Chance or Providence : Religious Perspectives on Divine Action [1 ed.] 9781443871013, 9781443866750

Citation preview

Chance or Providence

Other volumes in this series: Theology, Evolution and the Mind (ed. N. Spurway) Creation and the Abrahamic Faiths (ed. N. Spurway) Matter and Meaning: Is Matter Sacred or Profane? (ed. M Fuller) Darwinism and Natural Theology: Evolving Perspectives (ed. A. Robinson) Inspiration in Science and Religion (ed. M. Fuller) The Concept of the Soul: Scientific and Religious Perspectives (ed. M. Fuller)

Chance or Providence: Religious Perspectives on Divine Action

Edited by

Louise Hickman

Chance or Providence: Religious Perspectives on Divine Action, Edited by Louise Hickman This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Louise Hickman and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6675-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6675-0

CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chance or Providence? Religious Perspectives on Divine Action Louise Hickman Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 Toward a Theology of Providence for a Scientific Age Philip Clayton Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 Will Resurrection be a Law of Nature? Science as Divine Action at the End of the World Mark Harris Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 45 Divine Action: Nothing more Natural? Michael Fuller Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 53 Joy and Divine Action Jeffrey W. Robinson Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 61 “The Lions Roar for Prey, Seeking their food from God”: Divine Action and Evolutionary Suffering Bethany Sollereder Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 79 Isaac Mayer Wise, Cosmic Evolution and the Problem of Evil Daniel R. Langton Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 95 Energy: A Sign of Divine Action in the World? Bertrand Souchard

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Contents

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 101 The Emergence of Altruism in the Evolution of Humankind: A Keynote of a Trinitarian Grand Narrative Peter Barrett Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 115 A Kenotic Model of Divine Action Peter Colyer Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 121 Miracle Shmiracle: David Hume versus the Early Jewish Rabbis Mark Harris Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 131 Rowan Williams and Divine Action Mark Hart Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 137 Special Divine Action: A Category Mistake? Christopher C. Knight Epilogue................................................................................................... 149 The Science and Religion Forum: A Short History Jeffrey Robinson Contributors ............................................................................................. 153 Index ........................................................................................................ 157

INTRODUCTION CHANCE OR PROVIDENCE? RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES ON DIVINE ACTION LOUISE HICKMAN

Belief in some sort of providence is widespread. “Everything happens for a reason” is enough to cause a despondent sigh in any theologian within earshot but this oft-repeated cliché is significant. It might be called (to borrow a phrase from Mary Midgley) part of our “philosophical plumbing”, constituting a background belief for both religious believers and non-believers alike, hardly noticed until it starts to go wrong, perhaps through challenge from personal events or a nearby quarrelsome theologian. It also marks a chasm, complained about by Nietzsche, between our world-view and that of the ancient Greeks for whom tragedy was a real possibility, the gods using us merely for their sport. This optimistic aphorism hasn’t always been a human intuition. The Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions are centred on a commitment to providence. The doctrine of God’s concern for creation and some sort of guidance, control or ordering of it is typically what distinguishes theism from deism, and also from fatalism, mechanism and—more recently—the suggestion that the universe and the life within it have arisen entirely from pure blind chance. Fortunately, most theological considerations have been somewhat more sophisticated than the aforementioned platitude, but there is still much reflection to be done. Insights from ecotheology, process theology and feminist theology encourage us to re-imagine metaphors of sovereignty and consequent debates about theodicy, particularly in relation to the non-human world. Our rapidly developing scientific understanding calls us to consider afresh the nature of direct and indirect divine action, the extent of human freedom, the legitimacy of distinguishing between providence, miracle and creative action, and even the role of chance itself. The chapters in the volume have their origin in the 38th annual conference of the Science and Religion Forum ‘Chance or Providence:

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Religious Perspectives on Divine Action’ which took place in September 2013 at the University of Chester. The conference itself was notable for its inter-religious character, receiving papers from Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars. The broad intention of the symposium, reflected in the contributions published here, was to combine together both scientific and theological perspectives on providence. Scientific perspectives have had a greater share of the attention in some recent publications but the outcome of the Chester conference was a more thorough integration of theology with science, reflected in this present collection. The first chapter is contributed by Philip Clayton who outlines the main causes of scepticism about the possibility of divine action: religious pluralism, non-belief as an option for most people, and the epistemic authority of science. There is also a profound theological objection: as Clayton puts it, the more one defends God’s special interventions, the more God’s non-interventions require some sort of explanation. Clayton’s own defence of providence lies in our non-lawlike mental life. This provides a sphere of influence for divine action on human minds and also makes us a vital part of the process: providence is thus participatory. This model is based on which enables the cohesion of a theology of providence together with an affirmation of the regularity of scientific laws (essential for the scientific enterprise). Mark Harris in Chapter 2 explores scientific predictions for the end of the universe, all of which look bleak for biological life. He considers how scientific ideas about the future might contribute to a theology of the eschaton. He warns against making strong claims about the science of the eschaton or of trying to unite the different gospel account to come up with one proposed conception of resurrection. Developing a valuable critical hermeneutic, he argues for the importance of considering the New Testament passages of resurrection both in relation to the ancient cosmologies which form their context, and to the historical contexts of the biblical writers. He offers a rich model of engagement with historical scholarship and biblical criticism. Michael Fuller provides an important discussion of the meaning of “miracle” and helps us to shift our thoughts about what might count as evidence for one. Empirical evidence is impossible precisely because this is not how miracles work. Miracles are instead, he proposes, transformative events with notable ethical or social dimensions. A reimagining of the concept of miracle is pursued further by Jeffrey Robinson, who in Chapter 4 proposes joy as a “signal of transcendence” that points to the presence of divine action. Building on recent insights about the working of the human brain, he develops a theology of joy as the

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means by which we may communicate with, and be influenced by, the divine. Chapters 5 and 6 address the reality of suffering. Bethany Sollereder examines different models of creation and their impact on theodicy. She points out that in order to be adequate, any theodicy must address the suffering of the non-human creation. In her chapter, she proposes a farreaching model of theodicy that incorporates a dual-aspect teleology together with an open theist perspective of providence. The result is an account of providence that safeguards the freedom of creatures while allowing for our role in co-creation, God’s co-suffering and the promise of redemption in the future. Daniel Langton, drawing on the theology of Isaac Mayer Wise, presents a Jewish response to divine action in the light of Darwin. He notes Wise’s concern about the socio-political implications of Darwinism and the influence of Lurianic Kabbalism which led to his theology of an organising life-force, infusing nature yet going beyond it. Langton’s discussion of Wise gives substantial consideration to the problem of evil as it is this life-force that drives the process of evolution towards the evolution of self-conscious beings. God’s providential action thus becomes expressed through human agency. Bertrand Souchard’s discussion in Chapter 7 develops the idea of a life-force of nature by discussing energy as a model which can help us envisage how God might be both transcendent and immanent. Describing the importance of the concept for both biblical and ancient Greek writers, Souchard’s account of energy presents a helpful alternative to both materialism and dualism. Peter Barrett draws on Sarah Coakley’s systematic theology of the emergence of supernormality to propose a Trinitarian natural theology which affirms the validity of scientific knowledge of the world while appealing to tacit knowledge informed by the imagination. He presents a pertinent theology of the Logos and the Spirit acting on the unfolding cosmos and on creaturely development: divine action on a grand and small scale. God’s action extends to the arenas of nature and history, while also embracing every individual human life. The political implications of the theology of providence are discussed by Peter Colyer in Chapter 9. If every occurrence is the direct result of God’s will then there is less incentive to challenge things at the social or political level, and this is something that every account of divine action should be aware of. In response, Colyer’s noteworthy theology envisages God’s relationship with the world as permissive and self-denying—in other words, kenotic. Creation can then be perceived as the gift of freedom and the act of self-emptying love rather than the expression of power.

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In his second contribution to this volume, Mark Harris proposes a community-based approach to divine action informed by what he calls a “high” rabbinic theology in which the laws of nature are God’s laws, combined with a community-based scepticism. Both laws of nature and miracles he argues are matters of community judgement. Such an approach offers an imaginative critique of Hume’s definition of miracle. Mark Hart’s model of divine action is informed by Rowan Williams’ theology of creation and salvation. For him, the self-giving nature of God is the ultimate ground of the universe. Hart can therefore meet the theological challenges to specific or non-general providence by seeing salvation not a series of separate acts but as the fulfilling of inherent potential made possible by divine energy. Christopher Knight concludes this volume’s reflection on providence with a valuable consideration of divine action in relation to naturalism. He challenges the distinction between special and general divine action as a category mistake. Arguing that personal responses to divine action do not need individual personal action for each occasion, he utilises instead the rich resources of Eastern Orthodox theology, in particular its panentheistic insights, to challenge our common perceptions of naturalism. Lastly the epilogue presents a short history of the Science and Religion Forum written by our secretary Jeffrey Robinson. The objective of the Forum is to encourage conversation between religious thought and scientific insights. As some of the fruits of the 2013 conference, the chapters presented here go some considerable way towards promoting that aim by stimulating further theological reflection on this most crucial aspect of theistic belief; thereby aiding us further in the re-imagining of this particular part of our philosophical pipework.

CHAPTER ONE TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF PROVIDENCE FOR A SCIENTIFIC AGE PHILIP CLAYTON

Introduction1 It were cold and lifeless to represent God as a momentary Creator, who completed his work once for all, and then left it. Here, especially, we must dissent from the profane, and maintain that the presence of the divine power is conspicuous, not less in the perpetual condition of the world then in its first creation…. [F]aith must penetrate deeper. After learning that there is a Creator, it must forthwith infer that he is also a Governor and Preserver, and that, not by producing a kind of general motion in the machine of the globe as well as in each of its parts, but by a special providence sustaining, cherishing, superintending, all the things which he has made, to the very minutest, even to a sparrow. (John Calvin, Institutes, I.16)

Providence (from providere, to foresee or attend to) is the belief that God guides history and the lives of individual persons. This belief has stood at the heart of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions since their origin. Affirming God’s gentle guidance and care probably plays a more central role for people of faith than any other mode of divine action.

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Although this particular paper has only one author, the position conveyed here draws deeply from my co-authored work with Steven Knapp, The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith. The core argument in Predicament was developed jointly between us, and the six theories of providence given in this paper are direct adaptations of the six ‘levels’ in our jointly authored book. I gratefully acknowledge this collaboration and intellectual debt, though without claiming that my former co-author would agree with the position on providence that I develop in these pages.

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In the last thirty years of engaging scientists on matters of faith, I have again and again noticed the following pattern. During abstract debates, questions are often raised about whether divine action is possible in principle. But when, whether in private or in public, talk turns to the scientist’s own spiritual life, to the moments that have affected him or her most profoundly, the topic of experiencing the presence of God becomes central. Sometimes the scientist has experienced God as present in the crucial moments of his or her life, and faith is alive and well. But when the scientist has come to believe that God is absent or uncaring, he or she has usually left faith behind. Not only scientists are confronted with the high-stakes question: is it still rational to believe in divine providence in an age of science? Members of the clergy and theologians may not serve the significant public role they once played. But when it comes to the question of miracles and divine action, the expectation remains that they will be able to provide a theology of providence. As we will see, a satisfactory answer must include two dimensions: what one affirms that God does, and how one interprets his or her own language about divine action or care. A theology of providence that addresses only one of these dimensions provides only half an answer.

The Predicament of Belief: Reasons to Doubt The challenge is made more intense by several factors. Men and women in this era are more strongly confronted by the plurality of religious options than were previous generations. In the past, many followers of Christianity, the majority religion in the West, did not really view themselves as having any other live options for religious belief. Like mono-cultural and mono-linguistic people, mono-religious people—those who knew only one religious worldview—tended to think that their view was intuitive and obvious and that no other religious response could be credible. The “well, it’s just obvious” response is rather more difficult for those who belong to a minority religious tradition within their culture. Still, social isolation (often imposed by the majority religion) still made it possible for many to view their own tradition as their only option for belief and practice. These conditions have changed dramatically in the last fifty years. Most people in the West now report that they can and must choose between multiple options for belief. Even more significantly, people now see non-belief or non-affiliation as an increasingly viable option. Americans are startled to find that, in just five years, the percentage of the

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non-affiliated in the U.S. has risen from 15 to 20% of the population, and to 32% of young people (Pew Report 2012). In Europe, of course, the numbers have been far higher for far longer, and participation in organized religion is far lower. Many today no longer view any religious belief system as a viable option. Where do people most often turn when they are looking for an authority or guide in deciding what to believe? The research is very clear: most people see science as the most reliable authority to guide them in forming beliefs, not religious leaders. Sometimes this response takes the virulent form of New Atheism, as in the biting words of Richard Dawkins, “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument… Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong” (Dawkins 2006, 308). But Dawkins’ overwrought language probably doesn’t express the real attitude of most Europeans or Americans. E. O. Wilson probably came closer in his well-known book Consilience (Wilson 1998). All matters of fact, he argued, fall ultimately within the domain of science; hence science is the authority that will ultimately determine what is the case and what is not the case. All knowledge thus belongs to science. Many spheres of human interest lie outside of the realm of fact, however: art, morality, hopes and fears … and thus religion. If you want to know what a sunset is, you must be guided by science. But of course you are still allowed to enjoy the beauty of the sunset and to be moved by it. Such (purely affective) human responses are the only remaining home for our religious feelings. These three factors—religious pluralism, non-belief as an increasingly live option for most people, and the uncontested epistemic authority of science—are the backdrop for this discussion of divine providence. The many people who feel the weight of these reasons to doubt, and who nonetheless still find themselves drawn toward religious belief, experience what Steven Knapp and I have called the predicament of belief. More than any other single theological topic, claims about God’s activity in the world evoke scepticism about traditional religious claims. The predicament of belief has many sources, but it appears that its primary expression lies in doubt about divine action.

Toward a Theology of Providence It’s sometimes held that all language about God or divine action is merely symbolic. “Sure,” the objector responds, “many say that God is

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present with believers and providentially cares for creation. But what that really means is that they have a confidence in life, or that their faith helps make life more meaningful, or that they intend to act as if there were a God who cares for them.” One can of course understand the temptation to reduce the language of providence to existential statements about human beliefs and attitudes. But, it turns out, it’s also possible to defend a more robust response. That is, there is at least one religiously meaningful understanding of providence that is fully compatible with the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Successfully making a case for providence in light of science, however, does however require some breaks with traditional language. The more one affirms God’s special interventions in the natural order, the more God’s non-interventions call for an answer. At that point only two options are available. One can (and many do) simple cease to engage the objections of non-believing discussion partners. “It’s God’s decision when to intervene and when not to, and it’s not our place to question. God’s actions should be greeted with gratitude and faith. God owes us no answer when God chooses to be silent.” The other option is to face the objection and offer an answer that addresses it. Wesley Wildman has formulated the objection as cogently as anyone: [T]he personal God does not pass the test of parental moral responsibility. If God really is personal in this way, then we must conclude that God has a morally abysmal record of inaction or ineffective action. This I shall call the argument from neglect… It applies most obviously to versions of personal theism in which God is omnipotent. But [it] also applies to views of personal theism that deny omnipotence, such as process theology, because the argument establishes that God’s ability to influence the world is so sorely limited as to make God virtually irrelevant when it comes to the practical struggles of our deeply unjust world. (Quoted in Clayton and Knapp 2011, 45)

All adequate responses to the objection share one axiom in common: that it’s good for there to be conscious moral creatures who freely know and worship their Creator. Something is broken if the creation does not know its Origin or if it responds only in forced or mechanical ways to its Source. Conscious moral creatures with the freedom either to acknowledge or to deny their Creator can only arise in the context of a lawlike natural order. Not only the evolution of such a species over time, but also the development of individual agents able to freely judge and respond, requires regularity in the surrounding world. Natural laws provide the constancy that is the necessary backdrop for conscious discernment and decision making.

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It turns out that these conditions are fulfilled only if God does not suspend these laws from time to time. One reason comes directly from science. Science presupposes the regularity of the natural order. If the fundamental constants of nature vary over time, and if the fundamental laws admit of exceptions that are random from the standpoint of science, then science is impossible. Interestingly, this constraint applies not only to our actual measurements, but also when we’re not looking. That is, science as we know it falls just as much into trouble if God occasionally alters fundamental laws and values without getting “caught” by science as it does if we actually verify the exceptions scientifically. In either case, scientific explanations are false and we are deceived. There’s a second reason that God cannot occasionally suspend natural law. If God intervenes from time to time, then God becomes responsible for the cases when God does not intervene. Indeed, a benevolent God could not intervene even once without incurring the responsibility to intervene in every case where doing so would prevent an instance of innocent suffering. In The Predicament of Belief Steven Knapp and I call this the “Not Even Once Principle.” Certainly, these conclusions raise difficulties for many traditional understandings of divine providence. Clearly God does not intervene in every case when innocent persons suffer. But an omnipotent, omniscient, all-good being would wish to respond to innocent suffering and would be able to do so. So it looks like the problem of evil gets the last word— unless this entire way of thinking about divine providence is mistaken. Fortunately, it turns out that there is a different way of conceiving of God’s providential care. This defence of providence begins by assuming the non-lawlike nature of our mental life. One does not have to be a dualist to hold this position; many emergentists affirm it as well. (By emergentists I mean those who affirm that evolution produces more complex agents over time, including complex emergent phenomena such as consciousness, subjectivity, morality, and spirituality.) Note also that one does not have to be a theist to affirm the non-lawlike nature of mental; naturalists have also argued for what they call the “non-nomological” nature of consciousness. I have defended this view in numerous publications.2 The crucial thing to note is that, if (at least parts of) the human mental life is indeed non-nomological,

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See (Clayton 2004); (Clayton 2009); (Clayton and Davies 2006). Donald Davidson is a naturalist philosopher who affirms the nonnomological nature of the mental, though his understanding of the mind-body relationship is not the same as mine. Note that affirming this position does not mean denying that there are neural correlates to consciousness.

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then God can influence or “lure” thought without setting aside natural laws. Providence, I affirm, utilizes this sort of influence. An objection immediately arises: doesn’t this claim raise the “not even once” worry all over again? If God were to directly impart knowledge that would reduce or eliminate suffering, then God would become responsible for those occasions when God does not do so. For example, if God mentally warns people on the beach to run for high ground before the tsunami strikes, doesn’t that make God responsible for all the times that God does not warn people of impending danger? The objection is correct. It turns out that the Not Even Once Principle holds here as well: God cannot even occasionally impart direct infallible knowledge to people. This means that, when we speak of God’s leading or guiding us in some way, we have to acknowledge that our conclusions involve some amount of interpretation on our own part. Providence is a participatory process: we believe God is luring and guiding, but not in such a way that we can claim infallible knowledge of what we believe God has said. What then is the mode, the channel, of divine providence? Divine communication can take an axiological form; God can present to a person’s consciousness a value that she is free to embrace, pursue, reject, or ignore. Divine providence can also go beyond communication per se, taking the form of God’s bringing about the kind of religious experience in which the subject becomes aware of God’s presence. And of course we can sense God’s leading through sacred scripture, through life events, through nature, and through the voices of others—as long as we do not claim that God has transcended our own role as interpreters of the divine leading, convening direct and infallible knowledge. In no sense is this conclusion trivial or inconsequential. On this view, God continually lures all creation. There is no reason not to affirm that this is a differentiated lure, personalized for each individual agent, human or otherwise. Because the human and divine agent participate together in constituting the message as it is understood and appropriated, Steven Knapp and I have called this view a participatory theory of divine action. Christians call this guiding and directing presence “the mind of Christ,” mediated through the Holy Spirit. This view represents, we believe, a robust account of God’s presence and guiding. If we are correct, God can influence or “lure” thought without becoming responsible for natural and moral evil. As we summarize this account in Predicament, not only has God purposely created a universe in which beings could evolve who are capable of making moral choices and entering into communion with God. God also

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purposely and graciously responds to, and interacts with, those beings, accompanying them on their journeys, inspiring their joys, and luring them, gently, into harmony with the divine will. God is not only the creator of the natural regularities that enable finite moral agents to exist in the first place; God is also engaged with us in the modes of gentle guidance, growing illumination, and persistent attraction. Such a God may not be able to stop a fatal mudslide, or warn the villagers of its impending arrival. But this is by no means a form of deism. On the contrary: a participatory conception of divine-human interaction suggests that God is involved in every instance of human action and experience in ways that infinitely exceed our comprehension (excerpted from Clayton and Knapp 2011, 64-66). This view does not affirm divine interventions that set aside natural law. It does however offer a picture of creation that is based on God’s active self-emptying love for a creation that is other than God’s self. Genuine otherness can only exist if there is a world where suffering is real. On this theology of providence, suffering is not a phenomenon that God abstractly contemplates but a reality in which God participates—indeed, with a degree of comprehensiveness and intimacy that exceeds our imagination.

Speaking of Providence: Six Options As we noted at the beginning, to make a full response to the question of providence one has to consider two dimensions. One dimension is the theory of divine action itself: what does one actually affirm that God does? The other dimension is a theory of religious language: how does one interpret language about God and God’s activity? Interestingly, this second question, to which we now turn, can be the more difficult one to understand. Since the famous “Theology and Falsification” debate between Antony Flew, R.M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell in Oxford almost sixty years ago, theologians have been deeply preoccupied with the status of language about God—and rightly so: science may not eliminate language about God, but it does cause us to think more deeply about the status of Godlanguage. Building on the conclusions of the previous section, I propose that there are at least six different ways to construe language about divine providence:

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Objective Divine Action, Known through Objective Arguments Option 1. One could construe the language of providence in much the same way as one construes scientific language. If you do this, you affirm that the theory that God is intervening providentially on behalf of creation, and perhaps on behalf of Christians in particular, is the most likely hypothesis given the total state of evidence available to humans. Bible stores in America are packed with apologetic books of this sort, books with titles such as Evidence that Demands a Verdict (Josh McDowell) or The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Timothy Keller). Although this view is popular among fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals in America, I find it deeply implausible. A closer look reveals how similar these books are to that particular variant of Creationism known as Intelligent Design. Compare, for example, apologetics works of this sort with the newest book from Intelligent Design theorist Stephen Meyer, Darwin's Doubt (Meyer 2013). According to Meyer, the rapid diversification of life forms about 530 million years ago that we call the Cambrian Explosion violates core Darwinian principles such as uniformitarianism. Therefore, he argues, the best explanation for the rapid development of new life forms is a direct intervention by God. Now, for the record I note that I actually do believe in a Creator God; and when I interpret certain phenomena in the natural world from the perspective of religious faith, I interpret them as signs of design and providence. But Intelligent Design theorists do something more. Rather than interpreting design language from the standpoint of faith, they interpret it as a direct competitor to natural science. Indeed, they claim that the idea of an Intelligent Designer beats contemporary science in a head to head battle within the domain of science itself. If you are not convinced by such claims, as I am not, then you should not interpret the language of providence as a direct alternative to contemporary science in the sense of Option 1. (Recall the opening quote on providence from Calvin: “Faith infers…”) Option 2. There is a close cousin to Option 1 that is a bit more plausible, or at least more humble, than Intelligent Design, though in the end I think it is still problematic. Here one admits that language about providence can’t be proven scientifically; it’s not superior to science in its own domain. But, these thinkers argue, we can provide a “theory of error” to explain why most scientists do not accept divine providence. According to this argument, science limits its domain of interest arbitrarily, or unfairly excludes some available evidence, or its prejudice closes it to facts that a neutral observer would acknowledge. So, although we cannot present arguments for God’s providential care that scientists “ought” to

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acknowledge, we can explain why they won’t listen. I suppose you might call this an inferential case for providence. Note what these first two options share in common. Both affirm that divine providence is an objective truth that can be demonstrated through objective arguments. And both take scientists as the target audience. To show the contrast, let’s now jump to the other end of the spectrum—to those who interpret the language of providence as subjective rather than objective.

Subjective Views of Divine Action, Known through Subjective Arguments Suppose you believe that the language of science rules out any real divine action in the world. Taking science seriously, you conclude, means that miracles are impossible. You want to still use the language of divine providence, but your position had led you to conclude that God cannot actually do anything at all in the world. When you use the language of providence, then, you probably mean one of the following two options: Option 5. When you speak of God’s providential care, you do not mean to make a factual statement of any kind. Facts, after all, you say, belong to science alone. So your language must have a different cognitive status. The first possibility is that you are expressing a kind of hope. “I hope that human existence is not meaningless in the end,” you say, “but that there is a God behind it all who is somehow directing human history toward a divine goal.” When you speak of providence, you don’t actually believe that God is influencing outcomes in the world; and if you don’t believe that, you clearly are not claiming that God is really directing the course of history. So your language about providence might be parsed as a statement of hope: “I hope it will turn out, despite what science seems to demand, that God is somehow working in and through the natural order, bringing about meaningful results out of the otherwise random physical events that make up universal history. When I pray for God’s providential care, I pray in the guise of hope alone.” In The Predicament of Belief, Steven Knapp and I gave this view a more technical expression. Adapting the text (p. 116) to our question, it would read as follows: The individual is attracted to belief in divine providence and hopes it will turn out to be true. Perhaps she occasionally finds herself believing in it, but she does not have what she regards as good enough reasons to persist in doing so. If she continues to guide her thoughts and actions by the possibility that God in fact exercises providential care for creation, she

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Chapter One does so as a ‘seeker,’ that is, as someone who does not now actually believe in providence (even if she once did) but as one who hopes that it is true and is attracted to the possibility that she might someday come to believe it.

For example, she might disbelieve in providence now, but hope for a new world with real divine action and no suffering and injustice—a world with “no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4). Option 6. There is a yet weaker possibility. You might hold that the language of providence serves as a useful fiction. You neither believe that God literally does things in the world, nor would you say that you have hope-plus-faith that it will turn out that God is somehow working behind the scenes. Instead, you use the language of providence metaphorically. For you, “I trust that God will see us through” means “we’re going to work very hard to achieve this goal, and I think we’re going to make it.” Or “God helps those who help themselves” means “those who help themselves have a better chance of succeeding.” Perhaps prayer for you is a way of focusing your inner energies and strengthening your resolve, so that you can be a more effective actor in the world. Or perhaps you feel identified with your religious congregation, and part of belonging to that congregation is using the language that your tradition uses. No one says that you have to take it all literally anyway, and you know that many of your other co-religionists share your doubts about traditional language. Again, we can give this more technical expression: The individual does not believe in providence, or perhaps believes that statements about divine action are actually false if understood literally, and therefore does not even hope that God is providentially guiding her life or the course of history. But she does regard language of this sort as a valuable metaphor for a proposition or set of propositions she does regard as true. She may at times allow herself to suspend her disbelief in divine action while participating in religious practices like prayer or worship; she does so, however, with at least a tacit awareness that statements about divine providence are not true in their own terms but are really, for her, metaphors for something else. (cf. Predicament, 117)

Real Providence, but the Case is Irreducibly Controversial because of Subjective Elements Options 1 and 2 try to give objective reasons for providence as an objective fact, and Options 5 and 6 offer subjective reasons for a

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subjective, metaphorical use of providential language. Both ends of the spectrum are popular in Western society today. The positions in between are not as widely acknowledged, perhaps because they are more complex. Yet they are arguably the more interesting responses (because they are more robust than Options 5 and 6) as well as more plausible (because they avoid the overly strong claims of Options 1 and 2). Option 3. This time let’s begin with the technical statement and then explicate what it means in practice: The individual believes in Providence but does not expect her belief to be endorsed by scientists or atheist philosophers. Unlike Option 2, however, she cannot point out any specific mistake that her opponents are making. She therefore regards believe in Providence as irreducibly controversial. Yet given her particular experience and point of view, she has what she regards as good reasons to believe in Providence—reasons she thinks that a neutral discussion partner also should regard as good reasons for an agent in her position. The individual, in other words, regards her belief in Providence as rationally indicated, but only for agents who share certain of her assumptions and experiences. (cf. Predicament, 115)

I think that a great many religious people actually hold a position similar to this. They will often say, “I know all the reasons from science to doubt that God is active in the world, and I also struggle with the problem of evil.” But then they will describe an experience of healing or apparently miraculous care that they (or someone they love) have undergone. Or they will describe a sense that just won’t let go that God is present to them and cares for them. Sometimes their accounts affirm God’s miraculous action, transcending the laws of nature. People will say, “As implausible as it seems, I can’t deny what I have seen or experienced.” Other times people will continue to affirm providence without the belief that miracles ever occur: “God is somehow watching out over us. I know there is no guarantee that God will keep me or my loved ones from harm; after all, bad things happen to good people. But whether or not miraculous things happen, I continue to believe in God’s providential care.” Both groups have what they regard as good reasons for their particular belief in providence. They don’t expect to convince a jury of their peers, but somehow that doesn’t seem necessary. “Given what I’ve experienced,” they say, “it just makes sense for me to believe. You would also if you were in my position and had my experiences.” Option 4. Option 4 is similar to the previous position, but it makes a slightly weaker claim. Again, I begin with the technical statement of the view:

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Chapter One The individual believes in Providence but, as in the previous case, does not expect her belief to be endorsed by non-believing scholars, cannot point to a mistake she believes that they are making, and therefore regards her belief as irreducibly controversial. She still has reasons to believe, but now the inferences are complicated enough, the possible criticisms serious enough, and the experiences from which she derives these reasons unclear enough that the status of her belief seems even to herself to be ambiguous. So she no longer claims that a neutral observer should regard her reasons as good ones, and she does not regard her belief as rationally indicated, even for an agent with her particular experiences and point of view. Yet she nevertheless has enough reason to believe in Providence that it remains rationally permissible for her to do so. (cf. Predicament, 115f.)

These two middle positions on the spectrum represent, I believe, the most plausible approaches to providence today. The difference between them is the difference between claiming that belief in Providence is “rationally indicated (for agents with certain experiences)” on the one hand, and “rationally permissible” on the other. The distinction is not difficult to grasp. Some of us feel that anyone who has had the experiences that we have had would believe in divine providence, and that they would be justified in so believing. Others of us believe that it’s permissible for us to believe in a divine providential care; we don’t break any rational obligations when we form this belief. But we’re not interested in making (or feel we can’t make) a rational case for this belief. It’s a subjective belief, even a subjective certainty, for us; but that’s as far as we want to go or think we can go.

