the status of man in this cosmic scheme. In the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, man is almost created as an afterthought… In the Hebrew Bible, however, the conquering of chaos and disorder by Yahweh has the focus of making the world ready for occupation by man. This aspect is particularly clear in the cosmogony presented in the Book of Genesis (itself heavily influenced by other Near Eastern sources) where the creation of man forms the climax of all God’s creation. Accordingly, because of the central locus that mankind occupies in the Hebrew account of creation, it followed that human beings could naturally claim that Yahweh was providentially concerned with their future.”
The concept that Yahweh is concerned with our futures is key to the discussion of divine action as it provides the overall point of what these stories were trying to say about God, his people and the relationship between them. God not only created the cosmos and man, but He cares for it and us as well. The Hebrew God is the one supreme God under whom all natural processes existed as expressions of his personality and will. Natural phenomena are personalized in Israelite religion.
As a scientist, this concept is difficult for me, because my world view basically presupposes that all natural processes obey the laws of nature. There is nothing moral about the laws of physics, they just are. But a scientist’s conflict with this description of natural processes is not a problem of science, it is a problem in how we’re reading the text.
Henri Frankfort said “for ancient man the surrounding world was not an ‘it’, it was a ‘thou’. In fact, there wasn’t even a word in the ancient near east that could be translated into ‘nature’ or at least the modern sense of the word.”
Now quoting Saunders again, “the source of the problem is that the interpretation of nature which modern philosophy of science adopts distinguishes natural phenomena as fundamentally ‘it’, rather than ‘thou’.” These are two very different ways of looking at things that are seamlessly interlinked with the cultures and worldviews of two very different times. I’m not saying that its impossible to reconcile the two, but its much easier to reconcile the two if we don’t impose our modern 21st century views onto a document written thousands of years ago.
Divine Action
Let us now discuss the philosophy of divine action and how philosophers deal with the topic. First of all, it is convenient to break divine action into two different types, General Divine Action (GDA) and Special Divine Action (SDA).
Saunders defines the two as:
General Divine Action: “Those actions of God that pertain to the whole of creation universally and simultaneously. These include actions such as the initial creation and the maintenance of scientific regularity and the laws of nature by God.”
Special Divine Action: “Those actions of God that Pertain to a particular time and place in creation as distinct from another. This is a broad category and includes the traditional understanding of ‘miracles’, the notion of particular providence, responses to intercessionary prayer, God’s personal actions, and some forms of religious experience.”
GDA can be seen as the laws of nature, “an overall government of the universe through the universal laws that control or influence nature, man, and history, without the need for specific or ad hoc acts of divine will.” (Langford 1981). This may sound more like a deistic form of divine action, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be so.
SDA displays the personal side of God, the loving, caring and providential part where God performs special actions at specific times and places for special reasons.
These definitions seem somewhat artificial and I’m sure there are some instances where there is overlap and the lines aren’t so clearly defined, but most of the literature draws these distinctions because it is productive to the discussion of the topic.
Science’s view of the discussion
Scientists tend to see the world as a fairly predictable and deterministic place. Deterministic means that if you know a system and its initial starting point, you can determine where it will be at some later time. It is because the laws of physics are deterministic that the technology we have behaves as reliably as it does. Now you might say that its not deterministic enough because my car breaks, electronics break and I’m constantly shelling out money to fix things. If it is so deterministic, why do things that we understand and build still break? The answer is that it is usually because they were only designed to work for a certain time period. It is possible to design things so they don’t break, but it normally makes the product so expensive that no one can afford it.
It is fairly easy for scientists to accept GDA because it is consistent with our world view and experience. This is because GDA is defined in manner very similar to the laws of physics and their deterministic nature. What is not easy to accept as a scientist is SDA, the idea that there is openness within the cosmos and its physical processes.
If you are somewhat educated on this subject you will know that the beginning of the 20th century brought about a new way of looking at the world and the laws of physics, namely quantum mechanics. And the second half of the 20th century brought about another phenomenon called chaos, which we will talk about as well.
