Divine action in the context of modern scientific thinking

Abstract

How can God interact with us and with the world? The problem of how God can do something - divine action - in this world is very important for Christians today. Without a proper account of God's action we will not have a credible defense of a God who is actually able to do something and we will not have the God who is described in Scripture for example. God is not only the creator and sustainer of all natural processes but is also able to interact with humans through revelation and other divine acts. The current popular opinion is that science has discovered the laws of the universe and it is assumed that everything is determined by those laws. Something undetermined simply leads to the assumption that the law governing the process has not been discovered yet. It is often customary in theology to avoid a direct explanation of how God can act within the framework of science which describes our available knowledge of the basic building blocks of our universe. Religion is said to have another language to speak about the same realities which are also described by the natural sciences. They are complementary and this complementarity is understood as two distinct not directly comparable realms of understanding (Dyrness, 132-133). Complementarity essentially isolates both realms avoiding fruitful interaction between those fields of study. I would content that this approach is not consistent with the Christian tradition. Christianity started initially by building on an early JewishlHebrew understanding of God transforming that understanding and culture and getting its first adherents from that culture. Later Christianity used the prevalent thinking in the Graeco-Roman culture to express its message and again transformed that culture. Similarly today we cannot continue to insist on our own frame of reference in dialogue with the secular world. We need to use the cultural thinking of our contemporary time period to express Christian core beliefs. Thinking is largely dominated by science today and it is therefore logical to utilize the best science today to communicate and express core Christian concepts. If Christianity really is the superior paradigm then it will be able to be expressed in inferior limited systems (such as the natural sciences) and add to the explanatory power of those systems by transforming them. This paper will try to show how divine action is possible within the framework of (post)modem science. Note though that there is more to God than just causation where the focus is here. God is a person and one of the desired outcomes of a scientific model of divine causation is the possibility for God to act as a personal agent. The paper here largely builds on work done by Nancey Murphy, John Polkinghome and Bob Russell on divine action and presents a possible way of integrating science and theology through a common model of causation.