How Can God Act in the World? Modern Science and the Problem of Divine Causation
How Can God Act in the World? Modern Science and the Problem of Divine Causation

Summary/Abstract: The belief that God actively acts in the world has been fundamental to orthodox Christian theology throughout the history of Christianity. Since the rise of modern science, however, this traditional understanding of God’s actions has attracted more and more critique. Firstly, it has been argued God cannot act in the world without violating the allegedly all-encompassing laws of nature, and, consequently, because the laws of nature cannot presumably ever be broken, it is considered totally impossible for God to influence the physical world in any way. Secondly, it is claimed that even if breaking the laws of nature was not, in theory, impossible, it would still be, in practice, impossible for an immaterial entity such as God to influence the material world. In this article, I argue that the first objection, i.e., that God cannot act in the world, holds partly true. I maintain that God cannot act without interfering with the processes of nature (although some recent attempts of building noninterventionist theories of God’ actions have been made). Nevertheless, I do not see how God’s intervention would constitute a problem for modern physics, as has often been proposed. Moreover, the second claim, i.e., that immaterial entities cannot affect material entities, is not based on evidence but on an unfounded assumption that because we do not know the mechanism of causation between immaterial and material entities, this causation is not possible.

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