Rethinking Divine Action What sort of theology of divine action is indicated by these results? Before closing, it seems important to outline the theological understanding of divine providence that, if this argument holds, is most justified for Christian believers. For some years I was involved with an international research program known as the “divine action project,” co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley and organized by Robert J. Russell. In the end, the Divine Action Project published seven books and played a major role in the development of the religion-science debate over almost 15 years. Among the achievements of the Divine Action Project were several concrete proposals for non-interventionist objective divine action (NIODA). The goal was to spell out the mechanisms, or at least the

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general scientific parameters, by which God might be able to engage in objective divine action in the world without breaking natural laws. The Cambridge physicist and priest John Polkinghorne used chaos theory to advocate for one sense of divine action that met this goal. Perhaps the most ambitious and best known proposal was the suggestion that the indeterminacy of quantum physics, and in particular the collapse of the wave function, offers an opening for God to influence the world without breaking any natural laws (Russell et al. 1995). God might then use evolution to ‘amplify’ these quantum-level influences and perhaps to guide the course of evolution (Russell et al. 1998). The leading advocates of this position were Robert Russell, Tom Tracy, Nancey Murphy, and George Ellis. I have come to hold reservations about the attempt to ground objective divine action in quantum-level divine influence. Now that we have considered the six options for a theory of divine providence in some detail, the reason for these reservations should be easier to describe. The quantum approach worked to parse divine action as a purely objective phenomenon defended by purely objective arguments, in the spirit of Options 1 and 2 above. By contrast, the approaches to divine action that we have been focusing on—Options 3 and 4—involve individual experiences that cannot simply be translated into the language of science, experiences that are to some extent essentially personal (or interpersonal). If you are drawn to Options 3 and 4 in the way that I am, you will tend to approach questions of divine action using a rather different set of assumptions than the quantum-level theory uses. Unlike Options 5 and 6, however, our position does not make language about God’s providence purely subjective. Language about divine action is not merely language about what human beings think and do; instead, the affirmation is that God really plays some role. This claim—however challenging it may be to translate it into more philosophical terms—allows us to draw more directly on biblical and theological language. One is immediately struck by how different are the biblical concerns. They start with the nature of God and the goals of divine communication, which Jesus associates with the kingdom of God. The High Priestly Prayer in John 14–17 offers a Christological and pneumatological theory of divine action. It centres on the Paraclete, the one who “comes alongside.” The central New Testament questions are then: to whom does the Holy Spirit come? What is the nature and what are the goals of the kingdom of God? What is the call to discipleship on the part of the receiver? In the New Testament account, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, so the service of God and the emulation of Jesus’ teaching and priorities

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are intrinsic to the nature of divine action. And those priorities are extremely clear: God’s providential care focuses on the outcast and marginalized. As Mary proclaims in the Magnificat: He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:47, 51-53)

“[God’s] power is made perfect in weakness,” writes the author of 2 Corinthians (12:9). This general theological principle sets the context for divine action. Understood Christologically, it is inseparable from the famous kenotic passage in Phil. 2, which may represent the oldest extant Christian hymn. The nature of God is most fully known by the one who “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself (İțİȞȦıİȞ), taking on the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man” (Phil. 2:6-7). John Caputo captures this framework for any talk of providence in his book on The Weakness of God: The perverse core of Christianity lies in being a weak force. The weak force of God is embodied in the broken body on the cross, which has thereby been broken loose from being and broken out upon the open plain of the powerlessness of God. The power of God is not pagan violence, brute power, or vulgar magic; it is the power of powerlessness, the power of the call, the power of protest that rises up from innocent suffering and calls out against it, the power that says no to unjust suffering, and finally, the power to suffer-with (sym-pathos) innocent suffering, which is perhaps the central Christian symbol. (Caputo 2006, 43, citing Placer 1994)

Conclusion We have explored six different ways that one might affirm divine providence in an age of science, focusing in particular on options 3 and 4. By combining a theology of divine action with these options, I have sought to turn attention to the two dimensions of the theological task: the combination of what is affirmed and how it is affirmed. In theology today, the complexities of the two dimensions are nowhere more pronounced than in the debate about divine action. Sadly, the debate has splintered into two warring camps: those who affirm objective divine action for (what

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they take to be) fully objective reasons, versus those who affirm subjective divine action based on purely subjective reasons. Far less attention is focused on what we might call the hybrid views—those that make a case for real providence while admitting that the arguments are irreducibly controversial because of their subjective elements. Yet the hybrid views may well be the most plausible and fruitful. My argument has also associated the six options with specific answers to the providence question. Although this link—what philosophers would call the link of epistemology and ontology—is contentious, I believe it is justified. When theologians treat providential language as a direct competitor to natural science, or when they make a philosophical case for miracles, they almost inevitably avail themselves of ‘objective’ arguments (Options 1 and 2). By contrast, when theologians centre their theory of providence on hope alone, or when they treat it as pervasively metaphorical, they tend to employ a more subjective theory of knowledge, of the sort described in Options 5 and 6. Thus it is no coincidence that the participatory theology of divine action that I’ve defended here pairs itself naturally with the epistemological options 3 and 4, in which subjective human experience plays a role in justifying knowledge claims without rendering those claims “merely” or “purely” subjective. When it comes to divine action, humans are disposed to seek dramatic miracles and signs. “Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus said at one point, “you will never believe” (Jn. 4:48). The heart of a theology of providence, however, lies elsewhere. Perhaps we need to learn to look more closely for the gentle lure of God that is always already around us. In her famous 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather tells the tale of two French missionaries in primitive New Mexico. In the closing narrative of Part One, Father Joseph speaks movingly of the miracles associated with the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, extolling “the reassurance of that visitation.” He concludes, “Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love.” But the bishop responds, Where there is great love there are always miracles. One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. … The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

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Bibliography Caputo, John D. 2006. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clayton, Philip. 2004. Mind and Emergence. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. —. 2009. Adventures in the Spirit. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Clayton, Philip and Davies, Paul (eds.). 2006. The Reemergence of Emergence. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Clayton, Philip and Knapp, Steven. 2011. The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press. Meyer, Stephen C. 2013. Darwin's Doubt. San Francisco: HarperOne . Pew Report, ‘“Nones”’ on the Rise.’ Published October 9, 2012. http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/, accessed October 3, 2013. Placer, William. 1994. Narratives of a Vulnerable God. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Russell, Robert J., et al. (eds.). 1995. Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Vatican City State and Berkeley, CA: University of Notre Dame Press. Russell, Robert J., et al. (eds.). 1998. Evolution and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Vatican City State and Berkeley, CA: University of Notre Dame Press. Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf.

CHAPTER TWO WILL RESURRECTION BE A LAW OF NATURE? SCIENCE AS DIVINE ACTION AT THE END OF THE WORLD MARK HARRIS

Introduction Although eschatology is a major theme in Christian theology, contemporary mainstream scholarship has largely avoided becoming embroiled in specific questions about the end of the world, preferring to leave them to the more literal-minded. Hence, doomsday expectation has largely been the domain of fundamentalist Christian movements, Harold Camping’s two failed predictions in 2011 providing a case in point. On the other hand, contemporary cosmological research also makes literal doomsday predictions, but on the basis of scientific research rather than biblical texts. Several scholars working in the science-religion field have in recent years countered this challenge from science by pointing to traditional Christian expectations of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1) as found in the New Testament. But in order to bypass the difficult problems of interpretation presented by the book of Revelation––that mainstay of fundamentalist apocalypticism––the theme of resurrection is emphasised as the key motif for investigation. Thus, the main New Testament texts under the microscope have been the four Gospel accounts of the empty tomb, and the resurrection appearances of Jesus, and Paul’s discussion of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. The approach taken is to say that, if it can be demonstrated that Jesus rose bodily, then not only is that a clear miracle of hope pointing beyond the desolate pessimism of scientific predictions, but it suggests something important about the end of this world and the creation of the new. It suggests that the physical matter of this world––together with the science that describes it––will not be done away with entirely, but will form the basis for what is to come.

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This chapter is directly concerned with the proposed science of the new creation; hence my title: Will resurrection one day be a law of nature? If so, will divine action be “scientific”? In the spirit of the scientific method, my approach towards these questions will be primarily empirical, concerned with the data that we possess: principally the New Testament resurrection texts (which I will consider to be represented chiefly by the following chapters: Mt. 28; Mk 16; Lk. 24; Jn 20-21; 1 Cor. 15). To be precise, my method will not only be empirical, but hermeneutical: I will be concerned with analysing the style of reading performed by those science-religion scholars who have taken up the challenge from modern cosmology: John Polkinghorne, Robert Russell, and David Wilkinson. Each of these scholars reads the New Testament texts as inferring a bodily resurrection of Jesus. While these readings are largely in accord with traditional Christian beliefs about the resurrection of Jesus, it is worth pointing out that wider scholarly opinion within Christian theology is by no means uniform. While there are many scholars who affirm bodily resurrection, there are many who question it and apply alternative interpretations to the resurrection texts. Among science-religion scholars, for instance, Arthur Peacocke was openly “agnostic” about the empty tomb traditions and the idea that Jesus was raised bodily, preferring instead to draw attention to the disciples’ experience of continuity between the risen Jesus and the Jesus they had known before (Peacocke 1990, 1993, 332). The recent study by Clayton and Knapp (2011) takes this approach still further, seeing the resurrection of Jesus less in terms of an objective happening to the body of Jesus and more in terms of an openingup of spiritual participation with believers in the life of God. In their approach, Easter becomes rather like Pentecost. Such non-bodily and non-objective interpretations notwithstanding, this chapter will focus on the bodily objective interpretations of Polkinghorne, Russell, and Wilkinson. My motivation is to investigate the degree to which the New Testament texts might be said to speak to the nature of physical reality, especially the physical reality of the end of the world. This is not an insignificant issue in New Testament interpretation. The issue of historical/objective/material reality, and the degree to which we can extract it from the biblical text, has been shrouded in controversy for more than a century of New Testament scholarship. Biblical scholars have expended a great deal of effort since the nineteenth century in attempting to clarify the relationship between the text and the notional historical reality to which it refers, and this has been the central aim in the search for the historical Jesus. So far, despite hundreds (if not thousands) of articles and books written on this very question of the historical reality

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of Jesus, the relationship has still not been fully resolved. Hence, it is worth highlighting at this point that, if this exercise is difficult when the reality is the historical Jesus, then how much harder must the difficulties be when the reality being searched for––the risen Jesus––is altogether more controversial, and more out-of-this world (literally when the tradition of ascension is taken into account) than the historical Jesus could ever be. This point about the elusiveness of reality––resurrection reality–– will therefore be an important focus of this chapter, along with the degree to which the New Testament may enlighten it.

Science and the end of the world First, we must examine scientific predictions for the end of the world. The relevant natural sciences––cosmology, earth sciences, and the environmental sciences––suggest a number of scenarios, all of them depressing. First, the world could end effectively on a local (that is, global) scale. Human life on this planet might become difficult or impossible because of catastrophes of our own making. Evidence pointing towards accelerating climate change, with attendant human disasters in the form of catastrophic storms, floods, and droughts, bears such a fear out. There is also the very real possibility of catastrophe from space, as demonstrated by the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period some sixty-five million years ago, possibly precipitated by a monumental asteroid impact. In fact, mass extinctions have occurred throughout the history of life on earth; some 99% of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct, and while humans have been particularly successful in the past 10,000 years or so there is no reason to suppose that we are especially immune against a future catastrophe. On a slightly less local scale––beyond the immediate environment of the earth––we face danger from our sun. While the sun is the earth’s source of light, heat (and thereby life), it is steadily expanding, and it will one day certainly extinguish all life on earth. Perhaps five billion years from now the sun will reach its maximum size as a “red giant”, by which time the earth’s seas and atmosphere will have long since boiled away. If humankind is to survive this into the far future, we must find an alternative home. Even if humans escape such catastrophes and find an alternative home, we are doomed in the still longer term because of what is sometimes called “freeze or fry”. As we know from the Big Bang model, the universe has been expanding since its birth, and cosmologists can describe the history of the universe relatively well up to the present day. Many cosmologists

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believe that a period of rapid exponential expansion in the earliest fractions of a second––called inflation––explains much of what we see of the present rather homogeneous structure of the universe. Where will it go from here? Solutions to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity made in the 1920s and 30s suggest three possible scenarios for the future, all of which depend critically upon the density of the universe, as the force of gravity which works against the expansion from the Big Bang seeks to pull the universe back together again. The first scenario describes the situation where the universe is denser than the critical value. This is called the “closed universe”. In this case, the force of gravity will one day overcome the expansion. The universe will continue to expand for perhaps 500 billion years from now, before it contracts upon itself in a dramatic reversal of the original Big Bang, aptlynamed the “Big Crunch”. The second scenario (the “open universe”) describes how the universe will continue to expand indefinitely, much as it has done since the Big Bang. The temperature will gradually decrease (as it has been since the Big Bang), until life as we know it becomes impossible; this is the socalled “Big Freeze”, where the universe tends towards a state of maximum entropy. Ultimately all of the energy and matter localised in stars and planets becomes distributed evenly throughout the universe: “heat death”. In the third type of model (the “flat universe”), the density is exactly equal to the critical value, and the universe will also expand indefinitely into another “Big Freeze”. It is difficult to be certain which of these three models is most appropriate, given that so little is understood about the total mass-energy of the universe, but cosmologists currently favour the third scenario, the flat universe. And even though these three scenarios are now understood to be too simplistic (Penrose 2010, 59–67)––to the extent that more complicated scenarios such as the Big Rip, Big Brake and Big Lurch have been proposed (Saudek 2001, 139-40)––the long-term prospect for biological life still appears bleak. It seems likely that we will either “freeze or fry” ultimately if these models are reliable, probably freeze (Russell 2008, 300). On the other hand, two rather bizarre glimmers of hope have emerged, both highly implausible from our present perspective. First, humans might be able to escape this universe before life becomes impossible. If, as many cosmologists suspect, our universe is one of many (the multiverse), then it has been suggested that black holes in our universe might work as escape hatches (“wormholes”) into other, younger universes (Wilkinson 2010, 1718).

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The second glimmer of hope involves staying in this universe, but redefining life so that it is able to survive in the long term freeze (or perhaps fry). Freeman Dyson (2002) suggests that “life” could continue forever even in an open universe (one tending towards the Big Freeze), if it was possible to replace biological human life by an equivalent form of synthetic existence that was “conscious”. One possibility he suggests is that of a self-organising dust cloud (Dyson 2002, 122). If such a form of “life” is able to maintain itself at very low temperatures then it may be possible, Dyson believes, for such “life” to continue into the indefinite future. Whether anyone would actually want to be converted into this kind of “life” is another matter though, and Dyson’s assumption that life may be reduced to information-processing has striking parallels with the Gnostic idea that material reality is illusory, and that the mind or soul is our true essence. Dyson works with an open universe (the “freeze” scenario), but another physicist, Frank Tipler (1996), has developed a related picture of “life” at the end of a closed universe (the “fry” scenario). All carbon-based life will become impossible near the Big Crunch due to the high temperatures, explains Tipler. However, the end point has a special significance, which is why Tipler refers to it as the “Omega Point” equivalent to God in Tipler’s scheme. Tipler explains that, as human technological ability improves, it will be possible one day to replace human biological life by more resilient computer emulations which will be, to all intents and purposes, alive. Close to the Omega Point, it will be possible for this “life” to fill the universe and therefore to experience its entirety. Omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence will be within reach for this “life”; or to put it another way, humans will become God. Additionally, Tipler explains how every life form that has ever lived might be resurrected at the Omega Point as a computer emulation, since full knowledge of the universe’s past will be available. Even though the universe will be ending, yet as the Omega Point is approached time will be experienced as effectively stretching out indefinitely, and “life” will appear to be resurrected “life forever”. Interestingly, these glimmers of hope from Dyson and Tipler have aroused widespread incredulity, even from theologians (Barbour 1997, 218–19; Fergusson 1998, 90; Russell 2008, 284; Jackelén 2006, 961), who are accustomed to handling fantastic claims about the future themselves, in the shape of biblical and creedal tradition. An interesting difference becomes apparent between scientists and theologians over the ways in which they handle reality and metaphor. Modern scientists tend to adhere to stronger forms of realism regarding their fields of study than do biblical

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scholars and theologians. Critical biblical scholars in particular exhibit a high degree of caution towards literal reality claims made from their data, especially when those data are expressed in the heavily-coded symbolisms and metaphors of apocalyptic. We may speak, for instance, of a motif such as the new Jerusalem coming down to earth from heaven (Rev. 21:2), but few scholars would interpret this literally as suggesting that a physical city will descend from the sky at the eschaton. The resurrection texts of the New Testament may not contain material quite as incontrovertibly metaphorical as this, but they were nevertheless born in the cradle of Jewish apocalyptic, and must be handled in a similarly sensitive way, especially if we hope to extract “reality” from them. We will have much more to say on this later. But for now, we shall turn to considering the ways that the three scientist-theologians––Polkinghorne, Russell, and Wilkinson––have used the resurrection texts to respond to the bleak and bizarre scientific predictions of the end of the world.

John Polkinghorne John Polkinghorne stands out in the science-religion field for regularly engaging science with Christian eschatology, even to the extent of devoting an entire monograph to the subject. We shall focus on this book: Polkinghorne’s 2002 sustained study of eschatology, The God of Hope and the End of the World. In this, Polkinghorne’s method (similar to his 1994 Gifford Lectures: Polkinghorne 1994, 108) is to place the New Testament resurrection texts centrally, and to introduce them by emphasising that the resurrection of Jesus is pivotal for all Christian truth claims (Polkinghorne 2002, 68). This is a significant move, very revealing of his priorities, since Polkinghorne simply asserts the centrality of the resurrection, without qualifying or supporting it by reference to the voluminous theological scholarship that explores its meaning and interpretation. Put simply, to say in scholarly terms that the resurrection of Jesus is pivotal is to beg the questions why and how, since there have been many different answers given. But Polkinghorne appears not to be interested. Similarly, as Polkinghorne next turns to the New Testament resurrection texts, he does so without reference to the equally voluminous biblical scholarship on the interpretation of these texts. On the one hand then, we might criticise Polkinghorne here for overlooking huge swathes of scholarship, controversy and subtlety. On the other hand, we should understand that his point here (as in much of his work) is less to engage discursively with academic theology and more to act apologetically on behalf of traditional

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Christian beliefs (Hefner 1998, 533-4). This explains why Polkinghorne sees the resurrection texts primarily in terms of evidence. Hence, Polkinghorne begins with the earliest resurrection text, the creedal formula in 1 Cor. 15:3-8, in order to establish the nature of the witnesses and their testimony, before looking at the empty tomb story in Mark, Polkinghorne’s second key piece of evidence (ibid., 69-70). From there he turns to the appearance stories of the risen Jesus in the other gospels. At this point, Polkinghorne acknowledges the difficulties with using these texts as evidence, namely the fact that the four Gospel resurrection texts are amazingly diverse and lacking in consistency. Crucially though, Polkinghorne suggests a way through, by picking out a “common thread” in the texts: Such perplexing diversity might at first seem to be indicative of a gaggle of made up stories, with each writer following his fancy in the version that he gives. I am persuaded, however, that this is not the case. Despite the variety of circumstances and detail, there is a surprising common thread in these gospel accounts (ibid., 70-71).

The importance of discerning this “common thread” in Polkinghorne’s methodology cannot be overstated, since it is his key hermeneutical step towards uncovering the reality of the risen Jesus. Note that Polkinghorne is not alone in taking this step; it is essentially the same hermeneutical move made by Russell and Wilkinson, as we shall see. And I will argue later that, in spite of its popularity here, picking out a “common thread” is a potentially haphazard hermeneutical method. Towards the end of this chapter I will suggest various ways in which this method fails, but I will also point out some ways forward. At this point though, it is important to see what Polkinghorne is doing with the text. The foremost common thread he picks out concerns the disciples’ recognition of the risen Jesus: difficulty first of all, followed by a moment of clarity and disclosure, a moment that is echoed in various ways through the accounts, from the Emmaus story to Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the man she thinks is the gardener (ibid., 71). The fact that this moment of recognition is related in different ways and contexts in the Gospels is, for Polkinghorne, convincing evidence that it is not a fiction, but represents a kernel of genuine historical reminiscence (ibid.). In the same way, Polkinghorne finds a common thread in the ways the Gospels describe the tangibility of the risen Jesus: how he eats food; his body retains the marks of crucifixion; but mysteriously he can appear and disappear at will, even to the extent that he seems able to enter locked rooms (ibid., 72-3).

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Paul’s account of the resurrection body in 1 Cor. 15 is also important for Polkinghorne, and in Paul’s mysterious distinction in v.44 between the σῶμα ψυχικόν (“physical body” in the translation of the New Revised Standard Bible) and the σῶμα πνευματικόν (“spiritual body”), Polkinghorne finds a consonance with the common threads he has unpicked from the gospel accounts. He summarises this as saying that there is a degree of continuity between the risen Jesus and the crucified Jesus, but there is also discontinuity (ibid., 77-8). The risen Jesus is bodily, but he is also transmuted (ibid., 76): he is the same but different. This single point––same but different––forms the basis for Polkinghorne’s exploration of the new creation. The new creation will bear great similarities with this one, but it will also be a transformation. Therefore, the new creation will not be an entirely new creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo), and neither will it be continuous with this creation; rather, it will be an ex vetere creation, that is, an “out of the old” creation (ibid., 116). Humans will therefore be re-embodied in the new creation, Polkinghorne suggests, and their old identities will be preserved, re-embodied along the lines of the “information-bearing pattern” (a favourite phrase of Polkinghorne’s, referring to what is traditionally called the soul) which God holds for each of us (ibid., 107-110). This new world will be free from suffering, and therefore, one might suppose, will have different scientific laws from our world. Can we say more than this? Just as Paul explored the idea of resurrection life using the science of his day in 1 Cor. 15 (notably with the image of the seed that dies, vv.35-41), Polkinghorne proposes something similar with our own “contemporary scientific resources” (ibid., 117). Just as the space, time, and matter of this creation are linked by God into the “single package deal” of general relativity in this world, Polkinghorne suggests that the new creation will also have its own “space” and “time” and “matter” (ibid.). This means that the new creation will not be a timeless eternity but a temporal world, containing embodied beings living temporal resurrection lives. As Polkinghorne puts it: Mathematicians can readily think of the spacetime of the old creation and the “spacetime” of the new creation as being in different dimensions of the totality of divinely sustained reality, with resurrection involving an information-bearing mapping between the two, and the redemption of matter as involving a projection from the old onto the new. Such a picture offers some partial insight into the nature of the appearances of the risen Christ, as arising from limited intersections between these two worlds (ibid., 121).

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It is only a “partial insight”, but nevertheless Polkinghorne offers an amazing vision here of a multidimensional reality sustained by God, part of which contains our creation and part the new, and each intersecting the other at the risen Jesus. However, one might reasonably ask whether such an approach––which appeals to scientific models in order to explain ultimate realities––is so very different at heart from the scientific eschatologies of Dyson and Tipler which have attracted such ridicule; there is a degree of scientific literalism employed in all of these models that does not sit easily alongside the biblical materials, as I will suggest later. For now, I wish to flag up a recurring point, that Polkinghorne’s vision is built upon a particular kind of reading of the New Testament resurrection texts, a reading that assumes it can extract a physical reality from them which may not be ours, but is a physical reality nonetheless.

R. J. Russell Robert Russell’s treatment of resurrection, and its impact on eschatology is closely related to that of Polkinghorne. Russell’s 2008 work Cosmology promotes a similar emphasis to Polkinghorne on the full bodily resurrection of Jesus as the key to the new creation. (Note that Russell’s 2012 book Time in Eternity contains a more detailed presentation of substantially the same ideas, but in the form of an appendix; Russell 2012a, 39-89. We shall focus primarily on the relevant parts of Cosmology here, since in this work Russell integrates the resurrection texts into his main argument). Like Polkinghorne, Russell discerns continuities and discontinuities between Jesus of Nazareth and the bodily risen Jesus (Russell 2008, 302, 312). Also like Polkinghorne, Russell’s concern is to challenge the bleak cosmological predictions of science. In fact, Russell makes an apologetic virtue out of the supreme difficulties surrounding bodily resurrection: it is the “worst case” scenario from a scientific viewpoint, and therefore the one worth exploring (ibid., 299). Apart from these points though, Russell’s account is less obviously apologetic than that of Polkinghorne. Russell engages more openly, for instance, with the scholarly debates on the nature and meaning of resurrection (ibid., 301-2; even more so in Russell 2012a, 40-50), and Russell shows little of Polkinghorne’s concern to promote the resurrection texts as evidence. Indeed, Russell’s discussion of the resurrection texts themselves in Cosmology is extremely brief (Russell 2008, 275, 302, 312), and he relies as much on alternative eschatological texts (ibid., 276).

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Russell’s “basic thesis” is that Christian eschatology posits a transfiguration of the entire cosmos at the end times (ibid., 275-6). Since it concerns the future of the physical universe, Russell sees his thesis as a challenge to science. This leads him to present a stark dichotomy on the matter. Either: (a) “physics and cosmology are right”, and biological life will end long before the physical universe, or (b) “theology is right”, “that something radically new happened to the universe at Easter” (ibid., 289). Russell admits that this dichotomy is contentious, and in a further publication (Russell 2012b) he explores the relationship between cosmology and eschatology with more nuance. Still, a point that Russell consistently makes is that science per se does not have all the answers, especially if theology is right to claim that Easter indicates a radically new action of God which is still to come to fulfilment. As he puts it: “the scientific predictions are right but inapplicable…In short, the future of the universe would have been what science predicts (i.e. “freeze” or “fry”) had God not acted at Easter and did God not continue to act in the future” (ibid., 1007). In saying this, Russell does not mean that science is irrelevant to the eschaton; quite the contrary, since science “might shed light on elements of continuity in the transformation of the universe” (ibid.). To be precise, so that the new creation will be a transformation of this creation (and not a replacement of it), Russell says that “God must have created it [the present creation] with precisely those conditions and characteristics which will be part of the New Creation” (Russell 2008, 308; cf. Russell 2012b, 1007). In other words, our world already contains the scientific seeds of the new world. For Russell, this must be seen in terms of a new law of nature, as was demonstrated decisively at the first Easter. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is the “First Instance of a New Law Of Nature” (FINLON): a one-off event in our world which will be universal in the next (Russell 2008, 309-10).

The laws of nature and the eschaton With Russell’s FINLON proposal we have reached the crux of this chapter, at least as far as the title is concerned: Will resurrection be a law of nature? Potentially a useful device for building eschatological bridges between science and theology, FINLON also suffers from difficulties. A law of nature in any world is by definition universal in that world, so if it worked for the bodily Jesus of our world as a first instance then it must work for all who live after him in our world. Aware of this problem, Russell (ibid., 310) goes on to nuance FINLON with the modified acronym FINLONC

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(“First Instance of a New Law Of the New Creation”), which clarifies the situation to the extent that resurrection is said to be law-like in the next world. However, we are still left with the question of how FINLON(C) relates the resurrection that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth experienced nearly two thousand years ago in this world to the resurrection we might hope for in the next world. It is not until his 2012 book Time in Eternity that Russell addresses this question (184-193, 347-351), and he does so by means of two resources: (1) relativistic models which suggest complex topologies of spacetime, such that connections might occur between different spatiotemporal realms of this world, or between different universes, and (2) Pannenberg’s suggestion that we may understand the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as a proleptic manifestation of the eschaton. Combining these resources, Russell suggests that FINLON(C) is the irruption (through relativistic means) of the physics of the next world (another spatiotemporal world from ours) into the space and time of our world, such that Jesus of Nazareth rose again from the dead two thousand years ago. In effect, the future reached into our past by means of relativistic physics. While Russell’s argument here might begin to address the difficulties around FINLON(C), we are still left with the further difficulty that we do not know just what kind of law of nature FINLON(C) might correspond to. Does it, for instance, correspond to the physics, chemistry, or biology of the new creation? Or does it impact upon all natural sciences as we know them? All that Russell will say is that it is “the general resurrection from the dead and life everlasting” (ibid., p.310), a suspiciously creedal statement that indicates that FINLON(C) is largely a traditional theological assertion cloaked in scientific terminology. Perhaps the next question to ask regarding FINLON(C) is its relationship to our existing laws of nature: if resurrection is to become a new law of nature, then which of our existing laws need to change, and how? Even to begin to address such a question requires a better understanding of the hope bound up in bodily resurrection. According to Polkinghorne and Russell, resurrection is more than “mere resuscitation” (Polkinghorne 2002, 103; Russell 2008, 312): it introduces a qualitatively new eschatological life where evil and suffering will be no more (Polkinghorne 2002, 116; Russell 2008, 310, 312). Such a hope is often encapsulated in the term “eternal/everlasting life”. If we are to look for a biblical basis for such a hope, the famous verse from Revelation (21:4) is a good candidate, since, taken at face value, it indicates that death will be no more at the eschaton, along with mourning and pain: “[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying

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and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (Rev 21:4 NRSV). However, important questions arise here about the degree to which we should read such a prediction literally, given the intense symbolism and metaphor with which the rest of the book of Revelation is constructed, and scholarly debates about the interpretation of apocalyptic texts (Harris 2013, 168-175). In short, did the author intend us to read this text so literally? Should we in fact see this passage as metaphorical of a happier and holier version of this world (perhaps with better health care)? Or does this passage truly refer to a literal and universal physical transformation? Polkinghorne, for one, takes 21:4 seriously and literally. As he says: [I]t seems a coherent hope to believe that the laws of its [a redeemed universe’s] nature will be perfectly adapted to the everlasting life of that world where “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4), just as the laws of nature of this world are perfectly adapted to the character of its freely evolving process, through which the old creation has made itself (Polkinghorne 2002, 115-6).

