Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (15 page)

Perhaps; but also, perhaps God is more like a romantic artist; perhaps he revels in glorious variety, riotous creativity, overflowing fecundity, uproarious activity. (Why else would he create a million species of beetles?) Perhaps he is also very much a hands-on God, constantly
active in history, leading, guiding, persuading and redeeming his people, blessing them with “the Internal Witness of the Holy Spirit” (Calvin) or “the Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit” (Aquinas) and conferring upon them the gift of faith.
²⁵
No doubt he is active in still other ways.
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None of this so much as begins to compromise his greatness and majesty, his august and unsurpassable character.

The reasons for supposing God couldn’t or wouldn’t intervene in his creation are weak. But now we must face a more poignant question: what, from the point of view of the new picture,
is
intervention? Can we so much as say what it consists in?

We can say what it is on the classical picture, at least approximately. Of course, we can’t characterize an intervention as an action that causes an event E which is contrary to a natural law. That is because, as you will recall, the form of a natural law is

(LN) When the universe is causally closed (when God is not acting specially in the world), P;

but if and when God intervenes, the universe is not then causally closed, so that the proviso of the proposed law is not satisfied.
²⁷
Nor can we say that an intervention is a divine act producing an event that would not have occurred but for that act: any act of conservation meets that condition, and conservation is not a case of intervention.

Suppose we look in a different direction. Returning to (LN), delete the antecedents from all the laws, conjoin the resulting propositions, and use “L” as the name for that conjunction. On the deterministic Laplacean picture, as we’ve seen, S(
t
), the physical state of the universe at any time
t
, conjoined with L, entails S(
t*
) for any (later) time
t*
. Let’s make a couple of simplifying assumptions: suppose the material universe has a beginning at a time t
_o
, suppose it evolves according to L, suppose no intervention occurs at t
_o
, suppose no two interventions occur at exactly the same time, and suppose there are at most countably many interventions.
²⁸
Then an intervention will have occurred at the first time
t*
such that

S(
t
_o
)L

does not entail

S(
t
*).

More generally, we can let
t
be
any
time, not just that hypothetical first moment; let
t*
be the first time after
t
such that S(
t*
) is not entailed by S(
t
₀
) & L: an intervention will have occurred at
t*
.
²⁹

Of course this still doesn’t tell us what an intervention
is
. As an effort in that direction, we might try saying that an intervention is an action (divine, demonic, angelic, human) that causes an event
E
to occur at a time
t
, such that for some
t*
prior to
t
, S(
t*
) & L doesn’t entail that
E
occurs at
t
. The idea is that God, for example, causes an event
E
to occur at
t
, such that at some earlier time
t*
, Laplace’s demon could not have predicted that
E
would occur at
t
(even if she knew both L and the total physical state S(
t*
)). Sadly enough, however, this won’t quite do the trick. For suppose God intervenes in this sense at
t
: say he
creates a full-grown horse
ex nihilo
, so that
E
is the coming-to-be of this horse. Let
t*
be an earlier time such that S(
t*
) doesn’t entail that
E
occurs at
t
. Now consider some time
t**
later than
t
and suppose God performs a noninterventionist act of preserving or sustaining that horse at
t**
. This act causes an event
E
* consisting in the horse’s existing at
t**
; S(
t*
) & L clearly doesn’t entail that
E
* occurs. So on our definition, this act of sustaining counts as an intervention. But it shouldn’t.

We might try the following: stipulate that where
E
results from an intervention at
t
, for every earlier time
t*
, S(
t*
) & L does not entail that
E
occurs at
t
. The definition thus goes as follows:

(INT) An act
A
(divine, demonic, angelic, human) is an intervention just if
A
causes an event
E
to occur at a time
t
, where there is an interval of times bounded above by
t
such that for every time
t*
in that interval, S(
t*
) & L doesn’t entail that
E
occurs at
t
.
³⁰

(INT) looks as if it will work for the classical context; we can therefore say for the classical context what an intervention is. But (INT) won’t work in the QM context. We can see this as follows. Suppose, once more, we delete the antecedents of the laws, conjoin the resulting propositions, and call that conjunction “L”: according to quantum mechanical indeterminacy, S(
t*
)
&
L, for a given time
t
, will not (except under extremely unusual conditions) entail S(
t*
) for other times
t*
. Hence (INT) as it stands will count every divine act of conservation as an intervention—which means, of course, that it won’t do. Given the indeterminism of quantum mechanics, nothing like (INT) is available. So what would an intervention be? (INT) won’t work for the New Picture, but what else can we come up with?

The aim of most of the DAP members, apparently, is to come up with an account of special divine action—action beyond creation
and conservation—that doesn’t entail or involve intervention. Several of the DAP authors apparently hold that intervention requires “violating the laws,” “setting aside natural law,” or “overriding” those laws; but how could God set aside or override the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics in performing those miraculous acts?
³¹
What would intervention be, in the context of the new picture, involving QM?

One fairly common thought—perhaps more like a sort of assumption than an actual proposal as to the nature of intervention—is that an intervention occurs when God performs an action, the consequence of which is an event that would not have occurred had God not performed that action:

(1) God intervenes if and only if he performs an action
A
, thereby causing a state of affairs that would not have occurred if God had not performed
A
.