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:
Quantum mechanics basically takes the classical wave theory description of the universe and creates a particle-like model in which wave phenomena can be essentially quantized. What we end up with is a duality in descriptions of the same thing. Waves can be described as particles and particles can be described as waves. One of the most infamous parts of quantum mechanics that many people have heard about is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle basically says that there are limits to how well we can know the position and momentum of particles. If we know the position with infinite accuracy we know nothing about its momentum. If we know the momentum with infinite accuracy we know nothing about its position. This principle has lead many people to conclude (incorrectly) that there is indeterminism explicitly contained in the laws of physics.
When this principle was originally developed, there was a great amount of philosophical reflection that went along with it. The thought that indeterminism could exist in the world was such a new concept in the world of physics many physicists rejected it entirely. The debate eventually resolved, but the details are too complex to describe here.
As for our discussion of divine action, many theologians have latched onto the Uncertainty Principle and used it to claim a possible mechanism through which God can intervene in the world’s natural processes. Until I began putting together this talk, I was one of those people.
Personal side note:
Around my sophomore year of college when I was first introduced to quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, I adopted the idea that God could interact with the world through the apparent indeterminism I understood to be present at the molecular level. I basically adopted Polkinghorne’s non-energetic divine intervention concept (without really knowing it) and it was relatively easy to do so. Quantum mechanics was so different from the rest of the Newtonian, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian mechanical descriptions of the world that it was easy to see the uncertainty principle as a limit to which man can know and understand the world, which lead me to believe that this is how God can act in the world.
It is quite ironic that I received a Bachelors and Masters in physics and only briefly questioned this concept of divine intervention. I remember doing my graduate quantum mechanics homework and wondering why there was always an answer to each problem. I remember asking “where is the indeterminism?”
Falsity of Quantum openness:
As I prepared to give this talk I slowly and methodically deconstructed this belief. What I realized, which I should have known all along, was that quantum mechanics is in fact just as deterministic as classical physics. That just goes to show how easily we can dismiss perfectly good scientific arguments and rely on our previous worldview without as much as a hiccup.
Steven Hawking says, “with the advent of quantum mechanics, we have come to recognize that events cannot be predicted with complete accuracy but that there is always a degree of uncertainty. If one likes, one could ascribe this randomness to the intervention of God, but it would be a very strange kind of intervention: there is no evidence that it is directed toward any purpose. Indeed, if it were, it would by definition not be random.”
Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of a particle by solving a wave function in Hilbert space, which contains as a small subset, the Euclidean space of classical mechanics. The wave function represents the probability that the particle will be in any given state. The system as a whole though is completely deterministic. Ernest Nagel in the Structure of Science says, “an examination of the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics shows that the theory employs a definition of state quite unlike that of classical mechanics, but that relative to its own form of state-description quantum theory is deterministic in the same sense that classical mechanics is deterministic.”
It’s not necessary for you to understand all of the details, but what I want you to understand is the conflict it creates for me as a scientist and a Christian. Through my investigation of divine action I have completed deconstructed my whole belief system of how God acts in the world. I can’t say that it hasn’t been at least a bit destabilizing as I have asked questions such as
- Does God act in creation at all?
- Is there any point to petitionary prayer? Is there any point asking God for anything?
- How is it that God is supposed to be a theistic God that loves, cares and plays an active role in creation when the world I understand suggests He is more of a deistic God that has created the world just to sit back and watch?
These are tough questions, but there is hope. Let me briefly visit just one more area that scientists have explored to provide a mechanism for divine action.
Chaos Theory
Chaos is basically the study of systems that have a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Given any two sets of initial conditions, now matter how similar they are, you will arrive at two very different outcomes. I won’t go into any more detail, but chaos theory has led many philosophers and theologians to see it as a way for God to act in the universe. However, chaos theory is based upon classical physics and is also a fully deterministic description of the world. Similar arguments made for quantum theory apply to chaos theory as well.
Summary
If I could summarize what the scientific discussion has to say on divine action, I would have to say that there is no final verdict that exists to claim how divine action occurs. And more importantly, I have found that science does not have much to say on the matter other than if God does act in creation, we certainly can’t measure his influence. But is that really surprising? Isn’t this the classic case of a category mismatch? Am I trying to use the tools from one domain of inquiry and apply them to another?
Divine action, if it occurs, permeates all of creation. It is present historically, theologically, personally or experientially and in some limited sense scientifically.