Polkinghorne, like Russell, believes that suffering, natural evil and death will be things of the past in the new creation, by means of a change in our laws of nature which our present science might be able to shed light on (Russell 2012b, 1008). And yet, if it is hard enough to imagine how “mere resuscitation” might become a law of nature, it is harder still to imagine how our existing laws of nature should be adapted in order for pain and suffering to be no more. We know that decay and perishability–– together with suffering, pain and death––are (paradoxically) essential for the flourishing of biological life in this world of finite resources. We must die in order that other creatures may live. And the facility to feel physical pain, for instance, is an important protective biological function, without which we would unwittingly inflict terrible injuries upon ourselves in the course of everyday life. For good reason, there is a positive side to pain: it is “the gift of pain” (Murray 2011, 112–21). If resurrection life is to be embodied––and this would seem to be a non-negotiable for Polkinghorne and Russell––then it is difficult to see how pain and death can be avoided from the perspective of our present laws of nature and embodied life. Further ambiguities arise when we examine the law of nature that is most often cited as the root cause of decay and futility in this world: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One might imagine that this would be the first law of nature that would need to be dismantled in the new creation. Accordingly, in a tantalisingly brief comment, Polkinghorne has

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speculated that matter in the new creation will possess such strong powers of self-organisation that it will no longer be subject to the disordering tendency of increasing entropy (Polkinghorne 2005, 124). Russell, on the other hand, has written on the theological problem of entropy in depth (Russell 2008, 226-48), and he quite rightly acknowledges the subtleties involved in speaking of entropy and the new creation (ibid., 310). For on the one hand, it must be admitted that entropy has something of an image problem, bound up as it is with disintegration, decay and disorder: all things on the minus side of the theological spectrum. Russell even speaks of “the tyranny of entropy” (ibid., 310), and connects it with that most unjust of all evils: natural evil. But entropy is not all bad. On the plus side, entropy is an important characteristic of biological life. Living creatures must preserve themselves in a state of negative entropy with respect to their environment, but at death, when that ability ceases, they begin to merge with their environment, slowly coming into equilibrium with it. From that point of view, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is significant as a way of defining embodied life (and its absence, death). In addition, we should not forget that entropy is bound up with much of the complexity and richness that arise in systems far from equilibrium (which is the case for much of our planet). Furthermore, entropy is an important aspect of temporal existence, defining the “arrow of time”. Augustine famously understood eternity as the absence of time, a state of existence which would strictly preclude the Second Law from the new creation. But for those who believe––as do Russell (2008, 312) and Polkinghorne (2002, 117)––that embodied existence in the new creation must be temporal, then there should correspondingly be a continued role for the Second Law. Russell suggests that time in the new creation will appear to flow forwards, as in our time, but our future experience of it will be improved, since time will “no longer be marred by the loss of the past and the unavailability of the future” (ibid., 312). It is difficult to make sense of such a statement, but Russell believes that such ideas are not beyond the grasp of modern theoretical physics, and so his agenda is partly to challenge physicists to provide a clearer view of the time of the new creation. Russell (2012a) explores these ideas more fully in his book Time in Eternity. The upshot of this discussion is that although it is tempting to speak of the new creation in terms of new laws of nature, and in terms of a transformation of our current laws, we barely know where to begin. Even to begin to address traditional Christian hopes of embodied resurrection life in scientific terms leads to rapidly-multiplying questions that have no apparent answers. This is not to say that the traditional Christian hope for

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“eternal life” is misplaced, rather that it introduces special problems when spoken of in terms of the science of this world, problems that cannot be negotiated without becoming yet more problematic. Some scientisttheologians––and Polkinghorne and Russell appear to be among them–– might say that it is a good thing to explore these problems in largely realist terms, since they allow the traditional claims of Christian faith to be asserted in the face of scientific pessimism and scepticism; others––who understand biblical and theological language in more metaphorical terms (e.g. Nürnberger 2012, 976-7)––might respond that such scientific literalism misses the point. For the moment, I simply wish to suggest a middle way, looking at a suggestion concerning the cosmic function of love. Polkinghorne and Russell are not the first scientist-theologians to consider how our laws of nature might contribute to the eschaton. Teilhard de Chardin famously suggested long ago that the eschatological Christ represents the pinnacle of biological evolution (an idea for which he has not escaped criticism, e.g. Deane-Drummond 2009, 40). Teilhard’s work is notoriously difficult to interpret, but in his famous image of the cosmic Christ as Omega Point he appears to emphasise continuity between our laws of nature and those of the eschaton so strongly that there is no clear discontinuity. The risen and exalted Christ is the culmination of the evolutionary processes of this world. And so it is presumably no accident that Teilhard’s term for the cosmic Christ––the Omega Point––is exactly the same term that Tipler uses for his outlandish scientific eschatology where computers become humans become God. However, this would perhaps be to misunderstand Teilhard. One theologian who has taken Teilhard’s vision on board recently, alongside Polkinghorne’s account of the resurrection, is Gerald O’Collins (O’Collins 2012). Against those who are sceptical of the empty tomb tradition, O’Collins thoroughly approves of Polkinghorne’s emphasis on the materiality of the risen Jesus, but he augments this view by incorporating Teilhard’s mystical talk of love as the highest of all laws of nature, love which pulls the entire material cosmos upwards towards the risen Christ in a spiritual ascent (ibid., 521). The strength of O’Collins’ presentation (over those of Russell and Polkinghorne) is that we are no longer considering the transformation of impersonal matter and impersonal laws of nature between this world and the next, but a more emotive fusing of scientific and theological visions, a fusing which is also more representative of those New Testament passages that describe the new creation in the language of praise and wonder (e.g. Rom. 8:20-23; Rev. 5:13).

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Summarising our progress at this point, I have reviewed Polkinghorne’s and Russell’s treatments of bodily resurrection as the physical basis of the new creation. They both suggest that the new creation will be characterised by both physical similarities and dissimilarities with respect to our creation. Testing these ideas by discussing the laws of nature, I have argued that the FINLON(C) thesis leads to one difficult question after another, with no clear solutions forthcoming. More crucially, I suggest that Polkinghorne’s and Russell’s physicalist approaches are insufficiently nuanced to capture the subtlety of New Testament views of resurrection and new creation. One hint that this is the case is provided by O’Collins’ proposal that talk of the physicality of the new creation should be understood in more mystical terms. I will now explore such ideas further with reference to the recent work of David Wilkinson.

David Wilkinson The third scientist-theologian, David Wilkinson, is critical of both Polkinghorne and Russell’s lack of engagement with the biblical texts and scholarship, and he attempts to make up for this in his Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe (2010) by treating a much wider range of biblical texts, and bringing a greater breadth of theological scholarship to bear. For all that, Wilkinson’s reading of the all-important New Testament resurrection texts is actually rather similar to Polkinghorne and Russell in several important ways, since he maintains, like Polkinghorne and Russell, that the risen Jesus is bodily but transformed: the same but different. We will turn to the New Testament texts shortly, but will first consider some of the ways in which Wilkinson differs from Polkinghorne and Russell. One of Wilkinson’s most important departures from Polkinghorne and Russell––in addition to his much closer engagement with the relevant biblical scholarship––is his concern to explore the balance between continuity and discontinuity carefully, a motif which is played out throughout his book (e.g. Wilkinson 2010, 94-101, 156-7, 186-7). We cannot stress the continuity of physical embodiment between the present and new creations without also accounting for the unexpected discontinuities that will come from the transformative and providential action of God. For this reason, Wilkinson questions Russell’s idea of FINLON (ibid., 109). Also for this reason, Wilkinson insists that it is not enough to focus upon the transformation of matter and scientific laws between this creation and the next without also attending to the theological and relational aspects of creation to Creator (ibid., 156-7). Thus, as we

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highlighted above with O’Collins’ suggestion of love as a “law of nature”, Wilkinson wishes to integrate theological concerns with scientific concerns: including the faithfulness and providence of God, the transforming work of the Spirit (ibid., 133), and the hope for fulfilled human relationality in the new creation (ibid., 156-8). Wilkinson’s discussion of resurrection and of the new creation offers a valuable expansion of the theological horizon beyond the largely materialist picture provided by Polkinghorne and Russell, but I wish now to examine his interpretative treatment of the New Testament texts. I will suggest that, in spite of Wilkinson’s more comprehensive treatment of many of the texts than Polkinghorne and Russell, his study, like theirs, relies on a problematic hermeneutic. Wilkinson is careful to discuss the crucial text, 1 Corinthians 15, in detail (ibid., 92-101). A notorious interpretative crux––especially in light of Polkinghorne’s, Russell’s, and Wilkinson’s interest in the materiality of the new creation––is v.44, and Paul’s ambiguous term “spiritual body”. Presumably Paul did not mean this term to be a contradiction in terms, so how should we understand it? Is the “spiritual body” a transformed version of our material existence, or is it entirely immaterial? How continuous and how discontinuous is it with our present material existence? Wilkinson emphasises that Paul’s language in this passage is not only concerned with our material substance but a transformation of our entire embodied existence: “We must hold to body being substance-form-mode-context for Paul…In the contrast of the natural and resurrection body we must consider continuity/discontinuity in all four of these aspects” (ibid., 99). Hence, against Polkinghorne’s and Russell’s pre-occupation with the question of material reality at the eschaton, Wilkinson insists that we must capture a wider theological vision. Having made these useful points about the need to envisage the question of resurrection life beyond that of physicality, Wilkinson turns to the resurrection texts of the four Gospels. Here the question of physicality arises especially sharply with reference to the body of the risen Jesus (ibid., 101-3). These are vital texts for all three of the scientist-theologians, because they provide the main evidential basis for discussion of the balance between continuity and discontinuity in the physical “stuff” of the new creation. Given the importance of these texts then, it is surprising that Wilkinson’s treatment is so brief, taking up just two pages of his book overall. Like Polkinghorne, Wilkinson acknowledges the diversity of the Gospel resurrection texts, and the many inconsistencies between them, but Wilkinson’s purpose in discussing the Gospel texts is to nail down the

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physicality question, which he does by tabulating elements of continuity and discontinuity in this way (ibid., 101-2): The continuity between the body of Jesus before and after resurrection is reflected by: x the risen Jesus is recognized by the disciples (Jn 20.19-20) x he can be touched (Mt 28.9; Jn 20.17; Lk 24.39) x he eats fish (Lk 24.42-43) x he shows them his hands, feet and side (Lk 24.39; Jn 20.24-31) These passages emphasise physicality…However, discontinuity is also stressed within the gospel accounts. Although they know that this is the same Jesus he seems to have different physical characteristics: x the disciples have trouble recognizing Jesus and some continue to doubt (Jn 20.14; 21.4; 21.12; Mt 28.17; Lk 24.37) x he did not seem to be limited to space and time, appearing in rooms with locked doors (Jn 20.19-20) x there is a real sense of mystery to the resurrection appearances (Mk 16.1-8)

This analysis is closely related to the “common thread” methodology of Polkinghorne (2002, 70-71), and to some degree also to Russell’s listing of continuous/discontinuous motifs (Russell 2008, 312). Thus, Wilkinson lists a selection of narrative devices across the four Gospels, both those that suggest the physicality of the risen Jesus and those that indicate his essential difference from our physicality. Wilkinson incorporates this result with his analysis of 1 Cor.15 to suggest that resurrection constitutes a transformation from our present physical existence, with elements of both continuity and discontinuity (ibid., 112), a conclusion which informs much of his subsequent discussion of theological and scientific aspects of the eschaton (ibid., 186-7). Therefore, in spite of Wilkinson’s considerably more detailed presentation overall than Polkinghorne and Russell, and in spite of Wilkinson’s extensive criticisms of Polkinghorne and Russell, he appears to adopt much the same hermeneutical approach when it comes to the crucial resurrection texts. We will now look critically at the key questions that arise from this hermeneutical approach.

Hermeneutical questions The hermeneutical approach of Polkinghorne, Russell, and Wilkinson which we have been examining here appears to be characterised by three

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general assumptions: (1) Paul’s discussion of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15 refers to basically the same reality as that presented in the Gospels when they narrate the traditions concerning the risen Jesus (Russell 2012a, 47). (2) The Gospel texts can be read literally as reliable indicators of the kind of physical reality which constitutes the risen Jesus. (3) This reality may be reconstructed by lifting (“cherry-picking”) certain narrative elements (“common threads”) out of the texts and then harmonising them across the four Gospels. I see reasons to question each of these three assumptions, as becomes clear when we liken this hermeneutical exercise to the modelling of scientific data. These three studies assume that the bodiliness/physicality of the risen Jesus is the basic data we possess, and that from those data we can proceed to model the new creation. To put this bluntly (since it is here, I feel, that the hermeneutical difficulties chiefly arise): these three studies assume that the risen Jesus is the data, and that the New Testament is the spreadsheet that presents the data. I see three problems here. First, if anything should be regarded as data, it is the New Testament resurrection texts, not the risen Jesus. The model of resurrection existence that is being proposed (bodily but transformed, continuous but discontinuous) is already an inference from the data of the texts, already a model which competes with alternative models of the resurrection texts. It may be that this is the model that best accords with traditional Christian beliefs, but it is still that, a model, and a fair appraisal of the texts as the data must acknowledge that it is one model of the data among others. Clayton and Knapp (2011), for instance, provide a completely different kind of model constructed from much the same data. Therefore, I suggest that the New Testament texts need to be engaged with more directly on their own terms, with a clear awareness of hermeneutical method, and with a clear awareness of the tried and tested methods of data analysis that have been developed over the last century of biblical scholarship. This leads me to the second problem. If the New Testament resurrection texts are data, they are nothing like scientific data, and they are not set out on a spreadsheet. These texts are complex, organic, and diverse. Lifting out narrative elements here and there according to whether they offer hints about material physicality (“cherry-picking”), and then harmonising them across the Gospels, might appear to be a common-sense way of picking out coherent threads across a morass of complex traditions, but it prioritises an anachronistic interpretative agenda over and against the theological coherence of the individual texts. This is a crucial point: in seeking to obtain coherent common threads regarding the continuity/discontinuity of the risen

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Jesus, the studies of Polkinghorne, Russell and Wilkinson have potentially made the individual biblical witnesses incoherent. But biblical scholarship has repeatedly emphasised the point, since at least the time of Wilhelm Wrede, that each evangelist is a creative theologian and narrator in his own right, offering different portraits of Jesus coloured by specific theological and historical contexts. The early church effectively set these theological differences in stone by canonising all four Gospels, and refusing to authorise harmonisations like the Diatessaron. There is theological value in celebrating (and not collapsing) the diverse polyphony of scriptural canon, in spite of inconsistencies that may thereby arise (Janowski 2006, 725-7). John’s Jesus is very different from Mark’s Jesus, for instance, and apart from the emptiness of the tomb their resurrection stories bear almost no relation to each other. I suggest that we should seek to understand carefully the reality of what John was trying to achieve over Mark before joining up the dots across them and assuming that we have extricated the reality of the risen Jesus. A further important example is that of Paul versus Luke. In 1 Cor.15 Paul is careful to avoid the morallyproblematic term “flesh” in describing the reality of the risen Jesus, and he prefers ambiguous terms such as “spiritual body” instead. Luke, whose centrepiece is the bodily ascension of Jesus, works hard on the other hand, to show that the risen Jesus is real “flesh and bones” like the disciples (24:39), and Ignatius of Antioch, combatting the Docetists, harder still (Dunn 2003, 870-2). We must be careful, therefore, to attempt to understand what each author was seeking to achieve before lifting their comments on the physicality of the risen Jesus out of context. Third, I suggest that the “common thread”/cherry-picking/harmonisation approach is too literalistic. It shows no great awareness of the complex oral and textual histories behind the New Testament traditions, and neither does it recognise the symbolic worldview and cosmology in which early Christianity grew up, namely that of Jewish apocalyptic. The resurrection traditions of Jesus did not materialise fully-formed in a symbolic vacuum, but were influenced by already-established apocalyptic motifs. Among these motifs were the resurrection of the dead at the eschaton, but also angelophany and heavenly vision. Careful work needs to be done to discern how such alternative motifs might alter the reality perspective obtained by the scientist-theologians. In other words, it remains to be established that the resurrection texts should be interpreted solely in terms of bodily resurrection without also incorporating alternative elements such as angelophany and heavenly vision. In short, the texts we possess––assuming that they do indeed relate to genuine human experiences of the reality of Jesus, a reality that is literally

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out-of-this-world––narrate heavily-loaded interpretations of those experiences. Another way of saying this is to remember the principle of critical realism, that “all data are theory-laden”. If the disciples’ experiences truly happened, then their accounts are, by their very nature, metaphorical to some degree (Dunn 2003, 878), and this must be the case before we even begin to account for the complex history of telling, interpretation and re-telling that marked the formation of the written traditions we possess. Another way of seeing this point is to compare the resurrection texts of the Gospels with the apocalyptic sayings of Jesus (e.g. Mk 13), or the book of Revelation, texts so cloaked in the metaphor and symbol of Jewish apocalyptic that we would think carefully before reading them literally. In the same way, conclusions we take from the resurrection texts must be understood at least partially in terms of metaphor and analogy, not simply as physical evidence for scientific hypotheses. I should emphasise that all of the above is not meant in any way to deny the historicity or objectivity of the resurrection––that is quite a different kind of issue for quite a different kind of chapter––but to reinforce the difficulty of the reality issue we have before us: we cannot extricate “reality” simply by joining up the dots.

Conclusions As serious apologetic engagements with the predictions of scientific cosmology, I believe that the studies of Polkinghorne, Russell, and Wilkinson have much to offer, and are thoroughly to be commended. But as readings of the New Testament, I suggest that more work needs to be done to establish just how the resurrection texts inform a Christian physical eschatology. In my remaining paragraphs I wish to explore three considerations. First, I suggest that we should expand considerably the biblical material under the microscope. The Gospels contain a great deal of material on the new creation, not just the resurrection texts. I am thinking of the many sayings, parables, miracle stories and traditions of the kingdom in the Synoptic Gospels, and the sayings about life, light, etc. in John. There is a great deal of material to consider, and much of it is complex, allusive, and analogical. But that is partly my point about the core resurrection texts: we must attend carefully to the metaphorical nature of the traditions in full, and read the stories of Jesus’ new life more consistently in the context of his earthly life and purpose. There are wider theological considerations to be incorporated too, and O’Collins’ suggestion that the resurrection traditions may be interpreted in terms of

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love as a “law of nature” might be one such example, and Wilkinson’s discussion of the wider relationality of the cosmos and Creator beyond the physical another. Second, I suggest that we should engage with the New Testament material on its own historical and conceptual terms. An obvious place to begin is with the term “resurrection”, which was a technical term in the cosmology and worldview of some strands of second temple Judaism before it was appropriated by Christianity. An investigation of what resurrection means in the context of modern scientific cosmology should begin in the context of the ancient cosmologies where resurrection first arose. In the same way, we should attend to the historical cosmologies, worldviews and contexts of Paul and of each evangelist individually. Luke’s Gospel is a case in point. Luke’s Emmaus story (24:13-35) is used by Polkinghorne (2002, 71) and Wilkinson (2010, 102) as a prime piece of evidence for the discontinuity of the risen Jesus with our world, but these authors also use Luke’s strong statements of the physicality of the risen Jesus (with flesh and bones like us, and the ability to eat fish like us; 24:39-43) to comment on the continuity (Polkinghorne 2002, 72; Wilkinson 2010, 101). What Polkinghorne and Wilkinson do not appear to do though, is to read these texts through the lens of Luke’s fascination with the ascension of Jesus, which to my mind is a significant oversight. The ascension may be a notoriously difficult story to interpret from a modern scientific perspective, but it is Luke’s climax, the cosmological and theological hinge on which his two volume work (Luke-Acts) turns. Our conclusions about Luke’s view of the physicality of resurrection life must be made in light of his ascension story, however metaphorical, mythological, or conceptually-difficult we may find it. Similar points could be made about the particular fascinations of the other evangelists, all of which should be studied on their own merits and in their own contexts before any conclusions are applied to our modern context. Third, I suggest that we should engage with the methods of historical Jesus scholarship. I was critical of the “common thread”/cherry-picking/ harmonisation technique which sees physicality as the interpretative key. Three massive studies published in the last decade show a different way: James Dunn’s Jesus Remembered, Tom Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, and Michael Licona’s The Resurrection of Jesus. Dunn discerns common threads in the gospel resurrection stories in terms of an authentic historical core of “seeing”, “commissioning”, and “the first day of the week”. Wright, on the other hand has a broader brush approach, arguing that the empty tomb and appearances are relatively insecure evidence in themselves, but combined they provide a firm historical core.

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Licona, most recently, works with three bedrock historical facts: Jesus’ death by crucifixion, the fact that the disciples had a drastic change of heart soon after (which led them to believe and proclaim that Jesus had risen), and Paul’s conversion after being a persecutor. All three of these historical scholars support traditional Christian beliefs about the bodily resurrection of Jesus, but they employ a highly-sophisticated hermeneutic in doing so, and they do not make strong reality claims about the science of the new creation. It would be interesting to extend this kind of historical approach together with my previous suggestions, to see just what might be said about such an eschatological reality.

Summary The science-religion discussion has not so far indulged to any great degree in biblical interpretation, but recent thinking on scientific eschatology has meant that the resurrection texts of the New Testament have come into special focus. Three scholars in particular––John Polkinghorne, R J Russell, and David Wilkinson––have challenged scientific models for the end of the world by advocating the biblical idea of new creation. Thus, in the face of bleak cosmological predictions of either “freeze or fry” for the far-off future of the universe, these scholars discuss the nature of physical reality which would pertain if resurrection were to become the norm in the future, perhaps even a “law of nature”. The point being made is that the risen Jesus provides the data for constructing such a reality. This chapter has offered a critique of the hermeneutical assumptions involved in these reconstructions of an eschatological physical reality. I have suggested that the integrity and character of the Gospel resurrection texts in particular has not been respected adequately. Accordingly, I have suggested a number of ways forward that engage in more detail with biblical scholarship on reality claims.

Bibliography Barbour, Ian G. 1997. Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. New York: HarperOne. Clayton, Philip and Knapp, Steven. 2011. The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deane-Drummond, Ceila. 2009. Christ and Evolution: Wonder and Wisdom. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.

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Dunn, James D. G. 2003. Jesus Remembered. Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Eerdmans. Dyson, Freeman J. 2002. ‘Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe.’ In The Far-Future Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective, George F. R. Ellis (ed.), 103–39. Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press. Fergusson, David A. S. 1998. The Cosmos and the Creator: An Introduction to the Theology of Creation. London: SPCK. Harris, Mark. 2013. The Nature of Creation: Examining the Bible and Science. Durham: Acumen. Hefner, Philip. 1998. ‘Confessions of a scientist-theologian’ Christian Century 20-27:533-539. Jackelén, Antje. 2006. ‘A Relativistic Eschatology: Time, Eternity, and Eschatology in Light of the Physics of Relativity’ Zygon 41:955–73. Janowski, Bernd. 2006. ‘Biblical Theology’ In The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, J. W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu (eds.). Oxford: Oxord University Press, 716-731. Licona, Michael R. 2010. The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic; Nottingham: Apollos. Murray, Michael J. 2011 Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nürnberger, Klaus. 2012. ‘Eschatology and Entropy: An alternative to Robert John Russell’s proposal.’ Zygon 47:970-996. Gerald O’Collins SJ (2012) ‘Cosmological Christology: Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne and Pierre Teilhard de Charding in Dialogue’ New Blackfriars 93:516-523. Peacocke, Arthur. 1990, 1993. Theology for a Scientific Age. London: SCM. Penrose, Roger. 2010. Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe. London: Bodley Head. Polkinghorne, John. 1994. Science & Christian Belief: Theological reflections of a bottom-up thinker. London: SPCK. —. 2002. The God of Hope and the End of the World. London: SPCK —. 2005. Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion. London: SPCK. Russell, Robert John. 2008. Cosmology: From Alpha to Omega. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. —. 2012a. Time in Eternity: Pannenberg, Physics, and Eschatology in Creative Mutual Interaction. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

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—. 2012b. ‘Eschatology and Scientific Cosmology: From Deadlock to Interaction.’ Zygon 47:997-1014. Saudek, Daniel. 2011. ‘Science and Eschatology in the Open Universe’ Science and Christian Belief 23:133-157. Tipler, Frank J. 1996. The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. London: Pan. Wilkinson, David. 2010 Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe. London: T&T Clark. Wright, N. T. 2003. The Resurrection of the Son of God. London: SPCK.

CHAPTER THREE DIVINE ACTION: NOTHING MORE NATURAL? MICHAEL FULLER

Introduction In the 21st century West, it is common to think of divine action in terms of miracles; and these in turn are commonly understood to involve the breaking or suspension of those laws of nature which are the stuff of scientific discourse. A miracle, considered thus, is something unnatural; and if something is thought to be miraculous, there is a scientific imperative to seek for an explanation of it in naturalistic terms. This paper suggests that this is a fundamentally unhelpful way of thinking about miracles, and that it is possible to make better sense of miracles if we see them as relating to natural, not to unnatural (or indeed to supernatural) phenomena.

A literary digression By way of justification of this re-framing of the word “miracle”, consider an episode from C. S. Lewis’s “Narnia” stories. In one of those stories, children from our world who have gone into Narnia are introduced to someone who, it is explained to them, used to be a star. One of the children remarks, “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas”. He receives the gentle reply, “Even in your world ... that is not what a star is but only what it is made of” (Lewis 1980, 159). It is easy enough to grasp the point Lewis is making here. It is interesting to work out what something is made of (and this is a task with which the sciences are well equipped to deal); but saying what something is made of is not the same as saying what that thing is. When we hear the word “star” it means so much more than just an enormous ball of flaming gas. It carries resonances from

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Greek myths, with the constellations representing Orion, and Hercules, and Perseus, and Casseiopia, and so on. A star illuminates, and guides: stars have been aids to navigation from the moment people started to travel. A star can be a friendly, comforting, or auspicious presence, like the star of Bethlehem, for example (Matthew 2:2). The sight of the night sky has always inspired awe and wonder (c.f. Isaiah 40:26, Psalm 19:1). Less positively, there is also a long tradition which sees stars as presaging dire events, such as wars and famines. Stars are associated with fate: “it’s written in the stars”, we say: Romeo and Juliet are “star-cross’d lovers”. And today, of course, celebrities of stage, or screen, or concert arena, are all routinely described as “stars”. Viewed this way, a star is indeed very much more than simply the enormous ball of flaming gas of which the stars which are the subjects of astronomical research are unquestionably made. Lewis was, of course, a scholar of the mediaeval world, and he was therefore very familiar with the pre-modern manner of thinking which Peter Harrison has described in his book The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Science. Harrison contends that it was with the Reformation, and the importance of the Word in every respect in that epoch (with biblical translations being made, so that the Bible could be read and understood by everyone), that the playful mediaeval approach, in which “objects ... might act as natural symbols for many other things” (Harrison 1998, 28-9), narrowed down to the idea that words mean the thing which they stand for, and no more: “The assertion of the primacy of literal reading ... entailed a new, non-symbolic conception of the nature of things” (Harrison 1998, 114). Harrison links this collapse of meaning to the rise of the natural sciences, which seek to avoid such playfulness and ambiguity––and which, of course, seek very much to describe things in terms of what they are made of, and no more. The idea that a miracle may be considered simply and solely as “a violation of the laws of nature” goes back to David Hume (Hume 2007, 83); and it has found widespread acceptance since his day. However, the historical arguments above suggest that there are precedents for our going beyond thinking of a “miracle” in these terms. Might it be argued that this Humean understanding is in fact a very limiting one, in the same way that it is limiting to assume that a star is nothing more than an enormous ball of flaming gas?

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The nature of evidence If a miracle is considered to be an event which violates the laws of nature, can there ever be evidence for such an event within a modernist, scientific framework for viewing the world? After all, it is axiomatic that within that framework, we expect investigations of phenomena to result in conclusions that are “evidence-based”. What is usually meant by “evidence” when it is used in this sort of way is that statements should be backed up by publicly-available data, obtained through repeatable experiments––in other words, data obtained through a methodology that has been developed within a particular modernist, scientific, materialistreductionist narrative of how the world works. In contrast to such “evidence-based” ways of thinking, faith, according to one popular commentator, means simply “a state of mind that leads people to believe in something––it doesn’t matter what––in the total absence of supporting evidence” (Dawkins 1989, 330)––and this is clearly, by implication, a Bad Thing. But let us look a bit further at what we mean when we talk about “evidence” in this way. We all frame our understanding of the world around us in terms of narratives, which make sense of the raw data which the world presents to us. One sociologist has commented that “what is evidence is itself largely made significant, if not constituted for us, by our narratives” (Smith 2003, 87): in other words, it is the narrative we inhabit that determines what counts as evidence and what does not. It can readily be seen that a circularity emerges here: the modernist, scientific worldview, in deciding what kind of evidence matters, dictates that the only kind of evidence that should be considered to be valid is that which serves to reinforce the modernist scientific worldview. Something which is perceived to be miraculous is therefore inadmissible as evidence in any scientific enquiry, because science operates under the assumption that miracles (considered as violations of natural laws) do not occur. (We might note in parentheses that the assumption does not, of course, prove the fact. A musicologist may pursue her discipline with the assumption that there is no such thing as colour-blindness: she has no need of such a concept, and it is irrelevant to her studies. Needless to say, it does not follow from her assumption that there is no such thing as colour-blindness.) Valiant attempts have been made to square the idea of divine action in the world with modernist scientific understandings of that world (c.f. Russell et al. 2008). But if such scientific understandings rule out miracles a priori, endeavours such as these are inevitably problematic.