As it stands, this can’t be right: in any act of conservation God causes a state of affairs that would not have occurred had he not performed that act. If God conserves you in existence, your continuing to exist is a state of affairs that would not have occurred (been actual) if he had not so acted. But conservation is not intervention.

Another possibility, therefore, would be:

(2) God intervenes if and only if he performs an action
A
thereby causing an event
E
that (a) goes beyond conservation and creation, and (b) is such that if he had not performed
A, E
would not have occurred.

This won’t work either. For what would be the difference between intervention, so construed, and special divine action? The project is to find a conception of special divine action—divine action that goes beyond conservation and creation—that doesn’t involve intervention; if (2) is true, however, every case of special divine action will
automatically
be a case of intervention—thus making the whole project of trying to find a conception of special divine action that doesn’t involve intervention look a little unlikely.

So what is divine intervention? Wildman speaks more vaguely of “violating the created structure of order”:

Most participants certainly felt that God would not create an orderly world in which it was impossible for the creator to act without violating the created structures of order…. A noninterventionist special divine act is in accord with created structures of order and regularity within nature, while an interventionist special divine act involves abrogating, suspending, or ignoring created structures of order and regularity within nature.
³²

William Stoeger adds that he believes that all the DAP participants agree with this definition.
³³
What are these created structures of order and regularity? Presumably they aren’t the natural laws as
disclosed in QM—once again, God’s performing a miracle wouldn’t violate them. So what are they?

Perhaps there is a way around this problem. Members of the DAP don’t or can’t say what intervention is; even so, it may be possible to specify a way God can act specially in the world that avoids the objections they bring against intervention. The chief objection, the heart of the matter, is two-fold. First, there is that concern with intervention as somehow going against the natures of the things God has created. And second, there is that alleged “inconsistency”: as McMullin puts it with admirable succinctness, for God to intervene is for him to “deal in two different manners” with the cosmos he has created. The idea is that typically, God does nothing special; he just conserves the world and allows it to develop or evolve according to the laws he has established for it, or he permits it to develop in accord with the natures of the entities it contains, or he treats the stuff he has made in the same way. Once in a while, however, he steps in and does something special; and it is that contrast between his ordinary dealings with the world, and the way in which he deals with it on special occasions, that is the cause for complaint.

Now as I’ve argued, neither of these objections is at all clear or clearly accurate. Furthermore, it isn’t easy to see what is problematic about God treating what he has made differently on different occasions: might he not have a good reason for doing so? Still there may be a way in which God can act specially in the world, and do so in a manner that accommodates those concerns; then even if we don’t know what intervention is, we could still specify a mode of divine action that isn’t subject to those objections. Even if we can’t say whether or not that mode of action is interventionistic, we can still
see that it isn’t subject to the objections brought against intervention, whatever exactly intervention is.

In 1958 William Pollard suggested that God
acts at the quantum level
; several members of the DAP have taken up, examined and developed his suggestion.
³⁴
All of these authors focus on the conventional Copenhagen interpretation. God can cause quantum events, and, because the laws are merely statistical, do so without “suspending” those laws. This action on his part can perhaps be amplified—by chaotic effects or in other ways—to the macroscopic level; in this way, perhaps, God can cause dramatic effects at the level of everyday life, and do so without falling into intervention.

John Polkinghorne notes a problem with this suggestion. First, the above authors speak of quantum
events
. On the Copenhagen interpretation, the only events for which indeterminism holds are those mysterious
measurements
. But then, says Polkinghorne,

There is a particular difficulty in using quantum indeterminacy to describe divine action. Conventional quantum theory contains much continuity and determinism in addition to its well-known discontinuities and indeterminacies. The latter refer, not to all quantum behavior, but only to those particular events which qualify, by the irreversible registration of their effects in the macro-world, to be described as measurements. In between the measurements the continuous determinism of the Schrödinger
equation applies. Occasions of measurement only occur from time to time, and a God who acted through being their determinator would also only be acting from time to time. Such an episodic account of providential agency does not seem altogether satisfactory theologically.
³⁵

Measurements are mysterious, and have been variously interpreted; but given (as on the Copenhagen interpretation) that they occur thus episodically, Polkinghorne’s stricture seems accurate.

The Copenhagen interpretation is a
collapse
interpretation; but there are other collapse approaches. For example, there are spontaneous collapse theories, including in particular the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber (GRW) approach.
³⁶
On these collapse approaches, collapses are not restricted to measurements; they occur spontaneously, and at a regular rate. One of the main motivations here is to help with the location problem: on the standard Copenhagen interpretation, objects, including macroscopic objects, don’t seem to
have
a location when their location isn’t being measured or detected; this can seem at the least embarrassing. On the GRW interpretation, however, “it follows that a macroscopic [system] undergoes a localization every 10
^–7
seconds.”
³⁷
Puzzles remain: won’t it be true that a macroscopic system, my body, for example, is only intermittently located, even if located 10 million times a second?
³⁸
At any rate there seems to be substantially less offense to common opinion, here, than on the classical Copenhagen interpretation.