One might argue that if God does not act through physical processes he can at least act through human beings or the Holy Spirit, right? Well not really. If the world really is deterministic like the laws of physics, then our brains would be deterministic as well. This would mean that all of our thoughts are not actually free thoughts, but thoughts that occur through natural physical processes. There are people that believe that, such as Calvinism, but I am not one of them. I believe that we have free will and that is an assertion I am making about the world.
If we are to make an educated assessment of whether or not divine action occurs we need to be using all forms of epistemology or knowledge. The big bang theory and the creation of life at least suggests that there may be a God. The stories and theology we have suggest that divine action occurs. Intelligent life seems to have free will and the ability to freely think and decide to do one thing or another.
At this point I would like to return to the original presumptions on which our laws of physics have been constructed. We have assumed that the world is predictable and we can know things about how the world works. Consequently, we have created a large set of knowledge, theories and models that are based upon empirical tests and observations. The realm of science alone can lead one to believe that the entire cosmos is deterministic.
It’s at this point that a scientist must remember that there are other epistemological sources that can contribute to the discussion. After all, other domains of inquiry suggest that openness does exist and that the world is not completely deterministic. Let us be clear that they cannot prove it, but they do (at least in my mind) suggest it.
So what are we to do about the deterministic laws of physics? I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps they are merely a subset of the larger domain of creation that is indeterminate and open. In any case, science is based upon the ability to measure what is repeatable. One cannot test what is not repeatable, and God’s SDA events cannot be repeatably tested with scientific inquiry. Other forms of epistemology must be used to determine whether or not one can believe in special divine action.
It is easy for scientists to make the assertion that the deterministic laws of nature constrain the entire universe to be deterministic. However, using the predictability of the world to conclude that the entire cosmos is deterministic is not a physical assertion, it is a metaphysical assertion. While the world may appear to be deterministic, one cannot prove that it is deterministic. When a scientist concludes through the study of the laws of physics that the entire cosmos is deterministic he has made a metaphysical assertion, an assertion outside his domain of inquiry.
Just as theologians falsely use their tools to make scientific claims, scientists also falsely use their tools to make theological claims. When Carl Sagan said “the cosmos is all that is, ever was, and ever will be,” he is making a metaphysical statement, but masking it as science. I doubt that he even realized he was doing that. I never realized that I was making a category mistake until just a few weeks ago. This metaphysical assertion I made long ago has certainly created much grief for me over the last decade or more, but even though I don’t know how divine action occurs, I can believe that it occurs.
Final Remarks
When my Dad and I first started preparing for this series he sent an email to N.T. Wright asking about his view on divine intervention in relation to the resurrection. He wrote back and this is what he said:
I do not myself like the word ‘intervention’, because it implies that God is normally ‘outside’ the processes of this world and would then be ‘stepping in’, like a headmaster ‘intervening’ in a lesson where the ordinary teacher couldn’t cope. Instead, the Bible offers us a more interesting and dynamic model of cosmology (heaven and earth and how they relate) and of God’s being and action therein. God, says the Psalmist, ‘feeds the young ravens when they call on him’. Is that ‘intervention’? Or do we call it the ravens’ ‘instinct’? Or is it both? Of course that could then collapse into pantheism and the BIble is clear that isn’t the answer either. But you see the point: God is always around the place, always active, and sometimes that activity results in things that take us by surprise, rather like … Einsteinian physics takes Newtonian physics by surprise (curved space? time warps?). Or perhaps like a sphere takes a circle by surprise. So, yes: another dimension, intersecting with the usual ones.
…
As to ‘how’ God works in the world, the answer is multiple. Often it is through human beings, who will find an idea, an impulse, in their heads and hearts which they find they have to obey, only then to find (for instance) they meet up with someone who had been praying for them, or whatever. I have no idea how this ‘works’, but I know, as do many, many people, that it does in fact. William Temple said, ‘When I pray, coincidences happen; when I stop praying, the coincidences stop happening.’ He was a wise man.
Sorry, that’s all I have time for. Give your son my greetings and suggest he reads the Psalms while thinking about his questions…
Warm greetings and good wishes
Tom Wright
Tom Wright was wise to tell me to read the Psalms while thinking about these questions, because there are other fruitful approaches to understanding the world than mere science.