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Insights from the Cognitive Science of Religion Perhaps some insights from the cognitive science of religion might indicate an alternative way of thinking about miracles. Researchers in this area have suggested that our brains have developed to think in particular ways about the world in which we live. Justin Barrett puts it thus: “our minds preferentially attend to and differentially process some types of information over others” (Barrett 2011, 38). It is assumed that this “hardwiring” has proved successful from an evolutionary point of view (c.f. Boyer 2002, 132ff.). This leads to there being ways of thinking that are “natural” to us: these are sometimes labelled “folk biology”, “folk mechanics” and so on. Thus, we have an expectation that animals reproduce “after their kind”––that a horse does not bear puppies, for example (folk biology); and we have an expectation that solid bodies cannot pass through one another (folk mechanics) (Barrett 2011, 62-3). It has similarly been argued that our cognitive inheritance presupposes us to believe in a God or gods, as supernatural agents of some kind: “belief in gods in human groups may be an inevitable consequence of the sorts of minds we are born with in the sort of world we are born into” (Barrett 2004, 91). In short, it is claimed, we are “naturally” religious. On the other hand, more developed ways of thinking, such as those which take place within an academic discipline like theology or physics, do not immediately correlate with these presumed “hard-wired” cognitive capabilities. These disciplines, it is said, require “cultural scaffolding”, allowing for their ideas to be recorded, taught and learned (Barrett 2011, 52: Barrett 2012, 3-4). Belief in gods might be “natural” for human beings, whilst belief in a Holy Trinity is not: similarly, belief that solid bodies cannot pass through one another might be “natural”, whilst belief in an inverse square law of gravitational attraction is not. Now, the kinds of evidence required by those supporting scientific narratives as ways of understanding the world are “unnatural” kinds of evidence, in the sense above: that is to say, they can only be required by–– and may only obtained through––practices involving cultural scaffolding. There is nothing wrong with that, at one level. But are there other kinds of evidence––evidence which is more “natural”, which does not require such cultural scaffolding, and which may consequently not be seen by scientific-materialist narratives as evidence at all? The answer to that question is, surely, yes. Quite simply, we do not go through our lives seeking to base all our thinking and all our actions on empirical evidence: to attempt to do so would clearly be futile. Can I give you objective evidence for why I like particular kinds of art, or music, and

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for why I dislike other kinds? For why I love my partner? Even for why I vote in particular ways? Hardly. But I would still consider myself to have evidence for thinking, feeling and behaving as I do, even if that evidence takes the form of subjective feelings, emotions, “gut reaction”, and so on– –in other words, if it is not the kind of evidence that would be admissible as such within a scientific narrative.

Miracles as natural, transformative events If miracles are conceived in terms of the violation of laws of nature, then there is little point in trying to harmonise their occurrence with scientific perspectives. No evidence that we might advance in support of such miracles can be seen as persuasive within the framework of a scientific-materialist narrative. But if we re-frame the idea of miracles in the way suggested here, then perhaps we might be able to take account of those other, more subjective, kinds of evidence which we have identified: evidence which an individual may find to be perfectly reasonable, and which leads her to orientate her life in the ways in which she does. Now, suppose that an event takes place which confounds the “natural” expectations of my inherited cognitive systems. If this event causes me to reflect on my presuppositions, and even to be inwardly transformed in some way, then I might well wish to speak of this event as something miraculous, even if it is perfectly possible to explain it using the “unnatural” arguments devised by culturally-scaffolded academic disciplines. This is one reason why the birth of a child is often colloquially referred to as “miraculous”: I may experience it as transformative (particularly if he or she is my child), even though my culturallyscaffolded biological awareness means that I am aware that this is a straightforward example of mammalian reproduction. It is my initial reaction––that this is a miracle––which is “natural”, and the biologicallyinformed one that is “unnatural”. Now, a miracle like this would not (necessarily) transform your world as well as mine, in such a way that we might together seek for objective evidence that a miracle has, in fact, taken place. But any search for such empirical evidence in support of a miracle is pointless, because that is not how miracles work. I would urge that a miracle is something which I experience as such, and which is transformative for me. If I wish to go further, and to attribute that miracle to a divine source (which I may or may not wish to do), then it becomes evidence for me of the reality of divine action.

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Miracles as socio-ethical events But that is not to say that miracles, thus conceived, are a purely solipsistic phenomenon. To return to a literary source, consider the following description of a miracle, from a novel by Leonid Borodin called “The Year of Miracle and Grief”. Borodin describes a train journey between two Siberian towns, during the course of which, after miles of featureless countryside, the train suddenly emerges into a stunningly beautiful panorama. If you experience this vista, writes Borodin, “Your entire being will be transformed at that moment into a sensation of total rapture in the presence of a miracle!” However, the real miracle is not this vision of natural beauty. Rather, A miracle is really a moral concept. This can be confirmed providing you are able to tear yourself away from the window at the psychological moment and look to left and right at your fellow-travellers, likewise transfixed by the sight. For in their faces you will perceive an expression of openness quite exceptionally kind and sincere (Borodin 1984, 4).

The miraculous, for Borodin, is about human transformation; and miracles thus conceived are open to anyone who wishes to observe them. But this doesn’t mean that a miracle is something that may be perceived only by the individual who experiences it. Whether it is an observable change in someone’s expression (as for Borodin’s travellers) or a change in someone’s subsequent behaviour, it is perhaps a social or ethical dimension to the transformation that an individual undergoes that allows us to say that something miraculous has taken place. Miracles are not about the breaking of natural laws: the breaking of such laws (if it were to occur) would be a sideshow, an irrelevance. This is not what a miracle is (though it may perhaps, on some occasions, be what a miracle is made of).

Conclusion In conclusion, there is little point trying to discuss miracles within a scientific-modernist narrative, because they belong to a narrative of a different kind. To attempt to make something that is thought to be miraculous fit within a scientific narrative is already to have conceded that it is not, in fact, miraculous: it cannot be miraculous within that paradigm ––nothing can. However, if we see miracles as natural rather than unnatural events, in the way I have attempted to describe, we may obtain a fresh perspective on them. If we set to one side the unnatural “cultural

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scaffolding” imposed by scientific discourse, and if we concede the proposition that we are “hard-wired” to perceive and to interpret the world in particular ways, then the confounding of our inbuilt expectations might be expected to occur. If that confounding produces personal transformation of some kind, which is observable to others, we might wish to say that it is miraculous. And if that transformation is congruent with (or even perceived to be caused by) our innate intuition of a God or gods, then it is an example of divine action.

Bibliography Barrett, J. L. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Lanham and Plymouth: AltaMira Press. —. 2011. Cognitive Science, Religion and Theology. West Conshohocken: Templeton Press. —. 2012. ‘The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Theology’, in Evers, D., Fuller, M., Jackelén, A. and Smedes, T. (eds.) Is Religion Natural? London and New York: T&T Clark, 3-23. Borodin, L. 1984. The Year of Miracle and Grief. London: Quartet Books. Boyer, P. 2002. Religion Explained. London: Vintage. Dawkins, R. 1989. The Selfish Gene (new edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, P. 1998. The Bible, Protestantism and the rise of natural science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, D. 2007 (1748). An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, C. S. 1980 (1952). The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. London: Collins. Russell, R. J., Murphy, N. and Stoeger, W. R. (eds.) 2008. Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action: Twenty years of challenge and progress. Vatican City State and Berkeley: Vatican Observatory and the Centre for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Smith, C. 2003. Moral, Believing Animals: Human personhood and culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER FOUR JOY AND DIVINE ACTION JEFFREY W. ROBINSON

In recent years discussions about divine action have centred mainly on its general nature and scope, and the possible mechanisms through which divine action might take place, but there has also been some speculation on the milieu in which divine action might operate. These latter debates reduce in essence to an attempt to distinguish between divine action in natural physical systems and divine action in intelligent minds, and some have attempted to argue that all special divine action takes place in human minds (see Saunders 2002, 40-43 for a more detailed account). This idea that special divine action can occur only through mental processes has, however, been subject to much criticism, firstly on the ground that the mind is itself part of the natural world and the events in the mind cannot take place without some impact on other naturally occurring processes, and secondly that it would preclude any divine action before the appearance of such minds. Saunders reaches the conclusion that divine action occurs through “mental” and “physical” events although it is likely that the mechanisms involved are different. If that is true is there anything in human experience that might support the idea of divine action through mental activity? Even if divine action were to occur without creating any awareness of it might there be a side-effect which could be recognised? In other words is there anything that could be recognised as a “signal of transcendence” (a term devised by Peter Berger, and referred to in the book Predicament of Belief (Clayton & Knapp, 2011, 40), that means a phenomenon within the domain of our “natural” reality but one which appears to point beyond that reality). In particular, is it possible that the human experience of “joy” might be seen as such a signal? Unfortunately, the word “joy” has come to have a rather imprecise meaning in modern English usage. Dictionaries give a meaning such as “delight” or “intense gladness” (or even “a beloved person”), and the word is often used in an ironic sense to suggest something less than joy. A more

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detailed, and nuanced, definition is required although the difficulty of reaching such a definition is neatly encapsulated in the following few lines from towards the end of Robert Bridge’s poem The Growth of Love: Ah heavenly joy but who hath ever heard, Who hath seen joy, or who shall ever find Joy's language? There is neither speech nor word Nought but itself to teach it to mankind.

However, there are many references in the literature to a complex joy such as this, and probably one of the earliest appears in the writings of the Stoic philosophers. Although we may regard joy as an emotion the Stoic philosophers did not. The Stoic’s views on joy are set out in detail in the 1996-97 Gifford Lectures by Richard Sorabji and the key points would appear to be as follows. The Stoics defined four generic emotions— distress, pleasure, fear and appetite—under which all the others could be classified (Sorabji 2000, 29) but joy, along with will (in the strict sense) and caution, they defined as belonging to a class of acceptable good states of feeling (eupatheiai). They recognised three types of joy: “delight”— fitting joy at one’s advantages; “gladness”—joy at the deeds of the temperate; and, “cheerfulness”—joy at the conduct of the universe and at its leaving nothing to be desired (Sorabji 2000, 47-48). They distinguished joy from the emotion of pleasure because it was thought not to involve value judgements but resulted in a feeling of expansion or uplift of the mind (although qualified by the concept of reasonableness). The Stoics also believed that all wise people could benefit each other, even if they did not know each other, possibly because they could gain the state of joy from the thought of good character in others (Sorabji 2000, 51). The Stoic notion that joy might be linked to the conduct of the universe is particularly noteworthy. Although nowadays we tend to regard joy as no different from any other emotion it does seem to be different from, and more intense than, basic emotions such as anger, despair, happiness and love. A number of modern writers have referred to joy as a spiritual experience, and it is possible to recognise in their works a link with the Stoic idea of joy as being connected to the cosmos or to something greater than our world can offer. The concept of joy as not merely a feeling of great happiness, but something more complex involving negation of the self and unity with a wider totality of existence, appears throughout much of the writings of C. S. Lewis (he called the autobiography of his early years Surprised by Joy). In his commentary on Lewis’s Narnia stories Rowan Williams (Williams 2012, 139) refers to joy as “moments in our experience when we know

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that we are overtaken by a fulfilment of desire so overwhelmingly more than we could have expected we can only think of it in terms of contact with a life or an agency immeasurably in excess of what we can otherwise imagine” and as something that happens when we are not analysing ourselves, which has a transcendent quality about it, and involves an element of “letting go.” Williams goes on to say that we have a hunger for joy that reflects our need for truth, but in order to experience joy we need to give ourselves space and liberty, so that we can overcome the self which we have constructed as our protection against the world. Transcendence, he says, is the wildness of joy through which we can find real truth and experience of God (Williams 2012, 107-109). A similar theme is explored by Robert J. Spitzer, in his book New Proofs for the Existence of God. He introduces the notion of five human yearnings for the ultimate which are the desires for “perfect truth,” “perfect love,” “perfect goodness,” “perfect beauty” and “perfect home” (Spitzer 2010, 259). “Perfect home” appears to mean total fulfilment, peace and freedom. Human beings seem to want to be in perfect harmony with all that is—with what is termed the totality of all that is (the cosmos), and this desire reveals its existence by feelings or lack of peace, and for greater belonging beyond that experienced with families and friends. We seem therefore to have a notional awareness of “perfect home” within the cosmos which is far greater than we could expect from our experience (Spitzer 2010, 282). Spitzer suggests that this awareness arises from “perfect home” itself and has been associated with the presence of God to human consciousness (or the mind). Where the desire for “perfect home” is even partially fulfilled it is usually referred to using a term such as joy, love and awe. Spitzer suggests that when C. S. Lewis wrote about joy in Surprised by Joy, he was in fact describing transcendent joy linked to “perfect home” and that he was comparing it to the kind of joy that takes over the person and adds a new intensity, awareness and significance to life (Spitzer 2010, 282). Lewis was therefore speaking about being drawn by God more deeply into the divine home. This kind of uplifting joy is also referred to by Martha Nussbaum when she writes about an experience of joy that “is without enervation and uncertainty, without fear and grief, and really does move and lift up the heart” (Nussbaum 2009, 399), although she was referring to the Stoic battles against Aristotelianism. Writing on the subject of saintliness, William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, identified a number of characteristics associated with saintliness, characteristics which appear to apply over all religious traditions and possibly in non-religious people as well (James 1902, 193194). Two of these characteristics are worth noting here:

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1. A feeling of being in a wider life than this world’s selfish little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power (This would be God in Christian saintliness, but Power could also be seen in other ways, such as an abstract notion of moral ideals, or a vision of holiness). 2. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of confining selfhood melt down. These statements might be taken as another way of defining joy, but it would probably be a mistake to think that only saintly people can experience joy. This definition does, however, imply an “other worldliness” to the experience of joy. That is not to say, however, that every experience of joy could represent a contact with the divine. In the God of Hope and the End of the World John Polkinghorne asks where “all-embracing hope could find its setting in human life,” and identifies forgiveness and joy (Polkinghorne 2002, 96-97). He suggests that joy offers us a foretaste of the ultimate future, and that experiences of joy are deep moments of peaceful happiness which come through music, art, nature, human love, and the worship of god: these represent the fruits of eschatological fulfilment, as well as insights of a dynamic and unifying kind. He also refers to Miroslav Volf’s view that “joy lives from the movement in time qualified by an unperturbed peace between past and future in all presents” (Polkinghorne 2002, 98), and that Volf sees heaven as a state of pure joy (Polkinghorne 2002, 135). Whilst these descriptions of the state of joy appear to differ they contain some common aspects: the negation of self, involvement with the totality of existence or the cosmos, hunger or yearning, the search for truth and beauty, increased awareness, the uplifting nature of the experience and contact with some form of external existence. Where they differ is in the intensity of feeling and its duration, but it could be that this represents a difference in the way that the individual experiences the state of joy rather than the existence of several different kinds of joy. Why is it then that it appears to be possible to experience different levels of joy? The answer may lie in the structure of our brains, and, in particular, in the interaction between the left and right hemispheres. In his book The Master and his Emissary McGilchrist indicates that although both cerebral hemispheres are involved in all brain functions, the left hemisphere has come to have an undue influence on the way we understand the world (McGilchrist 2010, 6). Because the two hemispheres see the world in different ways this left hemisphere influence may have a

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particular impact on those functions for which the right hemisphere is particularly important such as creativity and emotional understanding (McGilchrist 2010, 27, 28, 42). The right hemisphere appears to create the emotional value in what we experience, and if it is not functioning properly we and the world become emotionally impoverished (McGilchrist 2010, 62). Conversely, stroke damage to the left hemisphere may result in increased effectiveness of the right hemisphere functions. For example, creative capacity may increase as a result of stroke damage to the left hemisphere because the right is no longer under the restrictive inhibitory influence of the left (McGilchrist 2010, 42). This might suggest that emotional capacity, and other right hemisphere functions, behave in the same way under such circumstances, and human emotional capacity may be much greater than would normally appear. It may also be possible, based on what McGilchrist says about creative capacity, to learn ways of lessening the left hemisphere’s influence over the right. Neuropsychological tests designed to measure creativity suggest that making intense efforts to be creative may be less effective than ceasing these efforts (McGilchrist 2010, 41). This seems to be the effect of a sudden relaxation from focussed effort allowing the broadening of attention and the engagement of the right hemisphere which might also permit more remote association to be made in thought. In this way thoughts may appear in the brain in an apparently random or unforeseen way, but this may be because we do not understand how our thoughts are inspired or what the source of inspiration might be. These interactions between the hemispheres may help to explain why joy is such a variable experience, why some people experience it more than others and why it may be possible to open the mind to joy. It does seem possible, however, that all humans could have the experience of joy if they were sufficiently receptive. This would be in line with a suggestion by Davies that all human beings have a potential for spiritual awareness (Davies 2004, 126). Davies also suggests that there is “a religious and numinous quality in some of the experiences that most people have from time to time, and this may sometimes be felt as a sense of the divine.” Writing about spiritual awareness he suggests that we need to begin to think first about the sense we have of truth and beauty. He defines the pursuit of happiness in its fullest sense as including the search for beauty of all kinds—physical beauty, moral beauty and spiritual beauty. Spiritual awareness may vary with the sort of personality experiencing it, and may also be affected by mood and by problems in perception caused by illness (Davies 2004, 124, 125).

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Interaction of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain with the limbic system is necessary for normal emotional function, and there are many diseases of the brain that can result in loss or damage of emotions (for example, multiple sclerosis which can result in emotional lability presenting as an overflow of sadness, mirth or despair) (Parkes 2004, 45). Parkes also mentions a condition called synesthesia, another kind of sensory overflow, in which stimulation of one sense leads to a subjective sensation of another sense (for example some people may experience musical notes as colours) (Parkes 2004, 48-49). Parkes asks whether sensory overload is taking place when mystical experience results from “looking at stained glass or the Coventry Cathedral tapestry in the half light.” He goes on to suggest that something perceived in this way can be termed a mystery, but it is as real as any other sensory experience. These insights from neuroscience seem to suggest that some brain conditions may produce the effect of enhancing a normal brain function rather than disordering it, and that it is possible, given the right conditions, to enhance the brain’s capabilities. However, most brain disorders seem to result in a breakdown of function and some can result in experiences for those affected that would be described as extreme religious ecstasy which might be regarded as an abnormal manifestation of the state of joy. Thus, subjects with temporal lobe epilepsy may experience such states as part of the aura leading up to epileptic seizures (Jeeves and Brown 2009, 94, 95) possibly as a by-product of the abnormal electrical activity which brings on the seizure. Jeeves and Brown suggest that this kind of experience may shed some light on the physical processes involved in normal religious experience and they draw attention to work by Saver and Rabin indicating that the limbic system of the temporal lobes is able to tag certain events as “crucially important, harmonious, and/or joyous, prompting comprehension of these experiences within a religious framework.” If this is correct it might throw some light on the apparent association between the state of joy and its “other worldly” aspects. If joy is the result, or the process, of humans having contact with things beyond their experience and worldly context, and with the divine in particular, how have we come to have this ability? It is relatively easy to see that emotions like fear and appetite would confer an evolutionary advantage but more difficult to see what advantage might be gained by being able to experience a state of joy. Whilst there might be an advantage, and our brains might have become specially adapted towards the ability to experience the state of joy, it is also possible that this may have been the by-product of another adaption, and that is example of a “spandrel”—an evolutionary trait that arises and has no adaptive value of

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its own (see Gould & Lewontin 1979 for the adoption of the architectural term “spandrel” for use in evolutionary biology, and Rothschild 2006, 162 on the possible link between spandrels and emergence). There is no clear view one way or the other but it may be that the by-product idea has its attractions, leading us to the view that the ability to experience joy may have emerged once the brain reached a certain level of complexity. Joy is quite distinct from happiness which seems to be regarded as the level of satisfaction with life, a by-product of other things and most heavily influenced by the breadth and depth of social connections (McGilchrist 2009, 434-37). McGilchrist says in his book that humans now see themselves as “happiness-maximising machines” (and not very good ones) but they are capable of other (higher) values. He also refers to work by Panksepp suggesting that an evolutionary process is resulting in the disconnection of cognitive from emotional processes (McGilchrist 2009, 244), but McGilchrist thinks that it is more complicated than that, and represents the presence of two modes of being (the two hemispheres of the brain) “each with its own cognitive and emotional aspects” and the domination of one by the other (McGilchrist 2009, 437). The right hemisphere which is more closely involved with emotion and the body is increasingly subordinate to the left whose main concern appears to be power. This left hemisphere dominance could be taken to impede our ability to experience true joy and mean that to achieve joy we must learn how to modify the left hemisphere’s influence. It is possible that the experience of true joy may be a latent property of the mind which can only be revealed by training the mind to overcome other competing instincts (this may not be too far removed from the Stoic notion that only sages can experience real joy). This may be what is meant by releasing ourselves from the constructed self. It is possible therefore that there may be a way for the human mind to communicate with the divine and therefore to be open to the possibility of divine influence. Although this does not in itself indicate that divine action is possible through the human mind it may at least be a pointer in that direction.

Bibliography Clayton, P. & Knapp, S. 2011. The Predicament of Belief: science, philosophy, faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Gaius. 2004 ‘Spiritual Awareness, Personality and Illness’ in M A. Jeeves (ed), From Cells to Souls—and Beyond. USA: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, pp. 123-145.

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Gould, S. J. & Lewontin, R.C. 1979. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 205, 581-598. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., Routledge Classic edition 2008 published in the USA and Canada by Routledge. Jeeves, M. A. & Brown, W. S. 2009. Neuroscience, Psychology and Religion. USA: Templeton Foundation Press. McGilchrist, Iain. 2009. The Master and his Emissary. New Haven and London: Yale Inversity Press. Nussbaum, M. C. 2009. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Paperback reissue ed. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Parkes, David. 2004. ‘The Vulnerability of Persons: Religion and Neurology’, in M. A. Jeeves (ed) From Cells to Souls—and Beyond. USA: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, pp. 34-57 Polkinghorne, John. 2002. The God of Hope and the End of the World. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Rothschild, Lynn J. 2006. The Role of Emergence in Biology’, in P. Clayton & P. Davies (eds) The Re-Emergence of Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151-165. Saunders, Nicholas. 2002. Divine Action and Modern Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sorabji, Richard. 2000. Emotion and Peace of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, reprinted 2010. Spitzer, Robert J. 2010. New Proofs for the Existence of God. Michigan, USA/Cambridge, UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Williams, Rowan. 2012. The Lion’s World. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.



CHAPTER FIVE ‘THE LIONS ROAR FOR PREY, SEEKING THEIR FOOD FROM GOD’: DIVINE ACTION AND EVOLUTIONARY SUFFERING BETHANY SOLLEREDER

We are told in Psalm 104 that “the young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God.” (Ps 104:21) The Psalmist joyfully celebrates how God provides for all creatures; how they all look to God for food. Perhaps the Psalmist is right to praise God’s abundant provision for the lions. But the poet does not tell us how the prey, who are provided by God for the lions, feel about it. What we do know is that the exchange of life is inescapable: for every hungry creature who is provided for, some other creature of God is the provision. For some, in the history of the church, this was not particularly problematic. When Augustine treats the question, “why do animals eat one another” he replies curtly “The answer, of course, is that one animal is the nourishment of another.” He continues: To wish that this were otherwise would not be reasonable. For all creatures, as long as they exist, have their own measure, number, and order. Rightly considered, they are all praiseworthy, and all the changes that occur in them, even when one passes into another, are governed by a hidden plan that rules the beauty of the world and regulates each according to its kind. (Augustine 1982, 92)

For many years this answer, or ones like it that pointed to the hidden plan of providence, were enough. Each creature was designed and regulated to be what it is and to do what it does. However, when in 1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace announced to the world their discovery of natural selection as the

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mechanism for evolutionary development, the theological world faced a new set of challenges. The world could no longer be unproblematically equated with the result of divine design. In a fight for survival, the strong and the fit thrived, while the weak and the sick perished; a result difficult to square with the Bible’s insistence on God’s care for the weak. Chance and violence shaped the contours of life, rather than Augustine’s confident “hidden plan.” Theologians and scientists alike asked whether the world could still be considered the creative work of God? And could the God of love have used, and continue to use, such brutal tactics to create a “very good” world? Even more difficult is that the traditional answers for suffering––either that suffering is the result of the misuse of human freewill, or that suffering is allowed for moral growth––do not apply to the non-human world. Their suffering seems pointless through traditional theological lenses. The first part of this paper will look at how different approaches to the doctrine of creation reflect on non-human animal suffering and how we can begin to build a compound theodicy that answers the question. In the second half, I will offer an additional puzzle piece to our theodicy: a reflection on the nature of redemption based on a narrative providence grounded in divine love.

Theodicy and Creational Standpoints To begin, various theodicies are derived from how one understands the doctrine of creation. I will explore these various moves with an arrangement based on reference to time. I will look at how creation can be thought of as something that is primarily rooted in either the past, the present, or the future. Then we will see how each of these “creational standpoints” lays the ground for different defences.

Creation Past: Out of nothing There are two major models of creation that are understood primarily by their reference to creation in the “past.” The first model is that of creatio ex nihilo, or creation out of nothing. This has been held as the primary Christian understanding of creation since the second century, and it holds that God voluntarily brought everything into being out of nothing, and determined its makeup (May 1994, 27-28). Creatio ex nihilo is certainly not limited to a past frame of reference, as at each moment, creation depends upon God’s continual upholding of something out of nothing. Yet, for this paper, we will only be engaging with the part of the

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doctrine that deals with the origins of matter. Thinkers who hold to the ex nihilo tradition are set the particular conundrum of defending the incongruence between God’s making the universe intentionally out of absolutely nothing and the universe containing the factors that lead to natural evil. Typically, God’s choices are defended by pointing out constraints upon God’s action, showing how, if God desired certain values, certain disvalues were inevitable or at least probable. For example, Robin Attfield argues that values––such as organisms with quick neural capacities and fleet-footedness––could only have developed independently in predatorprey relationships (Attfield 2006, 129). Attfield admits that in another created order these skills might have been implanted directly by divine action, thus diminishing the need for violence, yet he comments, “though evolution by natural selection is not logically necessary, it is probably the only kind of non-interventionist world-system which could give us those capacities found in nature that we value.” (Attfield 2006, 129) Similarly, nomic regularity––the law-like regularity of physical systems––is necessary if creatures are to have any sort of significant choice of action or understanding of consequences (Murray 2008, 131-41; 160-64). In so far as the regularity of the cosmos provides a place where actions have real consequences, and where creatures have freedom to explore those actions (leading ultimately to moral freewill), pain is a gift to the creature and aids its ability to form meaningful relationships. Many other theologians have advanced similar arguments (Russell 2007, 123; Murphy 2007, 135-36; Southgate 2008, 16; Peacocke 1979, 166; Alexander 2008, 279-80; Polkinghorne 2005, 77.). By claiming there is no other way in which God could have brought about these values, theologians argue that it is reasonable to assume that although every possibility of creation was available to God’s divine power––with regard to things like dimensions, universal constants, attributes of matter, etc.––God still had to create the universe within relatively constrained limits (including the possibility of suffering) if God desired physical life, and in particular, sentient life. Arthur Peacocke sums up this kind of argument: There are inherent constraints on how even an omnipotent Creator could bring about the existence of a law-like creation that is to be a cosmos not a chaos, and thus an arena for the free action of self-conscious, reproducing complex entities and the coming to be of the fecund variety of living organisms whose existence the Creator delights in. (Peacocke 2001, 37)

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Creation Past: Creation out of chaos? Contrary to the position of ex nihilo, though still in the past frame of creational reference, stand those who see God as creating out of some sort of pre-existent material, or out of chaos. Instead of all matter being created out of nothing according to the divine will, they argue that God’s creative activity has always used pre-existent materials that already had intrinsic freedoms and properties (Griffin 1981, 104). The matter added a chaotic, intractable element to the world, which has prevented God from eliminating the possibilities of natural evil. Process theologians such as David Ray Griffin and Catherine Keller are the most prominent defenders of the “out of chaos” defence, as it coincides well with process theology’s commitments to God’s non-coercive, non-interventionist, and co-evolving nature. But process theologians are not alone in this stance: Thomas Oord, a prominent open theist, claims that creation out of chaos is a better way to understand the existence of natural evil because it denies God the type of power necessary to fine-tune the universe. He rejects the ex nihilo argument of limitation. “A God” he writes, “who can unilaterally create from absolutely nothing could also unilaterally prevent any genuine evil.” (Oord 2009, 41) Instead, Oord points to the opening chapter of Genesis, where the world is created from the tehom, the great deep or chaotic waters, to defend his position. In the end, however, creation out of chaos only further complicates the issues of natural evil. First, a pre-existent, co-eternal chaos creates an eternal dualism between God and creation––something which has traditionally been rejected with good reason by theologians. Second, it can be questioned whether a God who does not create out of nothing can really be considered a Creator at all. Instead, it seems, that God is simply like Plato’s Demiurge––managing and shaping recalcitrant matter with various degrees of success. Creation out of chaos does not allow for a robust theology of either creation or sovereignty, and ends up undermining hope in a new creation as well. After all, there is no reason to suppose that the God who could not initially shape matter into a good world could re-create that same matter into the substance of Christian hope the second time around. The traditional strengths of creatio ex nihilo are not easily discarded, nor is creation out of chaos a simple solution to the problem of natural evil. In both cases, God is limited in the options of creation, and the conversation ends up turning to the ultimately unanswerable question “Was it better to create with the possibility of all the suffering we see today, or not to create at all?”

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Creation Present: Creatio continua Creation in the present frame of reference sees God as the continuing Creator, bringing new possibilities into reality in the world, either through and with natural agents (through concursus), or independently of them (what we might term “miracles”). Ruth Page advances concursus as God’s method of ongoing creation, but does so from a strongly relational standpoint. Traditionally, God’s act of concursus was understood as either God being the first cause, but acting through secondary causes, or God providing the dynamism––the power of action, if you will––in the world which enables novelty to emerge in the creation (Page, 1996, p.58). Page argues that God’s continuing action should not be seen “as the exercise of causative power, but rather as the establishing and maintenance of relationship” (Page 1996, 59). God creates by establishing relationships between different creatures and between creatures and God’s own self, and then allowing creaturely actions to “run alongside” the divine will by natural attraction. These relationships establish the purpose and meaning of creation’s history. However, for Page, in order for the relationships to be truly concurrent they must be undergirded by freedom and love. It is precisely in God’s “letting-be” of creation that creatures have the possibility of response to God’s will, and thus the possibility of God’s action through concurrence is opened. Concurrent action is mutual action, where creatures and God, to quote Page, “think and act together, although each remains distinct in who or what he/she is” (Page 1996, 59). The power of concurrence, Page tells us, “is that of attraction, of drawing the attention and concern of the other without extinguishing that other’s freedom” (Page 1996, 60). Robert Farrar Capon makes this same point more vividly when he writes “What [God] does to the world, he does subtly; his effect on creation is like what a stunning woman does to a man ... She doesn’t touch his freedom, and she doesn’t muck about with the constitution of his being by installing some trick nisus that makes Harry love Martha” (Capon 1995, 201). The attraction of divine love draws creatures into a mutual relationship with God. John Haught, too, speaks of the “notion of an enticing and attracting divine humility... [which] gives us a reasonable metaphysical explanation of the evolutionary process.” (Haught 2000, 53) Haught explains that God’s non-coercive love would necessitate an autonomous creation upheld in freedom by divine selfrestraint but also of a creation which would “unfold by responding to divine allurement at its own pace and in its own particular way.” (Haught 2000, 53; 2005, 16-18) The flourishing of mutual relationship leads to concurrent action between Creator and creature, and that action is the foundation for God’s present and further work in the world.

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The possibility of concurrent relationship, though, also necessitates the possibility of creaturely rejection of divine relationship. If God’s love is genuine, it must not be controlling, because love is always distorted by the assurance of possession and control (Vanstone 1977, 46). When and where creatures reject divine relationship, the purpose of creation is lost. But a creature’s suffering is never held distant from divine involvement. For Page and others, God’s ongoing creative activity in relationships is also God’s answer to the problem of suffering, because without the possibility of suffering there would be no relationship. Therefore, if creatures suffer, they do not suffer alone, but can find comfort in the companionship of God. Arthur Peacocke also tentatively suggests that God’s co-suffering with creatures may––in itself––have creative potential. God, in suffering along with creatures, can bring about the greater good. “Indeed,” he writes, “the creation may in one sense be said to exist through suffering: for suffering is recognized to have creative power when imbued with love.” (Peacocke 2001, 38). Just as childbirth is suffering with creative purpose, the cosuffering of God may, Peacocke suggests, have some creative affect beyond the comfort of co-presence and be productive of novelty. How this might be the case, however, is not spelled out by Peacocke. Importantly, in each of these positions is the insistence that God is both presently active in the world and non-interventionist. Now, I mentioned that there were two views of present creation. That of concursus and that of interventionist divine action, what we might call “miracles”––although there are many other ways to understand the term miracles, too, such as signs of the coming kingdom. But in the sense of interventionist acts of God, there are not a lot of contemporary proponents defending this view apart from those who also reject evolution altogether: such as those who support Intelligent Design Theory or Young Earth Creationism. However, if we move from specifically divine intervention to a broader look at simply the intervention of spiritual beings, several theologians have suggested that the intervention of Satanic forces could be to blame for the violence and natural evil that we see (Lloyd 1998, 147-160; Griffiths 2013, 44-48; Creegan 2013, 10). Because this is not technically a position of creation, I will not dwell long on it, but it is important to point out that it encounters some fairly serious chronological difficulties with biblical texts which call the present world “good” and even “very good,” and regularly attribute its current workings to God’s glory. See, for example, the divine speeches in Job where God displays the violent and unfriendly parts of creation as particular points of divine pride. If it had been deeply corrupted by forces opposing God, one might expect that to show up more

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prominently. Instead, creation––even violent creation––is regularly attributed to God’s good work, as is seen in many biblical texts, including Psalm 104’s hungry lions.

Creation Future: creation in adventus The third reference of creation relates to those who look to the future as the key to meeting the questions of theodicy. These theologians do not deny the importance of the other frames of creation, but they do not think that the options explored above offer sufficient grounds for the theological resolution of natural evil. Instead, they argue that God will continue to create, and is creating from the future into the present in ways that allow for the redemption and fulfilment of those who suffer. “God creates from the future, not the past,” write Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett, “God starts with redemption and then draws creation toward it. Or, perhaps better said, God’s ongoing creative work is also God’s redeeming work” (Peters & Hewlett 2003, 160). The focus shifts from the questions of the origin of evil to God’s response to evil. The reasons for the origin or existence of evil may, in the end, be an unsolvable riddle, but God’s redemption of evil provides hope beyond suffering. Jürgen Moltmann holds such a view. Richard Bauckham helpfully summarises his thought, writing that, in response to evil, “Moltmann is proposing an eschatological theodicy, not in the sense that suffering will prove justified as contributing to the final fulfilment of God's purpose, but in the sense that God will finally overcome all suffering” (Bauckham 1987, 91). Suffering will cease, and so the origins and types of suffering or natural evil are, therefore irrelevant. It is only our response to evil in cooperation with God that matters. God works, and we must work, to eliminate natural evil and its effects, and that redemption is realised in the overcoming and elimination of suffering. Alternatively, some view the future hope as a place where God will recreate in such a way as to compensate creatures for their past suffering. For Jay McDaniel, the reality of a new life in heaven for non-human animals provides justification for the suffering and non-fulfilment those creatures experienced on earth (McDaniel 1989, 45-46). For Christopher Southgate, it is those who suffer or whose lives lack flourishing for whom the new creation is especially important. Those non-human animals who live flourishing lives here and now are less in need of a new life, along with those creatures who cannot suffer due to insufficient sentience (Southgate 2008, 84-85).

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Third, future creation can mean that God’s act of creative redemption changes the meaning of the past. Peters and Hewlett write “It is the divine act of redemption that determines what creation will have meant, and this can be determined only eschatologically” (Peters & Hewlett 2003, 160). God’s redemption actually creates the meaning of what is past, and the whole of creation cannot be understood before that moment, for its meaning is not yet determined. Robert Russell claims “It is only when the new creation is the starting point for reflecting on evil that we can hope to give a response to its origin and meaning in this present, broken world” (Russell 2007, 111). From the future to the present comes God’s redemptive work, and it thus ensures a fulfilled teleology for all creatures and it ensures that the path of creation has a future and a hope (Moltmann 1993, 118-124; 133-34). No suffering, then, whatever its severity and extent will remain unredeemed, and thus no present suffering, it is claimed, can challenge the existence of the love of God.

Compound Approaches Some theologians combine all these different explanations of suffering into a compound approach. Christopher Southgate, for example, recognises the power and necessity of each argument generated by the different creational standpoints, and he attests that no one strand of theodicy alone is sufficient. Rather, all three creational standpoints must be drawn together in order to address the problem of natural evil. God must be seen as originally creating within constraints in light of values that can come about in no other way––what he calls the “Only Way” argument (Southgate 2008, 16, 30). God must also be seen as responding to, companioning, and suffering with each creature, as well as working redemption in and for and through creatures––providing for them either fullness of life here, or in a life to come by drawing them into the life of the Trinity. My own view, like Southgate’s, combines various approaches. It holds that the limitations of the original creation, the freedom of creatures, the ongoing co-creation and co-suffering of God, and the future promise of redemption all have to be held together in order create a viable theodicy that accounts for non-human suffering. To explore each of these concepts at length would be far beyond the scope of this paper, however I will spend the second half of this paper exploring and expanding upon the theme of redemption: how an individual suffering creature might find great redemption within the ongoing narrative of history.

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Teleology and Redemption So far in this paper I have moved from different views on divine action in creation toward different types of theodicy. In the second half of this paper, I am going to work the other way: I will start with two present theological justifications for non-human suffering, particularly centring around questions of teleology, and work towards a view on divine redemption in creation. But first, we must further narrow our scope of enquiry. One of the major problems when talking about non-human suffering is that humans always seem to get involved. The conversation quickly ends up focusing on ethics, or environmental destruction, or what the human role towards non-human animals ought to be, or how they contribute to human wellbeing. These are important questions, but they can distract us from a theology of non-human animals “for-their-own-sakes.” So although I began this paper with the question of the hungry lions, it will not do to stay there, since lions are contemporary with humans and our theological lenses can get overwhelmed by their proximity. Nor has the problem yet reached its most critical point: if one lion dies, there is always another one to replace it. The tragedy of extinction has not touched this species (although whether it does may indeed rely heavily upon human choices). So, instead of staying with the Psalmist’s hungry lion for the second half of this paper, I will turn to the consideration of dinosaurs. How do their now-distant lives influence our theological judgments about God in creation, particularly (we might ask) in light of their eventual extinction? Let us begin with two very different theodicies which picture how God is at work in evolutionary history: the teleological anthropocentrists and the ground-of-being theists. The teleological anthropocentrists consider all the suffering of animals that existed before humans, and the lines of those species which have now been discarded in extinction, as only finding their fulfilment in the development of humankind. Every death, every extinction, every starved T-Rex or suffering Parasaurolophus, was simply a necessary means to an anthropic end. For example, Michael Corey argues in his book Evolution and the Problem of Evil: Now we are in a position to understand why an omnipotent Deity would have opted to create the universe in a gradual, evolutionary manner, instead of instantaneously by divine fiat. He presumably did so in order to facilitate the human growth process as much as possible; but in order to do this He seems to have been compelled to implement the same evolutionary processes in the natural world that appear to be an essential part of the Human Definition. (Corey 2000, 113)

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In short: God’s hands were tied. In desiring an environment where humans could grow, the terror of the T-Rex’s prey was an unfortunate but necessary side effect. God’s action in this case is simply one of looking forward to humanity who will make all the suffering worthwhile. At the other end of the theodicy spectrum are those for whom evolution was entirely a chance process, for whom there was no set teleological end. God, in this view, is often seen as essentially tied to the world and changed with the chance developments of history. For groundof-being theologian Wesley J. Wildman, for example, plans for the creation’s fulfilment and care for the creatures that reside within it are simply not characteristics of the divine being (Wildman 2007, 282). Whatever will be, will be, and God does not care for the T-Rex, its prey, or the humans that result from the evolutionary process. God is simply providing the ontological ground of existence, and allows the universe to be whatever it happens to be. The first approach devalues all non-human creatures to simply being means to an end. The second ascribes little or no value to any particular state of creation. Can we instead sail safely between this theological Scylla and this Charybdis? Can we see the past history of animals long gone as valuable in their own right, as their own ends, while not giving up the sense that there is a larger whole? And can this sense of teleology act as justification for their suffering? I want to suggest that a combination of Ruth Page’s notion of “Teleology Now!” and an open theist perspective of providence allows for a dual-aspect teleology that can help us begin to make sense of the long history of disvalues in nature. Page, whose thought we explored earlier on concursus, absolutely refuses to see the death or suffering of various nonhuman animals as merely means to an anthropic end. Page’s notion of “Teleology Now!” argues that the life of each creature is an end in itself. She writes: The other part of the doctrine which works with [the concurrent relationship] is that teleology is always now! It is with creatures as they live, rather than persuading them further up the evolutionary ladder. Indeed there is no ladder, a metaphor which gives comfort to human beings at the top. Instead, there is only diversity with different skills and lives... [therefore] creatures who die in the recurrent ice ages, or who are caught in the lava from volcanoes, have their importance to God, and their relation with God during their lives. (Page 1996, 104)

For Page, teleology is not a distant goal toward which life ascends. Page discards the idea of an evolutionary ladder and argues that the relationship that God has with each individual creature gives its life

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meaning regardless of whether it serves greater evolutionary development or not. The very notion of “greater evolutionary development” would be suspect to her, suggesting a programme of teleological direction that she rejects. For Page, value is found simply in the act of participation in life. Since there is no goal to achieve, the where and when of the life of a particular creature is unnecessary just as its death is undetermined but inevitable. Yet, in the freedom of an undetermined life, great good is to be found. “Fellowship, concurrence or relationship among creatures and between creatures and God is the greatest good of creation. The possibility of such relationships is what creation is about” (Page 1996, 105). In the creative space of possibility instituted by God in creation, life will continue, and each creature brings glory to God in whatever form it takes. In light of this, Page concludes that for the particular problem of extinction “neither continuing background extinction, nor the devastation of species in cataclysms, tells against God’s companionship and possibilities of influence in the world” (Page 1996, 105). God’s goodness and love are not called into question by death or extinction since the worth of the creature who dies is not reliant upon some future good; God was not using its death simply for some larger picture. From Page’s perspective, a world full of dinosaurs (or full of bacteria) is just as worthwhile to God as the world we currently see, because value is found in current being and participation in relationships. Redemption for suffering, we can say with Page, is found in the present participation of creatures in relationship to each other and to God. However, Page does not tell the whole story. To set value at the level of the creatures themselves is a good and necessary correction of the anthropocentric approaches which have long dominated reflections on the natural world. At the same time, it does not necessarily diminish the value of the individual to say that the individual has an impact that is bigger than itself. After all, the world has had a certain history, and the chronological march of time gives it direction, and makes it undeniable that there have been causal links between past events of disvalue (such as the extinction of the T-Rex) and the flourishing and diversification of biological novelty today. Page is right to avoid any instrumentalist language in discussing the value of a creature, yet I believe we can build on Page’s position by saying that––in retrospect––the impact of past lives on today’s world changes our interpretation of their lives, and the subsequent path of history can add a dimension of either glory or tragedy to the meaning of a creature’s life, without diminishing its value into a solely instrumentalist scheme.

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A closer look at our example of dinosaurs here may well help to flesh out concepts that are opaque in the abstract. We know that some 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, a meteorite hit the Yucatan peninsula causing wide spread climate change and environmental disruption. Dinosaurs could not survive the changes and were wiped out, while mammals, who until that time had been minor players in earth’s history, suddenly flourished in the new environments without the competition of the dinosaurs. The diversification of mammals eventually ended up in the emergence of Homo sapiens and centrally in the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. This wider sense of history can add a new facet of redemption, a sense of “Teleology then” to Page’s necessary “Teleology Now!” Actions and reactions build into narrative paths that in turn establish new and unforeseen dimensions to a creature’s meaning and worth. An open theist approach to providence helps to develop how this can be maintained. Three central tenets of open theist theology will be key here: A. God experiences time as a chronological progression of events, and does not know the whole future B. God rarely has fixed specific outcomes in mind, and changes desired outcomes based on creaturely interaction and the “givenness” of the past C. God always acts in perfect love and wisdom, and will continually and creatively work to bring about good, even if the path to that good is circuitous due to creaturely freedom. Since open theology postulates God as experiencing time in a chronological sense similar to our own experience of time, it is easy to hold a strong sense of “Teleology Now!”, because God is constantly companioning each being in the here and now. God cannot be simply using the present as a means to a foreordained end because, in open thought, God does not know which ends will actually occur––only the possibilities of the future are thought to be available to the divine view. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that creatures in the past have had important and lasting effects on creatures in the future. The world looks as it does today precisely because creatures in the past lived and died, fought and reproduced, flourished and were devoured. Their lives and their narratives are linked to ours today. The full meaning and impact of creatures long since dead are, in fact, still in development. As our stories continue their stories, there is an added providential twist, because in each act of divine lure in the present––and in the choices that are made today––

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the possibilities which God foresaw in the life of our now long-dead TRex are either realised or closed. God is constantly working towards giving the greatest amount of meaning to the natural evils that have occurred. God is constantly redeeming the lives of the past by luring creation toward ends that will reflect back greater glory on the individuals now passed away. An analogy may be drawn from the end of Hebrews 11. After the long line of heroes of the faith are listed, the author states the following: “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, without us, be made perfect.” (Heb 11:39-40, NRSV) The passage goes straight on from this statement into the paraenetic portion of the epistle, beginning with: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses let us...” followed by instructions on how to live. The saints of the Hebrew Bible recounted in the chapter had lived and died long before, but the author of Hebrews seems to think that the current righteous action of believers enriches their legacy, or at least that they cannot be made perfect without the actions of current believers. Although the saints are long since dead, part of the promise of their lives is realised in the present: a possibility of fulfilment that would not come to fruition if present believers chose not to “lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily entangles...” Another example might be how the legacy of Abraham is enriched by the later reality of Christ. We do not consider Abraham as a means to an end, but rather as a man who had an important part to play in the ongoing story of God’s relationship with the world. Abraham’s obedient actions (as well as his numerous disobedient actions) are wrapped into the narrative of salvation, and his life is given a greater glory, a greater meaning, because of the subsequent history that followed in Christ. This concept of redemption can meaningfully be extended to all living creatures. All living creatures are companioned by God, and are loved and valued on their own terms. Yet all creatures are also part of a greater story which God is constantly redeeming by creating new meaning out of events. It is possible to see the ongoing history of evolution, comprising as it does of ever increased complexity and interrelations, as a way of that redemption being carried out. The death (both individually and corporately) of the dinosaurs is a loss, and yet the flourishing of the mammals ends up contributing to the meaning of the dinosaurs’ extinction. We might see redemption of this kind by considering that the wonder of human architecture, or the transcendence of music, or the capacity of human love is actually bound up with the meaning of the death of past

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creatures we never knew. Our stories serve their stories and vice versa. By merit of the dinosaurs’ extinction we are here, and our retrospective vision allows us to interpret their deaths as having been meaningful in a way that (if we can imagine) a human observer at that time could not have foreseen. Other equally meaningful and fruitful possibilities of redemption along the road of time were, no doubt, not explored in order that our road might be. And God is continually seeking to interact with the world in order to see that the greatest possible good is realised. As a moment occurs, the narrative lines leading up to it converge and are either enriched with glory or diminished by tragedy in the passing event. Now, we must ask, is this at all plausible? Is it really possible to have a God who is at every moment working toward the good of each individual present, while also working toward the good of the legacy left by every creature past? Eleonore Stump, in her excellent book Wandering in Darkness, explores interacting stories of suffering and redemption, and tries to tease out a similar tension to what I propose here. Drawing from the narrative of Job, she suggests that stories of similar redemptive shape are nested within each other in such a way as to become fractal (Stump 2010, 219-26; 46667). A fractal is a type of self-similar and infinitely complex pattern, in which the smallest scale of measurement resembles the shape of the whole. Each small-scale story builds into the larger-scale stories progressively, giving them extra dimension and scope. So, for example, the raven’s story in the divine speeches is part of Job’s story, which in turn is part of Satan’s story. In each story exists God’s personal relationship with that particular creature as God works in its life toward its own specific good, just as God works in every other life as well. Stump explains “within each of the nested stories the creature whose story it is is an end in himself, even if in some other story he is also a means to an end for some other creature” (Stump 2010, 220). William P. Brown expresses this same idea in Job as Job’s realisation that “creation is polycentric. It has its various centers or domains, each accommodating different forms of life yet all interlinked.” (Brown 2010, 133) In all these different centres, God draws these individual narratives to “work upwards” together in complexity and scope until the greater story, like the smaller story, is a picture of God’s redemption in a systemic sense. Another way to envision the fractal narrative is by analogy to the computer generated images we sometimes see, which at first glance looks like a regular photograph. As you investigate more closely, however, you realise that it is a complex mosaic wherein each pixel is a photograph in itself. The shade and light and texture of each individual photograph is

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carefully placed against the others to create a larger image. The picture mosaic is different from the well-known tapestry image1 of redemption because in a tapestry each thread is not a valuable and unique whole in itself. The thread only becomes something worthwhile and complex when it is a part of the whole: when the tapestry is finished. Up until that point, a thread may easily be replaced by any other thread. In a picture mosaic, however, each photograph that acts as a pixel is in fact a complete whole in itself––apart from its involvement in the larger image. Yet, the individual photograph is also a necessary component of the larger picture. The uniqueness of each photograph is, in fact, precisely what makes it useful to be a component of the larger image. Its unique blend of colour and shade means that it uniquely fits in that space, better than any other available picture. There is no limit to the complexity of the arrangement, either. As we look at the smaller picture, it could itself be made up of a mosaic of still smaller pictures, each a whole in themselves. Still, the image does not go far enough because it is static. Reality, instead, is dynamic. Relationship is dynamic. So instead of imagining photographs that merge together to form a great photograph, we must imagine little videos that are so artfully arranged one against another, that together they still create a larger, dynamic video. Very quickly this would become impossible for a computer to arrange, but it is the type of picture we must have in mind for God’s weaving of the world narrative. To the complexity of this we must add that each video, both the small and large, are not carefully acted and scripted pieces, but rather dynamic real-time improvisations. The course of each individual video, as well as the largescale video, is created as each of the actors explores his or her own freedom and response to divine direction in his or her own capacity. Still, God works with the texture and reality of each of these into the large-scale video which is influenced (but not determined) by each pixel of its makeup. God interacts at each level of the mosaic, luring and creating relationships to bring about God’s purposes at every level in fractal redemptive form. The description of life as a dynamic video mosaic allows us to see in part how small stories could play up into a meta-narrative without sacrificing the individual uniqueness and worth of each story. The result of this type of perspective is that the individual and the system are not set against each other competitively, as is so often the case

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The tapestry image of redemption holds that we only see the ‘knots’ of creation now in historical events, like the messy knots that can be seen when a weaver is still in the process of creation. At the end of time, God will flip all the events of history over, and we will see a beautiful tapestry, where each thread is carefully woven for its contribution to the larger whole.

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in reasoning about suffering. The suffering of the individual is not brushed aside in light of the “greater good” or justified by merely pointing to some eschatological order that will make sense of it all. Page’s “Teleology Now!” ensures that we never see suffering and death as only a means to an end, but always as affirming the rich value of that particular individual. At the same time, a view of ongoing, ever-building fractal narratives allows us a glimpse into the possibilities of what impact a life might have ontologically, as its actions ripple through the course of history, and endow the individual with a weight of glory that is now unforeseeable. When held together with the insights from the first half of the paper, the fractal narrative idea of redemption is a valuable contribution to a compound evolutionary theodicy. Creation past ensures that we remember that the options of creation were limited if God wanted a sentient, free creation. Creation present draws us into the co-creation and co-suffering of God, where participation in the relationships of life is a primary value. Finally, creation future draws our attention to the redemption that is nascent in every present action, and the promise that what is gratuitous suffering now may one day become, by the grace of God, the small pixels of great glory.

Bibliography Alexander, D. 2008. Evolution or Creation: Do we have to choose?, Monarch, Oxford. Attfield R. 2006. Creation, Evolution and Meaning, Ashgate, Aldershot. Augustine. 1982. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol. 1, trans. J. H. Taylor, Paulist Press, Mahwah, NJ. Bauckham, R. 1987. ‘Theodicy from Karamzov to Moltmann,’ Modern Theology, Vol. 4, no. 1: 83-97. Brown, W. P. 2010. The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Capon, R. F. 1995. The Third Peacock: The Problem of God and Evil in The Romance of the Word, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. Corey, M. A. 2000. Evolution and the Problem of Natural Evil, University Press of America, Lantham. Creegan, N. H. 2013. Animal Suffering & The Problem of Evil, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Griffin, D. R. 1981. ‘Creation Out of Chaos and the Problem of Evil’ in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed. S. T. Davis. T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 101-136. Griffiths, P. J. 2013. ‘Impossible Pluralism’, First Things, 44-48.

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Haught, J. F. 2000. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, Westview, Boulder, CO. —. 2005. ‘The Boyle Lecture 2003: Darwin, Design and the Promise of Nature’, Science and Christian Belief, vol.17: 5-20. Lloyd, M. 1998. ‘Are Animals Fallen?’ in Animals on the Agenda, ed. A Linzey & D Yamamoto. SCM, London: 147-160 May, G. 1994. Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, T & T Clark, London. McDaniel, J. B. 1989. Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life, Westminster John Knox, Louisville, KY. Moltmann, J. 1993. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl, Fortress Press, Minneapolis. Murphy, N. 2007. ‘Science and the Problem of Evil: Suffering as a ByProduct of a Finely Turned Cosmos’ in Physics and Cosmology: Scientific Perspectives on the Problem of Natural Evil, eds N Murphy, RJ Russell & WR Stoeger, Vatican Observatory Foundation, Vatican: 131-151. Murray, M. J. 2008. Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Oord, T.J. 2009. ‘An Open Theology Doctrine of Creation and Solution to the Problem of Evil’ in Creation Made Free: Open Theism Engaging Science, Wipf & Stock, Eugene: 28-52. Page, R. 1996. God and the Web of Creation, SCM Press, London. Peacocke, A. 1979. Creation and the World of Science: The Bampton Lectures, 1978, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Peacocke, A. 2001. ‘The Cost of a New Life’ in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. J Polkinghorne, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids: 2142. Peters, T. & Hewlett, M. 2003. Evolution from Creation to New Creation: Conflict, Conversation, and Convergence, Abingdon Press, Nashville. Polkinghorne, J. C. 1989. Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World, Templeton Foundation Press, Philadelphia. Russell, R. J. 2007. ‘Physics, Cosmology, and the Challenges to Consequentialist Natural Theodicy’ in Physics and Cosmology: Scientific Perspectives on the Problem of Natural Evil, eds N Murphy, RJ Russell & WR Stoeger, Vatican Observatory Foundation, Vatican: 109-130. Southgate, C. 2008. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville. Stump, E. 2010. Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Vanstone, W.H. 1977. Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, GB, Darton, Longman & Todd. Wildman, W. J. 2007. ‘Incongruous Goodness, Perilous Beauty, Disconcerting Truth: Ultimate Reality and Suffering In Nature’ in Physics and Cosmology: Scientific Perspectives on the Problem of Natural Evil, eds. N. Murphy, R. J. Russell & W. R. Stoeger, Vatican Observatory Foundation, Vatican: 267-294.

CHAPTER SIX ISAAC MAYER WISE, COSMIC EVOLUTION, AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL DANIEL R. LANGTON

Introduction The question of God’s action or inaction arises in a variety of theological contexts, such as the problem of evil, or natural theology, or God’s providential will in human history. But in contrast to Christians, Jews have not been interested in either natural theology or even the problem of evil, relatively speaking. Traditional Judaism is famously disinterested in theology per se. Nor have Jewish religious thinkers been much interested in evolution, as Geoffrey Cantor and others have shown; in the main, Jews in the century or so since Darwin have been concerned with other more pressing issues, such as assimilation, anti-Semitism, and Zionism (Cantor and Swetlitz 2006). Elsewhere I have discussed two American-Jewish thinkers, namely, Mordecai Kaplan and Hans Jonas, who bucked this general trend and who wrote substantial theological works on evolution that also attempted to address the problem of evil (Langton 2013). That they were able to offer such theologies can be explained at least partly by their reformist, or revisionist orientations. In the present essay we will focus on another non-Orthodox American Jew, who, writing many decades earlier, prepared the conceptual ground for them. For Isaac Mayer Wise, too, engagement with scientific evolutionary theory led to a reconsideration of the problem of suffering in nature and in history––and to redefinitions of both the Jewish God and of the nature of divine action. The North American Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900) was born in Bohemia, part of the Austrian empire, and received a traditional education in Prague. He emigrated to the US in 1846 aged 27, where he became a congregational rabbi, eventually settling down in

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Cincinnati. He has been described as the father of Reform Judaism in the United States and it is certainly the case that he was in the vanguard of synagogue reform, introducing among other things mixed pews, choral singing and confirmation; he founded in 1854 and edited the English language journal The Israelite, which became the leading organ for Reform Judaism; he compiled the standard Reform prayer book, Minhag America in 1857; and he was behind the establishment in 1875 of the Reform Jewish rabbinical training college, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. It was in Cincinnati in the autumn and winter of 1874-5 that Wise gave a series of public lectures, excerpts of which were published in The Israelite and also in Cincinnati daily papers including The Enquirer, which a year later were published as the book The Cosmic God: A Fundamental Philosophy in Popular Lectures (1876). Cherry has suggested that “Cosmic God lacks a strong Jewish flavour, at least in comparison to the European Jewish responses to Darwin from this period” (Cherry 2001, 163). And while it is true that that Wise frequently cites the Bible, he rarely mentions the rabbinic literature or articulates what could be regarded as a Jewish position, as such. However, as we shall see, it is possible to trace the influence of Jewish mysticism in some of his ideas, or at least in the language he used to present them. Throughout his life, Wise was concerned to encourage the integration of his congregants with the non-Jewish world around them, to reassure them that in the New World there was no need to perpetuate the Old World fears of Christianity. It is not surprising, then, to see him engaging with Darwin’s ideas, and, although he was very much concerned about the implications of Darwinism, his approach was to offer an alternative evolutionary theory that would avoid their unpleasant consequences for theology, rather than to censor them. His style was formal, dense, quite technical, occasionally bombastic, and very wide-ranging, drawing heavily upon German idealism, biological science, history (both Jewish and profane), and biblical literature for countless examples to illustrate his philosophical points. For the most part, Wise offered a reasonable treatment of the scientific literature although there was, as we shall see, a tendency to argue from gaps in contemporary knowledge in order to find a space for his Cosmic God. Wise’s is one of the earliest Jewish critiques of evolutionary theory. That makes it all the more remarkable that his book represents one of the most substantial treatments of the subject, one that is both a protest against materialistic Darwinian theory, but also a very deliberate attempt to provide an alternative theory for his Jewish congregation.

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Critique of evolutionary theory Wise was not only one of the earliest Jewish respondents to biological evolutionary theory, but probably one of the best informed, as is clear from the systematic critiques he generated. Darwin’s was the most prominent of several competing theories that he considered and rejected for a variety of reasons. The barrage of criticism he proffered against Darwinism proper fell into three categories: a marshalling of contemporary scientific criticism of the theory, a socio-political argument against its practical consequences for societal morality, and a sustained philosophical critique of its materialist foundations. Wise’s scientific concerns, the first category of complaints, reflected well on his understanding of the contemporary scientific literature. He complained of five problematic hypotheses of Darwinism, “none of which is supported by facts, and all of which must continually co-operate to produce new species.” These included the apparently inexplicable emergence of life (the hypothesis of “unknown creation of the first type”); the incredible variability of organisms and their ability to adapt themselves to “all changes of conditions” (the hypothesis of “unlimited variability”);1 the central idea of natural selection that the failure of some organisms to compete successfully against others would result in their destruction or stagnation (the hypothesis of “the combat of existence”); the inheritability of beneficial adaptations (the hypothesis of “descendency”); and the way in which an adaptation of one or more organs would result in changes and re-adjustments to ensure harmonious function of the whole organism (the hypothesis of “the law of correlation”).2 (Wise 1876, 108-109) Other scientifically-grounded complaints include the lack of evidence of evolution or transmutation in the historical record covering several millennia, in the existing fossil record, and in the study of embryonic development.3 (Wise 1876, 111-112) He also denied that scientific

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Wise takes Baumgarten’s germ-theory of evolution, which viewed ‘periodical metamorphosis of germs [or embryos]’ as the mechanism for transmutation, as problematic in a similar way. As in the case of Darwinian theory, Wise argued that it failed to make the case that a mechanism that generated variation within a species could likewise cause speciation as such. 2 Wise refers to a number of scientists in support of his criticism, noting ‘Every one of those hypotheses… has been refuted by Naegeli, Baumgartner, Wigand, Lange, Von Hartman and others’. 3 Wise drew upon a range of scholars and scientists, including Cuvier and Agassiz, who argued that ‘within the bounds of human knowledge of historic and prehistoric ages, no change of type or species has been noticed.’ The evidence of

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observation confirmed claims that nature’s bounty was so limited as to provoke a “war of nature”, or that there had been a common human ancestor of bestial origins. (Here Wise reveals the common contemporary mistake in regarding Darwinian theory, when applied to the human race, in purely hierarchical, progressive terms. Thus he calls on the Darwinists to “render it plausible that the monkey changed into an Ethiopian, the Ethiopian into a Mongolian, and he into a Caucasian.” To counter such an idea Wise dedicates a full chapter to the differing anatomy of apes and men, and another to the distinct psychology of animals and humans.) (Wise 1876, 50, 52-53) Such arguments would have been familiar to anyone engaged in the scientific debates at that time. The secondary category, namely, the socio-political critique of evolutionary theory, has been viewed by some commentators as the motivation for Wise’s entire study. As Cherry sees it, it was the mechanistic assault on dignity and sanctity of humanity that was the prime motivating factor in rejecting Darwinism (Cherry 2001, 159). Wise certainly believed that mechanical forms of transmutation of species reduced the human to an ape, a hypothesis which he scorned with the label Homo-brutalism: Some men of learning and genius like Messrs. Vogt, Haeckel, Moleschott, Huxley, Darwin, Buechner and others, have imposed a hypothesis on science, which reduces man, on the scale of organic beings, to an ape, casually and mechanically improved, or some similar animal, no longer extant as a living organism or dead fossil, i.e. an imagined animal, one constructed by phantasy on the strength of induction, legitimate, or illegitimate, is supposed to have been the ancestor of man, and several kinds of apes. The monkeys not having improved themselves from casual and mechanical causes unknown, are still irredeemable monkeys. Some of them, however, having casually and mechanically gone through a series of improvements and changes, then by laws of inheritance and correlation have become human beings, and with them the history of mankind begins.

 both living and fossilized lifeforms failed to persuade, ‘Not mere fissures but gaps which, can not be bridged over, separate the [world’s living] species in numerous instances… The same precisely is the case with the fossils…. for there also the transition forms are missing, and no trace of genetic unity is left.’ The evidence of embryos was unconvincing because while ‘it is maintained that the embryo runs through all phases of organisms as it ancestors did in their natural development from species to species’ there was no reason to make the logical jump to suggest that ‘this ideal semblance of those various stages to certain animals [should be] converted into a proof, that the higher organism must have evolved from those lower organisms’.

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Permit me to call this main hypothesis Homo-Brutalism, as it has hitherto been given no name at all. (Wise 1876, 47) .

Wise’s condemnation of what he regards as the theory’s hostility to the hard-won Enlightenment values of “inalienable and inborn rights, equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, even accounting for the theory’s popularity in Europe in that (“because it props up the aristocracy”), would have resonated well with his North American audience. What was on offer was the ammoral, even immoral, vision of social Darwinism: In a moral point of view the Darwinian hypothesis on the descent of man is the most pernicious that could he possibly advanced, not only because it robs man of his dignity and the consciousness of pre-eminence, which is the coffin to all virtue, but chiefly because it presents all nature as a battleground, a perpetual warfare of each against all in the combat for existence, and represents the victors as those worthy of existence, and the vanquished ripe for destruction. So might is right, the cardinal sin is to be the weekest [sic] party. If this is nature’s law, and man is an improved beast, then war to the knife, perpetual war of each against all, is also human law, and peace in any shape is illegitimate and unnatural. Therefore in all cases of expulsion, assassination or slaughter, among individuals or nations, the vanquished party was doomed in advance, by a law of nature; and the victors having enforced the laws of nature are neither culpable nor responsible for their deeds. (Wise 1876, 51)

The third category of complaint included a set of profoundly misguided and mistaken philosophical assumptions, which, crucially, Wise perceived as underlying both the scientific and the socio-political errors. He therefore spent most of his critical attention in the book upon the materialistic assumptions that underlay Darwinian theory. In this context, for example, he mockingly accounts for the theory’s heavy reliance upon chance or “blind irrational Fate” in terms of the materialist urge to usurp God (Wise 1876, 50). He explains the current failure to explain how discrete evolutionary improvements in an organism’s physiology could harmonize with the rest of the organism in terms of the refusal to acknowledge a psychical rather than a mechanistic cause (Wise 1876, 113). And he denies that sexual selection, which he regards as a matter of will or choice, can be reconciled with mechanistic assumptions that characterise Darwinism (Wise 1876, 113, 117). Darwinism could only be saved, he suggested, once the purely mechanistic and materialist assumptions of many of its proponents were abandoned. If one focused upon Darwin’s theory of sexual selection or his Lamarckian-influenced

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conception of acquired characteristics through force of will, then the centrality in life of the mental, of the idea, of the will, would be obvious. He argued, [W]ith Mr. Darwin the origin of species depends entirely on the presence of will in every individual of the two kingdoms of organisms. The ornaments and improved songs of the male bird, for instance, are purposely acquired to please and captivate the attention of the female; which demonstrates will. Prehensile organs and defensive appendages grow out of the animal’s body, according to Darwinism, by the repeated exertions of the animal’s will. In fact, the whole system of Darwinian evolution is based upon the principle of teleology, carried into every detail or organism, always tacitly postulating the presence of active will in every organic individual. If we could accept Darwinism as an established fact, teleology and the existence of will would be proved eo ipso [by the thing itself]. Therefore if the Darwinists subscribe not to Schopenhauer’s dogma – i.e., will is the world’s substance – they must anyhow admit its inherent and permanent existence in every organic being. (Wise 1876, 129)

Overview of the Cosmic God and Evolution In basic terms, Wise offered a Jewish-panentheistic form of the vital force theory of evolution. As an idealist, he believed that the universal or fundamental substance was non-material or “psychical”. Ultimately, matter could only be held together by something he called at different times the “central force” or “active force” or “vital force”. He understood this vital force to be a function of an intelligent divine will. As such, the act of creation was, in effect, the divine assertion of this force so as to counteract matter’s tendency to dissolve or separate. This had implications for Wise’s biological theory, which rested on what he called the two “fundamental laws of creation”, namely, differentiation and evolution. As he explained: “Differentiation signifies the individuation of beings from and by the universal substance; and evolution in this connection signifies the systematic and rising succession of organisms from the lowest to the highest in the process of individuation.” (Wise 1876, 114) Thus the story of life was the story of the emergence of a hierarchical order of stable living forms from dead matter, achieved by the work of the divine vital force, which had eventually culminated in the self-conscious, moral beings known as men. The God that Wise had in mind was, to a degree, to be identified with both vital force and with nature itself, although God was also greater than these (Wise 1876, 163). In this way, his panentheistic Cosmic God offered an alternative theory to Darwinism in that it was a

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theory of the transmutation of species with a teleology defined in terms of divine action. According to Wise, vital force worked as a kind of organising or coordinating principle for all other forces working within and upon an organism. Through the process of differentiation, it generates individual organisms within individual, stable species. He wrote: Evidently we have before us in every living organism a force which governs the others for this specific purpose. Every constant relation of elements or bodies to one another, points to an overruling force in action for this specific purpose. In the organic kingdoms, the immense variety of elementary relations to form and, sustain here a tree, there a shrub, here an herb and there a blade of grass, here a mollusk, there a radiate or articulate, here a reptile, fish, bird, or mammal, and there a man, all made up of the same elements, governed by the same forces, necessitates us to adopt an overruling force which subjects matter and force, in order to assume this shape and no other, to be so large at its birth and grow so far and no farther, have this form, surface and color and, no other, develop and live so long and no longer. All these limitations and modifications point to a special force at work which we call vital force. This vital force bears no similarity to the other natural forces, to electricity, light, heat, sound, or mechanical motion… Every plant and every animal develops its arch type with a certain degree of freedom and variability, which must be the effect of a cause not at work in the inorganic world, for which we have no better name than vital force. (Wise 1876, 94-95)

In fact Wise did have a better name for this phenomenon, namely: God. It is the fact that he could see the same teleological, ordering force at work in geology, biology and human history that convinced him that he was dealing with a truly cosmic force. And having established that divine action affected the cosmos, Wise was also clear about that purpose and where it is headed: from dead matter to life, and from unconscious to conscious life, and from conscious to self-conscious life. For Wise, evolution represented the account of how the divine vital force animates and awakens matter, and then guides organic life along the inevitable path that will lead to man, that is, to the self-conscious individual capable of free moral judgment; and at this moment, the psychical cosmic force is seen to have liberated itself from its material constraints (Wise 1876, 114). This account resonates with another scholarly interest of Wise’s, namely Jewish mysticism. In Lurianic Kabbalism, a fragmented and broken godhead is dispersed throughout creation. The divine sparks animate the creaturely vessels or kelipot in which they find themselves and remain there until a mystical reunion takes place, when the godhead is restored to

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itself. Likewise, he suggested, the divine vital force, which is woven throughout the natural world, but not of it, overcomes and metamorphozes matter gradually and systematically prepares organic buds on the tree of life, unfolds them to blossoms of consciousness, and ripens them to fruits of self-consciousness. Conscious centers are produced by the same force which created the material substance, preserves and governs it, and individuates itself therein. It is the psychical force becoming itself again. It is its victory over matter. (Wise 1876, 171)

Thus Wise saw mankind as the culmination of the long history of the work of vital force, and, as such, the culmination of the evolutionary process. All of evolution “centers on man”, and all evolutionary developments had been perfected in him––Wise makes a brief aside here to point out that Jewish authorities were wrong to think of winged angels as superior: “When the fathers imagined a higher order of beings, viz.: the angels with wings, because man is debarred of these organs of the bird, they did not take into consideration that human hands controlled by human mind are far superior to wings” (Wise 1876, 116). In Wise’s imaginative reworking of the six days of creation, during which the divine vital force transformed dead matter to living matter, to conscious animals, and finally to selfconscious, moral humans, the seventh day marked an important transition. In his own account of the creation myth, there were seven stages that correlated with the seven days of the Genesis account.4 These he described as (i) an almighty impulse that compressed and united the elementary particles to generate (ii) a radiating fireball looked like the sun, which slew off material that became the planet earth. This cooled down and was covered with liquid water, allowing (iii) the emergence of organic life. In time, primitive life evolved to become (iv) conscious animals. With this stage, it was possible to say that “the force captivated in matter attempts its liberation, after it had overcome inert matter to the extent that organic formation had become possible.” (v) The earth fell into its proper orbit, and the gloomy carbon atmosphere cleared to reveal the celestial lights. It was now covered with rich vegetation, its land and ocean populated with

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Wise does not attempt to match up exactly his seven stages to the seven days of biblical creation, but the parallels are clear. According to Genesis 1, God created light on the first day, divided the water from the waters on the second day, generated vegetation on the third day, revealed the celestial lights on the fourth day, generated animal life in the water and air on the fifth day, generated animal life on the land, including man, on the sixth day, and rested on the seventh day.

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radiates, mollusks, and articulates, fishes, amphibians, and birds. One might say that “[t]he primary force materialized in the earth is reunited with the cosmic light.” (vi) “Constant types” or fixed species were now established, and mammals emerged, eventually including self-conscious humans. With this, “The primary force becomes self-conscious itself again, in the self-conscious man.” (vii) Human history began. And with human history, the work of the divine vital force can, in a sense, rest, because humans take over and continue its work. It is the Creator’s Sabbath. The work of liberation from matter and the triumph over it, begins in man, by him, and for him. He works on to accomplish the subjugation of matter, the resurrection of self-conscious spirit, the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of selfconscious intelligence over blind and inexorable powers of darkness; of freedom, love, and happiness over cold and barren necessity. This is the creation of history, the progress of the primary force to self-conscious existence in the human family… (Wise 1876, 161)

History, the Will, and the Problem of Evil and Suffering The Cosmic God posited by Wise is not the God of Jewish tradition, nor quite the first cause of the philosophers. It represents rather a kind of Jewish panentheistic god, worked out in both natural and human history, although the Jewish element is usually played down. One of the key problems in presenting a theistic evolutionary theory, however, is the problem of evil, that is, accounting for the wastage and suffering that evolution appears to entail. Here it is possible to trace the influence of Jewish thought on Wise in relation to Jewish mystical concepts once again. In this case, Wise appears to draw upon the Luranic kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum, that is, the idea that in creating the world, God withdrew or contracted Godself so as to make the space for the world, which is other from Godself. In kabbalism, this contraction functions to produce a conceptual space in which freewill is possible and which accounts for the hidden nature of God. For Wise, divine contraction is likewise part of the fabric of the universe, although its function is different in that, when complemented by expansion, it acts as a signature for the action of vital force in biology and history. The contraction or compression, we have noticed as the continuous activity of the primary [vital] force, of the impulse imparted originally to inert matter. Expansion, is the inherent tendency of matter, to dissolve into its primary elements, to fall apart and become cosmic… We observe the

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But if biology and history are both guided by the vital force, and if, at some level, the vital force is to be identified with the divine, then how does one reconcile what we know about God’s goodness with what we know about the enormous suffering in nature and in human history, both of which Wise indexes at considerable length? (Wise 1876, 121, 142-143) Before seeing how Wise approaches the problem of evil in these two contexts it will be useful to look a little more closely at the way he understands the relation between biology and history. The first thing to say is that Wise sees biology and history as different stages of creation. As he puts it, “With man’s appearance on earth, physical creation closed and mental creation began; the pedestal was finished and the statuary was placed upon it.” (Wise 1876, 159) We have already considered the idea of teleology in biology, and hinted that Wise sees the same developmental force at work in history. This force worked at overcoming the material tendency towards dissolution and break-down, although in this context Wise initially gave it another name: the Logos of History. The law of history is progressive, and man not only remains in quality always the same, but the vast majority is conservative and opposed to every progressive step.––Yet history preserves all that is good, true, and useful, continually increases its stock, spreads, utilizes and promulgates it, contrary to the will of the masses, and in spite of all egotism and prevailing stupidity… And yet no man schemes it, none does it with forethought and conscious design, it is all, contrary to human will and prediction, still done by human agency. Who designs this grand and marvelous drama of history, chooses the actors, shifts the scenes and conducts its execution, if man does not do, not will, not contemplate it? There is but one answer to which reason is necessitated; and this is the Logos of History does it in its invisible, silent and ever efficient power, and this Logos of History is not only extra-human, it is super-human, because it designs shapes, and puts

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into execution the destinies of all men and all generations, it presides over man, and all must submit to its laws. And now human reason turns upon gross materialism and says: “Here is teleology in history, to deny it is madness. Here is end, aim, design, purpose, and proper execution, not by one or all men, but independent of all.”––There must be will and intellect extra-human, superhuman, universal and bound to no organism. It is identical in its laws with the extra-organic will and intellect, in nature, hence both, are one and the same spiritual force. All your construction of atoms and atomic forces will positively not account for the existence of one sensation, much less for the grand drama of history; and the last resort, after all, is the existence of an extra-mundane spirit, as far as matter is concerned, which is no more unknowable than force or matter. (Wise 1876, 94-95)

Having established that, from the perspective of the divine vital force, history is simply an extension of biology into the human realm, it is remarkable, then, that Wise does not regard the problem of evil or suffering as analogous in the two contexts. In the first case, that of suffering and waste of life in nature, he does hazard a kind of greater-good rationale, namely, that death was a necessary part of the lengthy process of evolution. As Wise saw it. Every plant or animal that dies adds to the bulk of organic matter, and renders higher conditions of organism possible. Therefore after a sufficient bulk of animal matter had been laid up in the household of nature, and vital force, as the formal principle, had advanced to the organization of the perfect cell, that force could now bring forth everywhere, as the state of the ocean, land and atmosphere admitted, organisms adapted to each age and condition of the earth and its various parts. (Wise 1876, 115)

But his preferred approach was to argue fiercely for a reconsideration of an antiquated, anthropomorphic conception of the God of the Bible and Jewish tradition (Wise 1876, 121). This was entirely in keeping with Wise’s place as one of the founding fathers of US Reform Judaism, although his particular conception of the Cosmic God, whose ways are truly not our ways, was by no means a classic illustration of Reform Jewish theology and had little direct influence on his congregation or students. On the other hand, when it came to explaining evil and suffering in human history (and for this he included examples from biblical history and the modern histories of Germany, France, and the USA), Wise suggests

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that suffering on a national, although not an individual, scale may well be the result of the Logos rewarding morality and punishing immorality: It is not as clearly manifested in the life of the individual, and may not be enforced as rigidly; but nations, history and consciousness agree, live, grow, and flourish on their virtues; suffer, decline, or perish of their vices, and all that by agencies perfectly natural, though controlled by superhuman causes. (Wise 1876, 141)

In this way, Wise could have his cake and eat it. The awful loss of life and suffering that characterized the natural world and the historical lives of many individual humans pointed to the need for a reformed Judaism with a radically revised conception of God, which was the only way to escape the traditional paradox of a good God creating a world filled with evil. At the same time, this waste of life in the natural world and the suffering of nations could both be used to support the idea of a moral deity. After all, death on a massive scale was an inevitable part of the evolutionary process which had led to the greater-good of a being capable of free moral choice, and the fates of nations pointed to a just God of History who appeared to reward and punish them according to an recognizable standard of morality. Apparently, Wise did not see this tension in his treatment of the problem of evil.

An Alternative to Science and Religion: A New Philosophy? Wise was profoundly influenced by German idealism, although he preferred to call himself an adherent of “spiritualism”. As he saw it, In materialism, matter is the substance, and the forces inherent in matter create, preserve and govern all which is in this universe mechanically and automatically. In spiritualism, spirit or mind is the substance, and the forces which create, preserve and govern all things in this universe, are manifestations of the will of that spirit, mind or intelligence. (Wise 1876, 71)

He insisted that one should not confuse the materialistic method of natural sciences, which was laudable, with materialism as a philosophy, which was not. As such, his book is as much a polemical critique of materialism as it is an exploration of theistic evolutionary theory. He focuses the worst of his ire on the inadequacy of materialists to account for thought and selfconsciousness (Wise 1876, 12, 13, 22), and to solve the mind-body

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problem (Wise 1876, 24). Of course, Darwin’s attempt in The Descent of Man “to place man into the background of all animals” was an illustrative example of widespread influence of “the school of modern materialism” (Wise 1876, 83). Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Wise suggests that his work was “a fundamental philosophy, from which the various philosophical disciplines can be derived”. Keenly aware that he was writing at a time of conflict between science and religion, he believed that he offered a corrective to both materialistic science and naive theology, arguing that it would only be when the discrepancies between the sensual (which formed the basis of materialistic science) and the mental (by which he meant both philosophy and theology) were resolved, that truthful knowledge could be attained (Wise 1876, 5, 14). His was convinced that the truth of reality was to be sought, and could be uncovered, in the reconciliation of different approaches. Harmony in the elements of our knowledge is the criterion for truth… As long as science and philosophy contradict one another in any point or points, their disharmony proves inaccuracy or incompleteness of cognition on the one side or the other, and the necessity of correction. Their harmony is the only criterion of truth in our possession. (Wise 1876, 10, 14)

Specifically, Wise’s philosophy offered a new conception of God, which “is not the God of vulgar theology nor is it the God of Spinoza or Locke”, that is, it was not the God of Jewish tradition, nor of pantheism, nor of the first cause. In contrast, he believed that his argument for what he calls the Cosmic God had the power to undermine the inroads of atheism unlike previous attempts to philosophize God. At the heart of his theory, as has been noted already, is a panentheistic conception of the divine as an eternal cosmic animating or ordering force, which interpenetrates every part of nature even as it extends beyond it. The universe, with the exception of matter, which is a very small fraction thereof, appearing to me synonymous with Deity so that the present volume is in the main a new evidence of the existence of Deity, I have called it The Cosmic God, in whom and by whom there is the one grand harmonious system of things, in whom and by whom nature is a cosmos and no chaos. (Wise 1876, 6)

What he achieved was less systematic or persuasive than he had hoped. But Wise is important to us as one of the earliest Jewish interlocutors with Darwinism, and because he established a precedent for later Jewish

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thinkers to use evolutionary theory as the basis by which to explain suffering. In particular, Mordecai Kaplan’s Jewish process theology would develop more rigorously the idea of God as an impersonal force shaping nature, and Hans Jonas’ would attempt to harmonise scientific knowledge of biology with kabbalistic interpretations of God’s activity in accounting for free-will. Arguably, such panentheistic approaches are the distinctive contribution of Judaism to the creation-evolution debate. Furthermore, and of much greater significance for Jewish thought, it would not be going too far to say that Kaplan and Jonas would both apply Wise’s idea of a Cosmic God to that ultimate expression of Jewish suffering, the Holocaust (Langton 2013).

Conclusion For the pioneering Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, God was to be identified with, but not limited to, both the natural world and the vital force that ordered it. This vital force pushed in the direction of the evolution of self-conscious, ethical beings who would become partners with God. In practice, human partnership with God was achieved by ensuring ongoing moral progress in the realm of history and the unfolding story of civilization, thereby complementing divine vital force’s work in the biological realm. Wise’s panentheistic Cosmic God represented a radical revision of Jewish tradition away from an anthropological image of God who acted in history, towards a divine process or principle that actively governed nature but which was expressed in history through human agency. When it comes to the problem of evil, Wise’s approach was unorthodox, even incoherent, for he attempts to account for suffering in nature and in history in such a way as to retain a sense of divine morality, even if that God is to be described in terms of a non-personal process. God was presented both as (a) an impersonal force that ordered the cosmos, and in this way escaped moral judgment, and (b) as a moral entity whose integrity could be defended if one took into account the greater good of the emergence of moral beings which was only possible through the suffering and wastage of evolution, and if one recognized historically the punishment of wicked nations for their crimes and misdemeanours. Finally, it is worth noting that Wise was convinced that the religionscience debate had left Jewish tradition and its ethical teachings enriched by the insights offered from evolutionary theory and that new ways had to be found to express the relationship between theology and science. For the author of The Cosmic God, this reconciliation of the best of both worlds is

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best achieved, in practice, by stripping science of what he saw as its materialist tendency to ignore teleology, and by removing much of anthropological imagery of Jewish tradition and theology.

Bibliography Cantor, G. N. & Sweltlitz, M. 2006. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Cherry, M. S. 2001. Creation, Evolution and Jewish Thought. PhD Doctoral thesis, Brandeis University. Langton, D. R. 2013. ‘Jewish Religious Thought, The Holocaust, and Darwinism: A Comparison of Hans Jonas and Mordecai Kaplan’ Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism, 13: 311-348. Wise, I. M. 1876. The Cosmic God: A Fundamental Philosophy in Popular Lectures, Cincinnati, Office American Israelite and Deborah.

CHAPTER SEVEN ENERGY: A SIGN OF DIVINE ACTION IN THE WORLD? BERTRAND SOUCHARD

The word “energy” is widely used today not only in science (physics and biology), but also in alternative medicine, psychology, ecological challenges, and new age ideas. Energy seems to refer to an activity within matter, but also something more spiritual in the world or in the mind. I have two questions: 1-Why is this word energy, invented by Aristotle, used by Christian theology and contemporary physics? Why is the same word used by philosophy, theology and science if there is no correlation between them? 2-If the Christian theology of creation is to express the transcendence of God and also God’s immanence, could an analysis of the concept of energy help us to understand the divine action in the world? I will try to give a brief answer to these two questions. 1- Prior to Aristotle, the word “energeia” did not exist. Energeia appears 671 times in his books, and with derivations of the word 751 (entelecheia 138 times). We forget that energeia is the origin of the word energy, because the translation in Latin was actus, acte in French, and act in English. The understanding of dunamis and energeia is the centre of Aristotle’s thought. Some definitions of Aristotle we know very well but with the translation into act, we forget energeia. Another translation sheds a different light on the concept. It is certainly strange to hear these new words, energeia and entelecheia. Entelecheia has in fact disappeared,

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perhaps because it was too strange but energeia has stayed with a long history. We begin with two famous definitions; of motion in the Physics, and soul in De Anima. And we make no distinction between energeia and entelecheia. “The fulfillment (entelecheia) of what exists potentially, in so far as it exists potentially, is motion.” (Physics, III, 1, 201 b 4-5) “Motion is a dynamic energy in so far as it is dynamic.” “The soul is the actuality (entelecheia) of a natural body having life potentially within it.” (On the Soul, II, 1, 412 a 19-22) “The soul is the energy of a natural body having the desire for life.” We continue with the Good or happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics and God in the Metaphysics. “The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul (psukês energeia) in conformity with virtue.” (Nicomachean Ethics, I, 6, 1098 a 16-17) It becomes: “The Good of man is a psychic and excellent energy.” (I, 6) “There is something which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality (energeia ousa).” (Metaphysics, XII, 7, 1072 a 2526) “There is something which moves without being moved, an eternal and energetic being.” We find energeia also in the Bible, four times in the book of Wisdom, which belongs to the Greek Bible. “He it was who gave me sure knowledge of what exists, to understand the structure of the world and the energy of the elements (geneseôs arkên)” (7:17). “For she is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God's energy (tês tou theou energeias), and image of his goodness.” (7:26) “And if they have been impressed by their power and energy (dunanim kai energeian), let them deduce from these how much mightier is he that has formed them since through the grandeur and beauty of the creatures we may, by analogy, contemplate their Author” (13:5). We have the unity of act and potency, which is very Aristotelian. Between the physical energy of elements (7:17) and divine energy (7:26) we have the energy of being. And God is reached by the analogy. With Paul, energeia appears eight times and the verb energeo, twentyone. Energy belongs to the body (Ephesians 4:15-16, Philippians 3:20-21). Energy is the resurrection (Ephesians 1:18, Matthew 14:1-2, Mark 6:14) and divine grace (Ephesians 3:7): “There is variety of gifts but always the same spirit … energizing (energematon) in all sorts of different ways … it is the same God who energize (energon) in all of them” (Galatians 2:8; Ephesians 1:11-12). Energy can be a common activity both divine and human (Colossians 1:29): “It is for this I struggle wearily on, helped only

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by his power (dunamin) energizing (energeia) me irresistibly” (c.f. Colossians 2:12, 1 Corinthians 16:9, 2 Corinthians 1:6, 2 Corinthians 4:12). “Does God give you the Spirit so freely and energizing the powers (energon dunameis) among you because you practice the Law, or because you believed what was preached to you?” (Galatians 3:5 c.f. Galatians 5:6, Ephesians 4:20). “It is God, for his own loving purpose, who is energizing (energon) the will and the energy (energein) into you” (Philippians 2:13 c.f. Philemon 6, James 5:16). The word of God is also energetic (1 Thessalonians 2:13, Hebrews 4:12). Energy, however, can come from Satan and be against God (2 Thessalonians 2:7 and 9-11, Romans, 7:5 Ephesians 2:2). In 680-681CE we have the third Council of Constantinople about monoenergism. “We glorify two natural energies, without division, without changing, without sharing, without confusion, in our Lord JesusChrist, our real God, that is to say one divine energy and one human energy” … “We will not say that there is only one natural energy of God and of creature for fear of raising the created to the divine substance and to lower the sublimity of the divine nature to the level of generated being.” With these two sentences, we see a relation between the question of incarnation and the question of creation. To avoid pantheism, do we have to distinguish two energies in Christ? The word “Energy” is very important for Maximus the Confessor. There is also a discussion between Catholics and Orthodox Christian about divine energy with Gregory Palamas. I just mentioned this in passing without going into any details. Energy is not only the central concept for Aristotle and an important word for Christian theology, it is also a common word today which appears in physics. To critique Descartes, Leibniz posited “la force vive,” the life force. This reminds us of the Greek dunamis. The notion of work (ergon in Greek) became important in the 19th century. Today, to explain movement, we have potential energy and kinetic energy. But the word energy really appears in physics with Thomson in the context of thermodynamics, with the first law, the conservation of energy. Force, potentiality, work and energy are translation of Aristotelian words, dunamis, ergon, energeia. If words are signs of concepts, symbols of reality, then these similarities are remarkable, especially, if we remember that these words were used to critique Descartes who critiqued Aristotle. In the 18th century, the word energy appeared to critique the passive matter of Descartes. Some materialists noted the dynamic characteristics of matter, and—as opposed to Cartesian dualism, which posited activity only in God—they preferred to recognize an activity directly within

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matter. The answer could lie somewhere between materialism and dualism. 2- Now I will try to give a brief answer to the second question. If Christian theology of creation is to express the transcendence of God and also God’s immanence, could the analysis of the concept of energy help us to understand divine action in the world? Of course we have to distinguish different levels: scientific, philosophical, theological. The word is not used in the same way. Why, however, do we imply the same word if there is no correlation? Between univocality and equivocality we have analogy. We can go further: To explain the presence of God Thomas Aquinas makes a distinction. The substantial presence of God is the incarnation. Only Christ is really divine and human. Grace is the qualitative presence of God. All human beings can receive this kind of presence. Creation is a relational presence of God. The whole world is supported by this creative presence. But if creation is a relation, it means a presence of God inside the creature, not just an external cause. What is the analogy of relation, quality and substance? If we say that physical energy is the substantial or qualitative presence of God, we express pantheism and not creation. So how can the reality of energy help us to understand that God could be both inside and outside the World? Energeia means in Greek the work inside. Plato saw the relation between the divine world and the visible world as an external imitation. Aristotle is against this idea. He begins his thought from living beings, with internal activity and not from mathematics and a separate intellectualisation. Therefore, he invented the word energeia to express immanent activity. Aristotle is not a materialist, however. Immanent activity presupposes an outside activity, before and after, with an efficient cause and a final cause. “For from the potentially existing the actually existing is always produced by an actually existing thing, e.g. man from man, musician by musician; there is always a first mover, and the mover already exists actually.” (TH, 8, 1049 b 25) Energy comes from another energy. And energy implies finality, which is both inside and outside. He invented entelecheia to express telos within. Perhaps, this leaves us three possibilities. First, if energy is only an immanent activity we are led to materialism. Paul in Athens encountered this: “A few Epicurean and Stoic philosophers argued with him” (Acts 17:18). Sometimes we forget that the difficulties of Paul in Athens did not come from Greek philosophy but from the nature of this philosophy. Plato and Aristotle are closer to Christianity than Epicurus or Stoicism. Epicurus is similar to materialistic scientism and leads to atheism. Stoicism is a

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spiritual materialism leading to pantheism. The second possibility is Platonic dualism. A separate mathematic leads us to a separation between the divine world and our world. The third possibility is between the two others. Because energy is both inside and outside, immanent activity with an external cause and a finality inside and outside, we could express the presence of God inside and outside.

Bibliography Aristotle, La Métaphysique, Ethique à Nicomaque, De l’âme, Paris, Traduction Tricot, Vrin, Multiple réédition. —. 1986. Physique, Paris, Traduction Carteron, Les Belles Lettres. Balmes, Marc. 2003. L’énigme des mathématiques, la mathématisation du réel et la métaphysique, Bern, Peter Lang Publishing, —. 2004. Pour un plein accès à l’acte d’être avec Thomas d’Aquin et Aristote, Réenraciner le De ente et essentia, prolonger la Métaphysique, Paris, L’Harmattan. Bastit, Michel. 2002. Les quatre causes de l’être selon la philosophie première d’Aristote, Louvain-la-Neuve, Peeters. Garrigues, Jean-Miguel. 1976. Maxime le confesseur, la charité avenir de l’homme, Paris, Beauchesne. —. 1974. “L’énergie divine et la grâce chez Maxime le confesseur”, Reuve Istina, vol. 3: 272-296. —. 2003. “La doctrine de la grâce habituelle dans ses sources scripturaires et patristiques” Revue Thomiste vol. 2: 179-202. Ghesquier-Pourcin, Danièle; Guedj, Muriel; Gohau, Gabriel; Paty, Michel. 2010. Energie, science et philosophie au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles, Vol. 1 : L’émergence de l’énergie dans les sciences de la nature, Vol. 2 : Les formes de l’énergétismes et leur influence sur la pensée, Paris, Hermann. Levy, Antoine. 2006. Le créé et l’incréé, Maxime le confesseur et Thomas d’Aquin, Paris, Vrin. Levy-Leblond, Jean-Marc. 2004. De la matière relativiste quantique interactive, Paris, Seuil. Maclaughin, Thomas. 2011. “Act, potency, and energy” The Thomist 75: 207-243. Renczes, Philipp Gabriel. 2003. Agir de Dieu et liberté de l’homme, Recherches sur l’anthropologie théologique de saint Maxime le Confesseur, Paris, Cerf, Cogitation fidei.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE EMERGENCE OF ALTRUISM IN THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANKIND: A KEYNOTE OF A TRINITARIAN GRAND NARRATIVE PETER BARRETT

The question of divine action in the world has been a central topic of science-and-theology discourse over the past twenty-five years, much of it focused on the nature of the mind-brain relationship and the question of divine-human communication. For some writers this interdisciplinary discussion has indicated the need for a creation narrative that places the world-picture of the sciences within a theological framework of understanding––the main aim of what we may call ‘new-style natural theology’, a phrase used in similar vein by John Macquarrie in his notable Principles of Christian Theology (1977, 56-58). Toward this narrative formulation we first consider the succession of increasingly complex entities that have gone into the making of humankind––focusing, in particular, the higher elements of cognition that have enabled the development of religious belief and artistic expression into the sophisticated forms expressed in today’s world on one hand, and the constant human quest for meaning, truth, goodness and beauty on the other. As a way into the higher reaches of human personhood we turn to Sarah Coakley’s natural theology of altruism, as presented in her 2012 Gifford Lectures. This biology-and-theology series emerged from her three-year collaboration at Harvard University with theoretical biologist Martin Nowak. We then link Coakley’s treatment of altruism to a broader new-style natural theology that is aimed at a widely inclusive Trinitarian grand narrative of the creation, seemingly designed for the manifestation of

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goodness and beauty. We take as starting points Niels Henrik Gregersen’s notion of the “deep incarnation” of the Logos of God and John Vernon Taylor’s description of the creativity of the Holy Spirit. On the making of humankind with the capacity for imagination The scientific enterprise shows that we exist within a cosmic supersystem of physical systems which have developed in a multi-levelled evolutionary process. Our knowledge of it all is patchy and there have been major evolutionary changes for which no firm scientific explanations are yet available––particularly the progress from inanimate to animate matter and the first emergence of consciousness. Yet the scientific picture as a whole is extremely impressive in its coherence, level of detail and explanatory power, and it remains continually open to further verification and broadening. At the forefront of the enterprise is the exploration of the make-up and functioning of the human person, with particular emphasis on the nature of the mind/brain relationship. Paleontologists suggest that the emergence of Homo sapiens, at least 160 000 years ago, was marked by a substantial increase in powers of cognition. Steven Mithen (1996) offers a tentative but compelling account of the prehistory of hominid cognition in which the mind/brain evolves from a configuration of three separate modal intelligences (concerned respectively with social, technical and natural-world intelligence) to a state of full “cognitive fluidity” (Mithen 2003). This phrase implies not merely increased complexity but also flexibility and dynamic interaction between the different functions of the brain, thus ultimately making for greatly advanced cognitive performance. Jeremy Law (2007) describes the advance thus: A consequence and catalyst of this process is language and self-reflexive consciousness which escape from their originating function in social intelligence to be the ground for a mind that can examine and integrate thought and knowledge about the natural world, the social world, and technical process. What emerges is the ability to think symbolically.

He refers to the development of cognitive fluidity as a key factor in the cultural “big bang” that occurred about 70,000 years ago in Africa and 40,000 years ago in Europe, as migration from the former impacted culturally on the latter. He adds that this development

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manifested itself in the onset of cave art, musical instruments, new tool technologies, sea-voyaging, body decoration, and elaborate burial of the dead. Religious sensibility, social stratification and symbolic codification are its legacy.

Cognitive finesse thus gave rise to greatly enhanced levels of creativity in tool-making and social organization––also in symbolic representation, especially in language, art, and religious belief and ritual. The progression may be summarized as follows: modal intelligences ĺ cognitive fluidity ĺ capacity for abstract thought and language ĺ cultural and religious development into the sophisticated forms expressed in today’s world. What emerges in this progression is the remarkable skill of creative imagination––that which integrates perception, reason, intuition and emotion, especially in high-level assessment and creativity. This is what most sharply distinguishes human beings from our fellow primates. It comes into play over a wide range of human endeavour––in scientific and religious quests to know and understand, in scientific and artistic creativity, in the development of moral vision and in interpersonal engagement. It is extremely versatile, whether probing a theological precept, scientific problem, literary metaphor or moral dilemma, or functioning in the more passive mode of openness to a leap of insight. Altogether, it is supremely developed for the exercise of moral sensitivity and the tasks of interpersonal understanding and intellectual inquiry––and, indeed, that of formulating a comprehensive story of the world. This raises the question of what is involved in literary and artistic creation at its epistemic roots––how it is that an embodied mind can encounter the mystery of music, art and literature and therein find meaning. How can it begin to deal with the big questions of human existence? Such mental functioning brings into play what scientistphilosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge”––that which is employed in the “tacit skill” of making mental assessments and is the background to all instances of scientific and personal knowing. It is a concept that is strangely neglected by philosophers of science and underplayed in science-and-theology (Polkinghorne 1989, 175). The idea of tacit knowledge is Polanyi’s main insight into the thought processes involved in scientific discovery and in the build-up of personal knowledge in general, through the exercise of not only reason but also intuition and imagination. It is the unconsciously held store of knowledge and understanding that develops through the “conviviality”––the thinking, discussing and working together––within any corporate human activity (Polkinghorne 1994, 47). It acts as the “spectacles behind the eyes” through which the knower “sees” that which is to be known. Often such

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apprehension occurs not by deductive or inductive reasoning but by an intuitive leap of an imagination that has been sympathetically attuned to the subject matter––a leap, as Tom Wright puts it, from the random observation of phenomena to the hypothesis of a pattern (1992, 37), or to artistic insight in the realm of metaphor and symbol, or to theological insight in the quest for knowledge of God. Scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne remarks that understanding in art and literature comes from the power of the work as a whole, through intuitive grasp rather than detailed argument––and intuitive grasp, he adds, requires the exercise of imagination informed by tacit knowledge (1994, 38). Let us then consider the significance of our tacit-knowledge-informed imagination in the sphere of God-human relationships and thence in our quest for a grand narrative of divine creation. In his 1867 essay, “The Imagination: Its Function and its Culture,” the Victorian writer, George MacDonald, claimed that “the imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.” The essay was later included in the collection of his works, A Book of Orts (1907), where it helped John McIntyre formulate his ideas on the place of imagination in religion and theology (McIntyre 1987, 13-15). MacDonald considered creative imagination to be an attribute fully worthy to be placed on any list of God’s attributes and he located the imago Dei concept not in our rationality or moral character but in our imagination. This idea finds support in John Baillie’s comment, “I have long been of the opinion that the part played by the imagination in the soul’s dealings with God … has never been given a proper place in Christian theology, which has been too much ruled by intellectualist preconceptions”––and one reason for its neglect, explains John McIntyre, is that the three Hebrew words for imagination in the Old Testament and the three Greek words used similarly in the New Testament are pejorative, “uniformly implying that imagination is unacceptable to God in all its machinations” (McIntyre 1987, 1, 5). In contrast, we may view imagination as fundamental to every part of our engagement with the world at large and our thinking about God. It enables us to develop a “binocular” view of our entire setting, holding the scientific and theological together in dialectic tension as we seek to understand the purposes of God in the broad sweep of creation. This is both a scientific and a theological quest. On the scientific side cosmologists know that we are inhabitants of a mere speck of a planet within the vastness of cosmic space––that there are, indeed, billions of solar systems out there, in which there may be many advanced civilizations. Other scientists, however, point to the set of very special

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planetary conditions needed for the emergence of highly complex life. This specialness is persuasively argued, for example, by earth scientist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee in their book Rare Earth (2000). Thus, although it is almost certain that a great number of other planets contain some of the simpler forms of life, it is conceivable that very few, if any, are inhabited by complex imagination-bearing beings. What can be said about the question of human uniqueness, we may ask, if the universe is the creation of an omnipotent, all-loving Creator? As Polkinghorne once remarked, if there are fallen races on other planets the Word of God would surely be incarnated in each of them. But let us also note the remarkable response of the former Oxford philosopher, Michael Foster: “I do not believe that the cry of dereliction from the cross could have been uttered more than once in the history of the universe!” We are faced here with the related question whether the Earth’s population of Homo sapiens represents the pinnacle of divine intent in the creation of the universe. It has been fashionable to point to the relative insignificance of humankind in the whole scheme of things as progressively indicated by the claims of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. But this assessment may be viewed as a case of mistaken modesty, arising from a failure to imagine more clearly the profoundly loving nature and purpose of God as creator and the consequent significance of the term “imago Dei”. For example, John Taylor writes: “If God is eternally limitless selfgiving love, then God had to create a universe, seeking some “other” on which that love may be lavished.” He continues: “There will be accidents and casualties by the million every step of the way. Yet with all the risks, its agonies and tragedies, there is no other conceivable environment in which responsive self-giving love, to say nothing of courage, compassion or self-sacrifice, could have evolved” (1992, 196). In any case, a unified and unifying story of this beloved and costly universe seems urgently needed in the Christian church––a grand narrative for the theological education of its members in the first place, but also for the benefit of its engagement in public issues and interfaith discussion. Commenting on the constant human quest to know and understand the world, cognitive scientist Peter Gärdenfors makes the point that this involves perceiving a pattern, and that the human brain is superbly made for this task, whether in the everyday need for explanation or in response to the larger questions of human existence. He adds that narratives are excellent tools for conveying understanding, with myths and stories playing an important role in transmitting knowledge about causal relations (Gärdenfors 2008). The church’s aim must surely be to produce a grand narrative that will contribute to fresh understanding of the world within

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both intra-ecclesial and extra-ecclesial discussion and, indeed, make room for the key eschatological idea––which is drawn from Scripture and is speculative, yet profoundly explanatory––that this unfolding world constitutes the raw material for a ‘new creation’ yet to be realized. With this comprehensive aim in mind, we return to Jeremy Law’s paleontological-theological reflections. He refers to the Trinity as “the highest integrating summary of the Christian intuition concerning the being of God revealed in redemption and creation”––an intuition, he adds, that is expressed in the Irenaean dictum, “the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, through his transcendent love, became what we are, that he might bring us to be even what he himself is” (Against Heresies). Law referred to this human-ward move as a matter of both the Word becoming flesh and flesh becoming the Word: Was it not also necessary for flesh to become (capable of) words––for there to have emerged a creature capable of language, reason, symbolic thought and a relationship beyond the immediately demonstrable world? Is not the enabling ground of the incarnation the evolution of the embodied mind of Homo sapiens?

The human scene was thus set for the incarnation––for what John McIntyre describes as God’s “unexpected and stunningly imaginative way of making his love and forgiveness unmistakably real” (1987, 64). It lies at the heart of Christianity’s distinctive contribution to a theological understanding of the world and is central to our Trinitarian narrative. We may note that in secular form the cosmic story is the focus of an emerging interdisciplinary academic endeavour under the name Big History (see the websites of Metanexus and Wikipedia); it constitutes foundational material in some first-year tertiary-level curricula. Here we seek to enrich that story in terms of the unceasing work of God in the entire process of cosmic and biological evolution, through Word and Spirit, particularly in the development and inspiring of human imagination. For this purpose we turn first to the natural theology of the eminent British theologian, Sarah Coakley, as expressed in her 2012 Gifford Lectures, given at the University of Aberdeen under the title Sacrifice Regained––Evolution, Cooperation and God.

Sarah Coakley’s natural theology of altruism In these Lectures Coakley adopted the traditional natural-theology approach of arguing for the existence of God––through linking current

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thought on the phenomenon of altruism in biological and human evolution on the one hand, and key features of Trinitarian theology on the other. With respect to her theological writing in general, Coakley has been described as “at home with an awesome variety of genres and periods–– analytical philosophy, liberal and postmodern feminist theory, pre-modern and contemporary theologies, art and spiritual practices” (D’Costa 2004). She explains that, like most theologians, her range of intellectual experience has been largely unconnected with the world of the sciences. However, over the last three years of her fifteen-year period at Harvard University (1993-2008) she partnered the Harvard theoretical biologist, Martin Nowak, in a science-theology project entitled “Evolution and the Theology of Cooperation”, describing it as “without doubt the most exciting, mind-changing and transformative intellectual experience of my theological life” (Baker 2012). This meant getting to grips with the underlying thinking in Nowak’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics––a cutting-edge project in which, by means of extensive computer-modelling, he simulates procreationaffecting behavioural choices made by members of a biological group. At its simplest, his main finding is that the choices they make which enhance the procreation prospects of others in the group at the cost of diminishing their own––that is, altruistic behaviour that he names “cooperation” (a word drawn from the mathematical game of Prisoners’ Dilemma)––can bring this benefit not only to near-kin members, as generally assumed by biologists, but ultimately to the group as a whole. This has led him to claim that “cooperation” is always at work alongside the two longestablished drivers of evolutionary change, gene variation and natural selection, as one of its primary architects (Nowak & Highfield 2011). Nowak tends to use the words altruism and cooperation synonymously, whereas Coakley explains that there is a difference: cooperation is a form of working together in an evolutionary population in which one individual pays a cost (in terms of fitness for procreation, whether genetic or cultural fitness) and another gains a benefit; altruism, on the other hand, is a form of often costly cooperation in which an individual is motivated by goodwill or love for another (or others)––it is a subset of cooperation. This claim about cooperation, together with Nowak’s dismissal of the long-accepted mathematical description of kin selection by W D Hamilton, has proved extremely controversial among traditional Darwinists. His critics question the application of such relatively simple modelling to complex real-life dynamics. Yet Nowak enjoys a convincing range of support from some of the experts. And it seems that he has opened up some deep rethinking at the heart of evolutionary theory––a development that is

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comprehensively discussed by a wide-ranging set of writers in Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation (Nowak & Coakley 2013). Whatever the merits of each side of the controversy, Coakley treats Nowak’s cooperation claim as a starting point for an ethically oriented argument for the existence of God––basing it on the occurrence of sacrificial behaviour of the highest ethical order, for which she uses the adjectives “supernormal” or “excessive.” Her task was first to understand and probe Nowak’s project, checking the underlying concepts and presuppositions, then to link it to a theological framework of understanding. Nowak’s main finding, she remarks, is that cooperation is present in consistent, patterned forms throughout the evolutionary spectrum and that without its subtle sustaining presence, evolutionary populations inexorably decline from the long term effect of unremitting competition. In the case of Homo sapiens, however, such cooperation takes effect not only at the level of genetic inheritance but also through the exercise of intentionality, which is assumed to operate freely, not least in the quest for that which is morally praiseworthy––indeed, for that which underlies the moral development of human beings towards the highest levels of personhood. Here she introduces the notion of the “excessive supernormality of the saint-figure” and asks how natural theology is to be reinvented in order to address this singular human phenomenon, particularly as it is manifested in the life of Christ. Her approach is to appeal to the intimations of transcendence that supernormality can evoke––an appeal that is reminiscent of George Steiner’s persuasive claim that intimations of the “real presence” of God are conveyed by great works of art (Steiner 1989). And such intimations, it seems, are conveyed by acts of great self-sacrifice. A key aspect of Coakley’s theological thinking is the practice of “dispossessing” herself to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit––the eighth chapter of Romans being “the starting point and fulcrum” of her currently developing four-volume work of systematic theology. Indeed, she regards the experience of “prayer in the Spirit” as the place at which to begin to reflect on the concept of the Trinity, rather than in philosophical discussion about the divine-human nature of the Son––an approach that marks, for example, the first volume of her systematic theology, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity.’ Developing alongside this project, Coakley’s natural theology is firmly Christological in its discussion of the incarnation. It is also pneumatological in its appeal to the knowing and understanding that

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comes from openness to the Spirit. Indeed, she has commented in a podcast that the aim in her Gifford Lectures was (surprisingly, no doubt) “to reincarnate natural theology in all its Christological and pneumatological glory” (Beck 2012). However, she is in line with Lord Gifford’s guidelines in affirming the imperative, as he expressed it, to “reflect as much on God’s attributes as on God’s existence” ––attributes that must be “felt and acted upon”. For Coakley, the impetus to follow this imperative depends not only on the power of unaided human thought but also on the backing of a spirituality deepened through prayer. Her practice of disciplined silent openness to the Spirit forms a vital part of her theological work, as already mentioned, and in this respect hers is a significant new voice in the science-and-theology debate. Altogether, her contribution to science-and-theology nudges the debate more deeply into the higher moral reaches of human personhood. It complements an earlier expansion of the discourse into theology-scienceand-humanities which occurred by virtue of its turn to the phenomenon of inspiration. For example, the title of the 2011 conference of the Science & Religion Forum (UK) was “Inspiration in Science and Religion.” Before turning to the new-style natural theology of the next section, we note two issues in which Coakley’s neo-Thomist philosophical leanings put her at odds with ideas of leading scientist-theologians, John Polkinghorne and the late Arthur Peacocke: divine action through “primary causality” and the “a-temporality” of divine immanence in the world. With reference to Austin Farrer’s description (following Aquinas) of God’s ‘primary causality’ as the ability “to work omnipotently on, in and through creaturely agencies, without either forcing them or competing with them,” Polkinghorne comments that “this is so mysterious a notion that it effectively removes the question of God’s action from discussion in ordinary human conversation.” Peacocke is similarly critical when he writes that the notion of double agency (primary and secondary) “comes perilously close to the mere assertion of its truth” (Polkinghorne 1996, 31). And with reference to the much discussed question of ‘God and time’, Coakley speaks of God as “much more profoundly intimate to us (and the world) than we are to ourselves––but timelessly so.” Polkinghorne on the other hand envisages God as timeless in character and being, yet temporal in knowing and relating personally to the creation. Like Peacocke he speaks of divine omniscience as knowing all that it is possible to know, which implies not knowing the future in all its contingently unfolding detail––and this is not to be taken as a dent in that omniscience for it may be seen as a greater attribute of God to be both eternal in character and

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temporal in relation to the creation, rather than eternally all-seeing. Besides, the reality of human free-will seems less clear if God sees the creation as a ‘block universe’––all at once. Arguing that that which does not yet exist is not there to be known, even by God, Polkinghorne quotes H P Owen: “Temporal events cannot be known timelessly if they are to be known as they really are,” and he affirms Peacocke’s striking phrase about God at work within nature’s unfolding process as “an Improviser of unsurpassed ingenuity” (Polkinghorne 1994, 60-61). In the following section we consider further ideas about natural theology “in all its Christological and pneumatological glory.” These offer a broad setting for Coakley’s ethically oriented natural theology––one in which altruism may readily be linked to the Spirit’s inspiration of the human faculty of ‘moral imagination.’

A natural theology of Trinitarian creation The primary quest of the new-style natural theology mentioned earlier is to articulate a cogent account of the universe, based on the assumption that it is the result of divine creation (Barrett 2005:495-509). Here the knowledge of the physical and biological realms gained through the natural and human sciences is accepted as the most authoritative available and is discussed from a Trinitarian perspective. And one way to make this science-theology connection is to formulate a grand narrative, seeking to harmonize the generalities of the scientific world-picture with the historical particularities of Christian belief––a unified story of the unfolding universe, for the deepening of understanding of the church’s members in the first place, but also for the benefit of their engagement in public issues and interfaith discussion. On the scientific side we have noted the evolutionary emergence of the cognitive power of imagination––a highly significant feature of the mental make-up of human beings, which is crucial for inter-personal relationships and an understanding of the world at large. And for theological input we may note two Trinitarian ideas from patristic thought: Son and Holy Spirit as the two hands of God in creation, and the Spirit as beautifier-perfecter (Sherry 2002, 4-5 and 79). These can be starting points for exploring the concepts of the ‘deep incarnation’ of the Son, the Logos of God, as described by Niels Gregersen, and the energizing, inspiring, and enriching work of the Holy Spirit, the ‘Go-Between God’, as described by John Taylor. Gregersen is a professor of systematic theology who is well versed in the discussions of evolutionary biology and the sciences of complex

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systems. In 2001 he coined the term ‘deep incarnation’ to emphasize that the Son, the eternal Logos, does not merely assume the body of a particular human person, but also reaches into the depths of the material world in a fragile body susceptible to decay and death, that is, into the very tissue of biological existence, thus conjoining the world of suffering creatures (2001, 192-207; also note Gregersen 2013 and 2014). The selfgiving quality of ‘kenosis’ is thus set as an organizing principle or pattern for the entire creation. He goes on to argue that his idea is in line with not only the incarnation expressed in John 1:14 but also the Deutero-Pauline emphasis in Colossians 1:19-20 on the full indwelling of Christ in the cosmos (in order to reconcile “all things” to God). In more recent years the term ‘deep incarnation’ has been explored by the science-and-theology authors, Celia Deane-Drummond, Denis Edwards and Christopher Southgate (Gregersen 2013, 319). Elsewhere, Gregersen links the triadic nature of the physical universe to a Trinitarian model of divine creation. The universe, as a super-system of physical systems, comprises mass, energy and information––without information to give it form and structure, the mass/energy would be meaningless. He refers to the Father as the source of it all, the Son as providing the informational pattern or principle according to which its development takes place, and the Spirit as the life-giving energizer within the whole process (Gregersen 2010, 103-115). In this way he develops a notable theology of nature in all its dynamic complexity. John Taylor, to whom we turn for pneumatological wisdom, is regarded by many as one of the most creative and imaginative Christian leaders and writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. He refers to the Spirit as “ever at work in nature, in history and in human living” (1972, 27), and as one “who has always been quietly, anonymously at work within every human life, awakening all that is truly human in us, all that is most real” (1986, 11). A point that Taylor frequently makes is that the great gift of the Spirit to human minds is that of perception, helping us to see below the surface of things. As he puts it, the Spirit “enables us not by making us supernaturally strong but by opening our eyes” (1972, 19), often thereby confronting us with a perspective that needs to be entered into or a moral choice that needs to be made––also helping us, we may add, to see deeper levels of the beauty that the poet Kathleen Raine described as “the real aspect of things when seen aright and with the eyes of love” (Mayne 1995:139). For these two authors, then, the Logos and the Spirit operate on both the grand scale of the world at large and the intimate scale of creaturely development.

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The notion of the Spirit as the beautifier-perfecter of the creation is echoed in philosopher A N Whitehead’s remark that “the cosmos is a restless aim toward ever more intense configurations of beauty” (Haught 2000, 126-132)––or, more broadly, toward ever more intense configurations of IJo țĮȜoȞ, the good-beautiful-just right. This richly textured Greek term has been described thus by Hans Urs von Balthasar in his magisterial work on theological aesthetics: “It is the right, the fitting, the good, that which is appropriate to a being, that in virtue of which it possesses its integrity, its health, its security; only insofar as it embraces all this, is țĮȜoȞ also, by way of confirmation and proof, the beautiful” (1982, 201). Then, from a Trinitarian perspective, the “restless aim” of the cosmos may be viewed as response to the Spirit’s work of luring it all towards IJo țĮȜoȞ––towards its fullness of perfection and beauty. In his Spirit and Beauty, Sherry devotes a chapter to “Inspiration and Imagination”––to the Spirit’s inspiring of human imagination with visions of the beautiful and the good. In particular he argues here (and elsewhere) that human beings are open to what might be called “moral inspiration” or “inspiration of the heart”––the “enhancing of people’s capacities in which their emotional and moral range is extended, giving rise to particular creative moral actions or to the perception of new patterns of goodness” (2002, 108). He goes on to suggest that one of the functions of the saints is to give us a fresh realization of the requirements of morality and to suggest new patterns of goodness––conduct that is not so much what ordinary people neglect but what does not even occur to them (2002, 114). New patterns of goodness may well arise, of course, from the supernormal example set by Jesus of Nazareth. Altogether, this combination of Trinitarian ideas points to a divine love that is ever and everywhere creatively at work “in nature, in history and in human living.” And in an age of much local and global conflict there is clearly a need for some such inclusive approach to the world on the part of the Christian church. As Sarah Coakley puts it, “the urgency of the times suggests that I am morally and spiritually compelled to such an apologetic task,” within current biology-theology discussion and beyond. She adds that “the art of giving a reasoned, philosophically- and scientificallyrelated account of the ‘hope that is in us’, in a public space, is a Christian duty” (her emphasis). Theology’s most important hermeneutical task at this juncture in global affairs may well be that of making known the universe story in all its richness and unity––as a contribution to human understanding and peace-making.

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Bibliography Baker, A. 2012. Interview with Sarah Coakley, available at: http://theologystudio.org/content/sarah-coakley-and-the-gifford-lectures. Barrett, P. 2005. ‘The new natural theology––a bridging and integrating mode of inquiry’, Scriptura, no. 89:2, 495-509. Beck, R. 2012. ‘Natural Theology’, available at: http://robbbeck.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/natural-theology/ Coakley, S. 2012. ‘Sacrifice Regained––Evolution, Cooperation and God,’ The 2012 Gifford Lecture Series, available at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/gifford/about/2012-giff/ —. 2013. God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Costa, G. 2004. Review of Coakley’s Powers and Submissions, in International Journal of Systematic Theology, Vol. 6:2. Gärdenfors, P. 2008. ‘What happens when we understand?’ Unpublished paper presented at 12th European Conference on Science and Theology, Sigtuna (Sweden), May 2008. Gregersen, N. H. 2001. ‘The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 40:3, 192-207. —. 2010. ‘The Triune God and the Triad of Matter’, in Michael Fuller (ed.), Matter and Meaning: Is Matter Sacred or Profane? Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. —. 2013. ‘The Idea of Deep Incarnation: Biblical and Patristic Resources’, in Depoortere, F & Haers, J (eds.), To Discover Creation in a Scattering World. Lenjven: Peeters. —. (ed). 2014. Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Haught, J. 2000. God after Darwin. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Irenaeus. Second century CE. Against Heresies, vol. 5, Preface, available at: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/irenaeus-books.html. Law, J. 2007. ‘A theological reflection on the evolution of the brain/mind in Homo sapiens’. Unpublished paper presented at the Science & Religion Forum (UK) conference, Canterbury, September 2007. Macquarrie, J. 1977. Principles of Christian Theology. London: SCM. McIntyre, J. 1987. Faith, Theology and Imagination. Edinburgh: The Handsel Press. Mithen, S. 1996. The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Thames & Hudson. —. 2003. ‘Cognitive fluidity’, in W van Huyssteen (ed), Encyclopedia of Science & Religion. New York: Macmillan, 148.

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Nowak, M. & Highfield, R. (eds). 2011. SuperCooperators. New York: Simon & Schuster. Nowak, M. & Coakley, S. (eds). 2013. Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Polkinghorne, J. 1989. Rochester Roundabout. Harlow UK: Longman. —. 1994. Science and Christian Belief. London: SPCK. —. 1996. Scientists as Theologians. London: SPCK. Sherry, P. 2002. Spirit and Beauty. London: SCM. Steiner, G. 1989. Real Presences. London: Faber & Faber. Taylor, J V. 1972. The Go-Between God: The Holy Spirit and the Christian Mission. London: SCM Press. —. 1986. A Matter of Life and Death. London: SCM Press. —. 1992. The Christlike God. London: SCM Press. van Huyssteen, W. 2006. Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. von Balthasar, H. U. 1982. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol 4. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Ward, P. & Brownlee, D. 2000. Rare Earth – The Uncommon Existence of Complex Life. New York: Copernicus, Springer-Verlag. Wright, N. T. 1992. The New Testament and the People of God. London: SPCK.

CHAPTER NINE A KENOTIC MODEL OF DIVINE ACTION PETER COLYER

Scientists and all those who value and support science have to give serious attention to the importance of evidence. This applies to evidence from scientific experiments and from our more general observation of the world. And from a theological point of view the evidence suggests that God does not control or determine everything that happens. There is far too much pain, nastiness, suffering, loss of hope, violence and premature death for us to accept the ancient view that God is sovereign over all things. A God who is loving, generous and well-disposed towards human beings cannot be held responsible for the condition of the world today. God cannot be responsible for sins and their consequences. The French reformer John Calvin (1509-64) may be taken as an archetype of a proponent of divine sovereignty. When examining his theology, it becomes apparent that an extreme view of divine sovereignty leads to enormous moral problems. For example, based on the experiences of nursing mothers in sixteenth century Switzerland, Calvin wrote that some “have full and abundant breasts, but others’ are almost dry, as God wills to feed one more liberally, but another more meagrely.” (Calvin 1960 [1559], I.XVI.3). Note that he attributes the women’s difficulties directly to the will of God. Such a view would act as a serious disincentive for any investigation into the causes of undernourishment or poverty and any search for an improvement in public health. When considering the non-human world, it is also apparent that God is not the cause of everything that happens. Scientific enquiry during the past three hundred years has increasingly clarified the reasons for events that once would have been attributed to the divine will, so that any divine role in the natural world is driven into more abstract questions of primeval initiation or fundamental existence. As Stephen Hawking has expressed it:

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Chapter Nine [E]ver since Greek times we have been finding scientific explanations for what previously seemed mysterious works of God. By now, the only place where people might invoke the hand of God is the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe. (Hawking 2013, 25).

Calvin, on the other hand, openly discouraged enquiry into some of the mysteries of the natural world, such as why there is so much more void than substance in the universe: such enquiry would be “impudence” and “detestable to all the godly.” Therefore let us willingly remain enclosed within these bounds to which God has willed to confine us, and as it were to pen up our minds that they may not, through their very freedom to wander, go astray (Calvin 1960 [1559], I.XIV.1).

Note again the use of the “will of God” as a brake upon the investigation of questions about the natural world. Scientific enquiry would not have progressed far under such an intellectual regime. If the randomness revealed in various scientific fields is really random, there must be degrees of real freedom which rule out deterministic action by God. Consider this thesis in relation to one of the most widespread principles of contemporary science: namely evolution through natural selection. Although the process is not totally random, there is a significant component of randomness in evolutionary theory. And yet we hear frequent expressions of belief in “theistic evolution,” usually meaning that God has in some manner directed and determined the process of evolution to achieve God’s desired ends. Recently a speaker in a Radio 4 debate stated that God was not responsible for every last detail of evolutionary change, but that God “inspired” the process. Use of a highly subjective word like “inspired” masks any consideration of what God’s role actually was. Evolution guided or directed or even inspired by God appears to be a denial of any real random occurrences in the process. Other writers have argued that “God creates the world through chance”—but does such a concept have any substantial meaning when the attempt is made to define more exactly what God does? A hubristic belief that humans were the primary purpose of God’s creative acts may be the real reason for maintaining this belief in theistic evolution. For Christians, the belief that God was revealed in the man Jesus may also have influenced the view that evolution towards humans cannot have been totally random. These considerations point towards a form of divine action which is permissive rather than determining. In theological terminology this is described as kenotic, as defined below.

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Religious beliefs have to take account not only of our observations of the world but also of the sacred sources, which in the case of Christianity means the Scriptures of the Hebrew and Christian Bible. And here we find further reasons to hold that God’s relationship to the world can be regarded as permissive, self-denying, or kenotic. The adjective kenotic (noun: kenosis) derives from the Greek verb țİȞȠȦ and its cognates, meaning to empty, in the everyday sense of emptying a vessel or, metaphorically, empty of value or significance. The single biblical use of the word in a theological sense lies in the statement at Philippians 2.7 that Jesus Christ “emptied himself.” This phrase has yielded centuries of speculation about the possible ways in which Christ was limited, but this particular set of problems is not the subject of this chapter. The long tradition of kenotic Christology throughout the history of Christian doctrine is dealt with in my book (Colyer 2013). In Christian theology Christ is seen as a revelation of the being and character of God. I propose that the obvious self-denying nature of the life of Christ, in his acceptance of a life of privation, hostility and supremely in his submission to a cruel and undeserved execution, is a powerful indicator of an often neglected characteristic of God, which has particular relevance to divine action. The kenotic nature of Christ and of God means that God allows the human world to develop in its own way and nonhuman worlds to follow pathways dependent upon physical and biological constraints. One of God’s gifts to the created world may therefore be seen as the gift of freedom. Even the creation of the universe may be seen as an act of giving the freedom to exist to things that are not God, rather than solely an act of enormous power. Humans have freedom to conduct their lives as they will, within the limits available to them at different times and places. In a parallel fashion, the non-human world possesses freedom to respond to options available, which include the possibility of randomness. Some writers have described these parallel phenomena as “free-will” in the case of the human world and “free-process” in the non-human world. I address now three questions raised by such a kenotic model of divine action: 1. Can a single reference to one aspect of Christ’s life carry the weight of a whole theology of divine action? 2. Are the demonstrations of power also associated with the works of God consistent with a kenotic model? 3. Does God’s kenosis have to be understood in the same manner in relation to the human and the non-human worlds?

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1. Can a single reference to one aspect of Christ’s life carry the weight of a whole theology of divine action? Although Philippians 2.7 is indeed the only theological use in the Bible of the root word of kenosis or self-emptying, I maintain that the essential idea is evident in many other places in the Scriptures. A large part of the story of the Hebrew Scriptures describes the ways in which God endured, again and again, the failure of people to follow laws of behaviour intended for their good. God is portrayed as experiencing intense suffering because of God’s association with the people who, supposedly, carried God’s name. And yet God repeatedly maintained unfailing goodwill towards them. Repeatedly the writers of the biblical Psalms complain of God’s failure to take action, to do what God should do if God is really the powerful being able to do whatever God chooses. “Where are you, God?” “Why don’t you do something in this situation crying out for righteous action?” “Why are you so invisible?” Psalms 74 and 77 are two good examples. The life of Christ shows, through his acceptance of and sympathy towards society’s rejected people, what can only be described as his humility when compared with other more dramatic and awe-inspiring features normally associated with divine action. So I conclude that the single reference to the word țİȞȠȦ is not the only evidence for self-limitation in the being of God. The Scriptures contain many further instances without the specific use of this terminology. 2. Are the demonstrations of power also associated with the works of God consistent with a kenotic model? It is necessary to avoid a monochromatic or one-dimensional view of God. I do not wish to suggest that self-emptying or permissiveness is the only characteristic of God. This view has been followed by the school known as Process Theology, in which God is not merely tolerant of the free choices of his creation, but is in his own nature unable to take any corrective action. Ian Barbour has expressed succinctly the differences between a kenotic and a Process understanding of God: Whereas exponents of kenotic self-limitation hold that the qualifications of divine omnipotence are voluntary and temporary, for [Process theologians] the limitations are metaphysical and necessary. (Barbour 1998, 326).

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In kenotic theology, divine self-limitation is an aspect of the present world order—creation could not endure a full and perfect revelation of the whole being of God. This aspect of divine kenosis helps us to face the difficult problem of divine inaction in the face of gross evil. God has given freedom to the creation and will not, it seems, interrupt that freedom while the present created order continues. God is committed to a kenotic relationship with the creation, at least until such time as God brings into existence a new form of creation. But this still leaves the question of the place of mighty divine acts within the present world order—how can such acts be related to an understanding of God as kenotic? These acts are rare—as we have touched briefly on the experience of some of the psalmists, it is as though God has to be dragged from a normal state of permissiveness to take some special action. Miracles would not be miracles if they were commonplace and everyday. Some of these acts, such as those during the life of Christ, are of a special eschatological nature, an advance notification of the possibilities when the kingdom of God has fully come. And some are of a very personal nature, when only the individual concerned will see the outcome as divine action. 3. Does God’s kenosis have to be understood in the same manner in relation to the human and the non-human worlds? I propose that the manner of God’s kenosis is very different in relation to the non-human and the human worlds. God may understand the life-experience of an ant, or a bumble-bee or a giraffe as clearly and thoroughly as God understands the life-experience of a human being. Whether those experiences are expressed in the verbalised thoughts of humans or in the emotions and instincts of animals is of no consequence to God, who understands all things. However, as far as we are aware it is only the human species that has the capacity to understand something of the divine reality, and to relate to it. This indicates that humans will respond to God in a way that is not possible for non-human creatures, and even less for inanimate objects. In relating to humankind, God is looking for response, so although the principle of a self-emptying relationship applies in all cases, it will be modified in the human case by the possibility of human knowledge of God and relationship towards God. In brief, God is seeking a relationship with the human species; therefore the nature of God’s self-emptying love must be modified in comparison with God’s relationship to the non-human world. Humans

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may choose to turn towards God and allow divine influences to enter their own lives, rendering God’s kenosis less remote and less impersonal. A kenotic model of divine action also has consequences for the approach of scientists towards their study of the natural world. If God allows the natural world to follow its own ways and respond to physical forces, then it is right for science to discount the divine in its interpretation of natural phenomena. As John Haught has written, “To introduce ideas about God as the “cause” of natural phenomena at soft points in our scientific enquiries is intellectually inappropriate and theologically disastrous.” (Haught 2003, 86). I therefore conclude that a kenotic model of divine action has benefits both for theology and for the practice of scientific research.

Bibliography Barbour, I. 1998. Religion and Science. London: SCM Press. Calvin, Jean 1960 [1559]. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press. Colyer, Peter. 2013. The Self-emptying God. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Haught, John. 2003. Deeper than Darwin. Oxford: Westview Press. Hawking, Steven. 2013. ‘Interview with Giles Whittell,’ Times Magazine, 21 September, 22-27.

CHAPTER TEN MIRACLE SHMIRACLE: DAVID HUME VERSUS THE EARLY JEWISH RABBIS MARK HARRIS

The title of this chapter is inspired by an old Jewish joke.ͳ A certain doctor is famed for his miraculous ability to cure arthritis. One day, his waiting room full, a little old lady, bent double over her walking stick, shuffles in slowly, waits her turn, and goes in to see the good doctor. Half an hour later she emerges, standing up straight, her head held high. The next person declares: “It’s a miracle, you walked in bent over, and now you’re standing tall. What did he do to you?” “Miracle, shmiracle,” says the old lady, “he gave me a longer stick.” This joke encapsulates the somewhat tongue-in-cheek view of miracles that we find in some ancient Jewish sources such as the Babylonian Talmud. More than a thousand years before early modern science was revolutionising the laws of nature, leading to an inevitable worry about how these laws are compatible with belief in miracles, the Jewish rabbis of the early centuries of the Common Era (CE) were pondering the relationship between miracle and the laws of nature. In this chapter, I will discuss some ways in which this ancient form of Jewish wisdom relates to modern thinking on miracle, and especially to the definitive modernist perspective of David Hume. I will suggest that rabbinic thinking on miracle (which includes a significant degree of scepticism) can offer a helpful positive alternative to Hume’s much better-known scepticism. We turn to describe Hume’s treatment of miracle first of all, and especially its relationship with laws of nature. Despite the importance of his empiricism overall, Hume’s treatment of miracle is often thought to be



1 http://jewishumor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/miracle-shmiracle.html. Accessed on 3rd December 2013.

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rather lacking in rigour. Keith Ward, for instance, declares that Hume’s arguments against miracles are “exceptionally poor…and they can be quickly disposed of” (Ward 2002, 742, 745). It is therefore interesting to note that, in spite of such criticisms, Hume’s definition of miracle is virtually ubiquitous, perhaps because it serves the equally ubiquitous modern meme that science and religion are totally opposed. Hume’s famous definition of miracle appears in Chapter X (‘On Miracles’) of his An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), and its most succinct statement in an Endnote: “A miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent” (‘On Miracles’, X.12, Endnote). Note the juridical language here. A “transgression” is of course a wrongdoing, and Hume also uses the word “violation” (‘On Miracles’, X.12), both terms communicating the sense that a miracle involves a rigid framework being abused. This negativity gives rise to the first criticism that is often made of Hume’s view, that it sets up a stratospherically-high view of the laws of nature, whereby they cannot be bypassed, adjusted, or overlooked, but can only be violently abused. The second criticism highlights the lack of coherence in Hume’s use of the juridical metaphor of “law of nature”. For in Hume’s statement above, a miracle can only occur when the Deity (or an invisible agent, i.e. something beyond experience, and which is therefore supernatural) transgresses the laws. This means that the lawmaker and lawenforcer must also be the lawbreaker. Not only does this provide an incoherent picture of God, it also stretches the juridical metaphor of law of nature to its breaking point. For that is exactly what Hume’s definition makes use of: a very old metaphor, and far older than Hume himself. There has been some disagreement in historical studies of early modern science over how the transformation of the term “law of nature” came to pass, from the juridical and theological metaphor of antiquity (which linked the regularities of nature with the divine lawgiver), to the non-theological terminology of modern science (where the regularities, “laws”, refer to causal, natural mechanisms; Henry 2004). However, it seems clear that in Hume’s above definition of miracle he is harking back to the juridical/theological /metaphorical use of “law of nature”, an idea that has an important biblical heritage, especially in the Hebrew Bible (Zilsel 1942, 247-8; Jaeger 2008), and which was familiar to Greek thinkers of antiquity such as the Stoics, as well as Patristic authors such as Basil and Augustine (Padgett 2003). Moreover, Hume was not the first of the early modern thinkers to use the juridical/theological metaphor of a law being broken to define

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miracle––Robert Boyle, for instance, preceded him (Harrison 1995, 535)– –but Hume’s account is certainly the best known, perhaps on account of his withering scepticism, which more or less puts miracles out of court. And it is this scepticism which provides the substance for Hume’s next step in his discussion of ‘On Miracles’, as he proceeds to enthrone the laws of nature (and his empirical knowledge of them), on a nearlyunassailable pedestal. “A firm and unalterable experience has established these laws”, he says, such as that “all men must die; that lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water” (‘On Miracles’, X.12). How “firm and unalterable” are these particular laws that Hume cites? Such is the onward march of science that we might question Hume at this point, or at least these examples, which appear less “firm” than Hume supposed. Lead can of itself remain suspended in the air (in a magnetic field, as a result of the Meissner effect, with a critical temperature for lead of 7.2 K). Moreover, there are types of fire which burn under water. As far as we know though, Hume was right when he said that “all men must die” (but it is worth noting that the mere existence of contemporary fields of interest such as artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and cryonics suggest that, whether they are realistic or not, technological solutions to human mortality are already under investigation). Therefore, an important lesson may be learned from Hume’s premature rhetoric concerning these examples: science is in a state of constant flux; it is unwise to be too prescriptive about the laws of nature, since yesterday’s miracle may be tomorrow’s scientific law. A further important question arises. Philosophers of science have, over the centuries since Hume, repeatedly asked whether the laws of nature are prescriptive or descriptive of nature, but no clear consensus has emerged. Answers have ranged from necessitarian accounts at one end of the spectrum, to instrumentalist accounts at the other, with intermediate positions also being advocated (such as the idea that the laws are basically statistical). Likewise, the related question of whether nature is deterministic or not has been met with no clear answer. While developments in twentieth century physics such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory have been held up as examples of ontological indeterminacy in nature, these same developments also submit to interpretations where the indeterminacy is epistemological rather than ontological. And science, while undoubtedly successful at describing potential laws of nature in empirical terms, lacks the competency to pronounce on their underlying basis. For this reason, scientific hypotheses made on the basis of one particular philosophical interpretation of the laws should be viewed with

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caution, since they stray into the territory of metaphysics. Such an example (although not without merit) is provided by the claims of many modern cosmologists, that these laws are so omnipotent and universal that they describe not just our universe, but a whole ensemble of untestable universes (the multiverse). Of course, one of the reasons the multiverse hypothesis is invoked is to provide a non-theistic answer to the question of fine-tuning. In which case, a degree of Humean irony arises: although our understanding of the laws of nature––those that make the multiverse hypothesis meaningful and cogent––has expanded in scientific and mathematical terms far beyond what Hume might ever have dreamed of when he constructed his account of miracle, yet we have come full circle, since these laws are being used again to discount the possibility of divine action (fine tuning) by the invocation of many universes. Hume’s high view of the laws of nature has effectively returned, again in order to make sceptical (but metaphysical) claims against theism. Arguably, such a move means that the old juridical/theological metaphor behind the term “law of nature” is making a comeback, but now in the opposite direction of the old metaphor, since it works against the existence of a divine lawgiver. In light of this discussion, it would seem that the term “law of nature” is fraught with ambiguities, and that it might be time to search for an altogether-different terminology to describe the objectives of science. That may be the case, and Nancy Cartwright for one has argued (without reference to the theological difficulties) that we might be better off speaking of the “capacities” of nature rather than its laws (Cartwright 1999, 77). However, I would like to make a virtue of the old metaphor, in all its juridical and theological glory, at least when we speak of miracle. Furthermore, I would also like to retain something of Hume’s robust scepticism. To see this, it is necessary to examine some ancient Jewish texts. The phrase “law of nature” does not appear in the Bible as such, although there are related discussions of the scope and character of the natural world, sometimes linked with torah, divine law (Harris 2013, 836). Psalm 19, for instance, begins, “The heavens are telling the glory of God”, moves on to describe the rising of the sun, and concludes with the resounding statement, “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple” (v.7, NRSV). This passage raises an interesting theological question: does the constancy of the sunrise testify to God’s law, or vice versa? Given that torah is understood as the entire framework of Israelite law––contained within, and embodied by the five books of Moses, and regulating concrete human affairs as much as the natural world––a case could be made for either

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view. At the very least we have here a theological view of that most celebrated of all laws of nature, the rising of the sun. (Other examples may be compared: Job 28:26; Pss.33:4-9; 78:23; 107:25). We might press these texts further to ask about a biblical view of miracle. This issue is complex, since, just as there is no phrase “law of nature”, so there is no word for “miracle” in biblical Hebrew or Greek either. We do, on the other hand, find terms like “sign” (e.g. Ex.4:17), or “great work” (2 Kings 8:4). A connection can be made between such signs, creation, and God’s law, as may be seen in a particularly revealing passage from the Wisdom of Solomon. Here, we find the Red Sea crossing described as an “incredible journey” (19:5), and a “marvellous wonder” (19:8). Significantly, we are told that the whole world needed to be refashioned according to God’s command, in order for the miracle to happen: For the whole creation in its own kind was again formed anew, complying with your commands, so that your children might be kept unharmed (Wisdom 19:6).

Here, there is no sense that the Deity intervenes in the natural order, nor that the Deity transgresses a law of nature in order to part the sea; rather, God is said to completely re-forge creation, effectively giving new laws (“commands”) to the entire natural world. In this way, the miracle of the Sea becomes a stunning example of a “new creation” through a considerably more positive understanding of miracle than Hume’s, although it also invokes natural law. Accordingly, the rabbis in the first few centuries CE went even further with this kind of thinking, declaring that the miracles of the exodus were pre-ordained at the original creation, laws of nature that only become apparent later on. So the miracles of the manna, and of Moses’ wonderworking staff were defined by the rabbis of the Mishnah to be part of the initial six days of creation described in Genesis 1 (mAboth 5:6). And as for the Red Sea crossing, it was taught that when God originally made the sea back in Genesis 1, God made it a condition upon the sea that it should part for Moses many years later (Ginzberg 2003, 553-555). Realising that such a law of creation must be truly universal, the rabbis explained that all bodies of water in heaven and on earth parted when Moses parted the Red Sea: whether the water was in caves, jugs, bowls or cups across the world, it all parted at the same time, emphasising that the miracle took place by means of a universal command to creation, a law of nature. Such was the enthusiasm of the rabbis for the universal consequences of this particular miracle, that they extended the story even further, to heighten the sense of

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the miraculous. For instance, they calculated that the walls of water through which the Israelites walked were 1600 miles high, so that they could be seen by all of the nations on earth. One charming interpretation explained that, if an Israelite child was disturbed and cried during the passage through the water, its mother only had to reach out her hand into the nearby wall of water to pluck out an apple or some other piece of fruit to pacify the child (Ginzberg, 2003, 555-557)! Of course, such readings are likely to sound absurdly fanciful to our modern Western ears. However, it is important to bear in mind here the Jewish tradition of interpretation known as midrash, which would often explore the significance and the difficulties of a given story by re-telling it imaginatively. (The modern technique of narrative theology is not so very different). And in these ancient Jewish readings of the story of the Sea crossing we find that there is an expansive (rather than a restrictive) understanding of the laws of nature, which allows for miracle to be defined as a natural affirmation of the theology of creation, rather than (as in Hume) a theological violation, intervention or incursion into nature. This is so because the rabbis operate within a related, but theologically more inclusive framework than Hume. Both operate with a high view of law. But while Hume, the great empiricist, defines the laws of nature in terms of his experience and the naturalistic evidence available to him, the rabbis define the laws of nature in terms of the theological evidence of torah, divine law. For Hume the laws of nature are to be understood as legal terms only metaphorically; for the rabbis, the laws of nature are to be understood as literal components of the divine law, and components which they, the rabbis adjudicate over. For, lest it be thought that the rabbis lived in a kind of theological dream world compared with Hume’s naturalistic scepticism, we should note that the rabbis were also capable of hard-headed scepticism. (It is suggested that this scepticism was in part a reaction to the Christian claims made about Jesus as a miracle worker; Corner 2005, 165-9). There can be no better illustration of rabbinic scepticism towards miracles than the classic Talmudic account of a legal dispute found in Baba Mezi‘a 59b. Here, Rabbi Eliezer is so certain of his interpretation of the halakhah that he calls upon a nearby tree to prove him right against the other scholars gathered in opposition to him. The tree uproots itself and moves a hundred cubits, but his opponents are unimpressed. Rabbi Eliezer then calls upon a nearby stream to prove him right. The stream flows backwards, but again his opponents are unimpressed: “Water cannot prove anything,” they say. Then Rabbi Eliezer calls upon the walls of the building to prove him right. Sure enough, the walls bend inwards, but they do not fall down

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completely, out of deference to one of the other scholars present, who has rebuked the walls. Finally Rabbi Eliezer calls upon heaven to prove him right, and a heavenly voice booms out, “What have you got against Rabbi Eliezer, seeing that the halakhah agrees with him?” The opponents answer with amazing scepticism: “Torah was given to us from Sinai,” they say, “so we pay no attention to a heavenly voice.” Again, this might appear to be an outlandish and fanciful story to modern Western ears, but it makes the highly relevant point for our purposes that divine jurisdiction on both law and miracle has been handed over to the earthly community. God may question, but only the earthly community may answer authoritatively. Now that torah has been entrusted to human hands, it is the earthly community that interprets and adjudicates, whether the matter concerns human, natural, or divine interests. Hence, even in the face of putative signs from heaven (miracles), there can be grounds for scepticism while the matter is still under discussion by the community. The power for any decision about the law–– God’s law or a law of nature––rests with the community, and not with a sign from heaven, since all is torah, and all is in the community’s hands. This, I suggest, is the ideal way to adopt Hume’s powerful but nihilistic scepticism. Hume’s “firm and unalterable experience” against miracles is vulnerable to the fact that it is his own individual view, informed neither by centuries of matured discussion of the scientific and philosophical bases of the laws of nature, nor by exposure to the community’s scrutiny. In connection, Polanyi explains that modern science as we know it is a communal activity: individual geniuses can make a difference, but ultimately it is the consensus of the scientific community that adjudicates (judges) over acceptable scientific ideas and results, and indeed even over what constitutes “science” (Polanyi 1958, 1962, 163-4, 216-7). From that point of view, the fabled objectivity that postmodernity insists is out of reach is very much within reach when it is the scientific community’s current consensus. Applying these ideas–– mediated by Polanyi’s juridical understanding of the scientific community, but clearly operative in rabbinic discussion of miracles too––I would like to commend a community-based approach to miracles. This would be aided on the one hand by the rabbinic high theological view: the laws of nature are God’s laws commanded to nature within an inclusive theology of creation. But on the other hand, such a high theological view must be constantly subjected to a community-based scepticism. The power of miracle, I suggest, actually lies with the human communities of faith, and how they adjudicate divine law and natural law.

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To summarise, I have explored Hume’s definition of miracle, and have pointed out some of the inconsistencies. Like many interpreters before me, I have suggested that Hume’s definition is vulnerable on account of his very “high” view of the laws of nature, a view which is difficult to sustain in light of contemporary philosophies of science. One of the most significant problems arises from the fact that Hume’s definition works by reviving the old juridical/theological metaphor underlying the term “law of nature”. By way of contrast with Hume, I have introduced early Jewish views which understand the laws of nature as literal expressions of divine torah. These views are able to incorporate miracle naturally within a universal and adaptive theology of creation. Canonical miracles of torah are enthusiastically affirmed in such a view, but all miracles are nevertheless subject to stringent deliberation (and if necessary, scepticism), by those in the community who have been accredited to judge over human and divine law. We find then that through the community of experts both “laws of nature” and miracles become juridical matters. Ready parallels may be drawn with Polanyi’s idea of the modern scientific enterprise as a community exercising a juridical capacity over the results and scope of science: the “laws of nature”. This comparison between the rabbinic community and the scientific community illustrates again that Hume’s definition of miracle is inadequate to account for the complex and dynamic ways in which both miracle and laws of nature emerge. No easy definition of either is sufficient; rather, working understandings of both miracle and natural law materialise through robust scrutiny and even scepticism by the respective juridical communities.

Bibliography Cartwright, Nancy. 1999. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corner, Mark. 2005. Signs of God: Miracles and their Interpretation. Aldershot, Burlington (VT): Ashgate. Ginzberg, Louis. 2003. Legends of the Jews. Volume One: Bible Times and Characters From the Creation to Moses in the Wilderness. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society. Harris, Mark. 2013. The Nature of Creation: Examining the Bible and Science. Durham: Acumen. Harrison, Peter. 1995. ‘Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 56: 531-553.

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Henry, John. 2004. ‘Metaphysics and the origins of modern science: Descartes and the importance of laws of nature.’ Early Science and Medicine 9: 73-114. Hume, David. 2007. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaeger, Lydia. 2008. ‘The Idea of Law in Science and Religion.’ Science and Christian Belief 20:133-146. Padgett, Alan G. 2003. ‘The Roots of the Western Concept of the “Laws of Nature”: From the Greeks to Newton.’ Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 55: 212-221. Polanyi, Michael. 1958, 1962. Personal Knowledge: Towards a PostCritical Philosophy. London, New York: Routledge. Ward, Keith. 2002. ‘Believing in miracles.’ Zygon 37: 741-750. Zilsel, Edgar. 1942. ‘The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law.’ The Philosophical Review 51: 245-279.

CHAPTER ELEVEN ROWAN WILLIAMS AND DIVINE ACTION MARK HART

“It’s a very big issue, the question of divine action,” Rowan Williams once said when asked about miracles (Shortt 2005, 7). So far we might all agree. He went on to suggest that an answer should begin with a doctrine of God rather than an examination of any particular claim to have experienced the miraculous. The agreement is therefore short-lived because we immediately face a divide between classical theism, where Williams stands, and modern personalist or process theology. Williams (2000, 72f) is clear that all creation depends on God for its existence while God depends on nothing other than God and is unchanged by creation. God does not need the world and is perfectly fulfilled without it. Creation is gratuitous and is loved by God for what it is, not for any usefulness. And this provides a foundation for the principle that no-one and nothing may be viewed as purely instrumental to our goals. Everything has value in itself. But surely this view of God is the imposition of a Greek metaphysics on the personalist idiom of the Hebrew Bible? Not at all, says Williams (2000, 67f; 2007b, 269f). It is that to which biblical speech as a whole points and any anthropomorphic description of God must be read in the light of it. The Old Testament bears witness to a long process of reflection about God prompted by experiences of salvation. And the doctrine of creation is the culmination, not the beginning, of all that thinking. It was an experience of being called, of Exodus, which led to what we first find in second Isaiah: the concept of creation from nothing, a summons into being. And it is the same experience which also led to the understanding that it is idolatrous to speak of God as one amongst others. This last point brings us to the other frequent criticism: that classical theism is monarchical and legitimates monarchical control in the world. Not so, says Williams (2000, 68). The mistake here is to imagine that God’s action in creation is a power over things, like a force exerted by one

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thing on another in the world. But God does not act on anything in power. To say that God creates the world is simply to say that God gives it its existence. It exists, moment by moment, in relation to its creator. This is clarified further by considering the difference made when God is seen as moved by the world, reacting to events in a punctiliar way (Williams 2007b, 267f). We and God come to share a logical space, an environment, a context. The result is that God is one agent alongside others, and what’s more, the “biggest thing around”. Ironically then, to make God one of us, sharing the same ontological order as creation, actually provides the way to hierarchy, whereas the doctrine of the absolute difference of God’s being implies the absolute equality of our beings, one with each other, as dependent creatures. So strictly God is not the Supreme Being, at one end of the scale. God is not on the scale; not on any scale. Is God therefore remote? Quite the opposite. If God shared our space then according to circumstances we may be nearer or further from the divine presence. But precisely because God is not a thing, competing for space with everything else, then, as Augustine said, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. To quote Williams (Shortt 2005, 7): It’s the relation of an eternal activity which moment by moment energises, makes real, makes active, what there is, and I sometimes feel that a lot of our theology has lost that extraordinarily vivid or exhilarating sense of the world penetrated by divine energy in the classical theological terms.

Note how far this is from deism or pantheism. The world is not God, nor are God and the world two separate things, nor does God share the world’s environment, but the world is of God, existing in absolute dependence yet created by God’s absolute freedom. It is not an artefact but an overflow of love giving existence to that which may itself share and express the divine life. Its potential is unlimited because the only limit is the endless resourcefulness of God who gives it its own rationality, coherence, freedom and integrity. Now if the origin of this doctrine of creation lies in an experience of salvation then at its heart is a conviction that the world has the potential for the surprising and new, for that which cannot be explained as a result of human planning or via the routine behaviour of its elementary parts. This points the way to how we may conceive of miracle. Not in Hume’s terms as a “transgression of a law of nature” and “a particular volition of the Deity”. Nothing is transgressed, and God’s action is not a sequence of episodes interacting with our history.

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[God’s action] must not be in competition for a shared logical space (and this, I suppose, is why a theologian like Augustine can so firmly reject a view of miracle that regards it as a direct divine interruption of finite agency, as opposed to an extraordinary realisation of possibilities inherent in finite agency itself…) (Williams 2007b, 269).

Williams looks to Augustine, Aquinas and Eastern Orthodox tradition where there is a sense of “divine energy” penetrating creation so everything is “charged with the grandeur of God” as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it. And as Herbert McCabe used to say, “God is more deeply involved with any creature than we can imagine, and that’s why we don’t have to invent stories about God getting involved” (Shortt 2005, 7). Williams goes further: How then does that energising work? It works, we believe, according to the rational purpose of God. It works in orderly and cohesive ways… Can we imagine certain circumstances in which the action of God in relation to one of these coherent bits of the world is, to use a rather weak analogy, that much closer to the surface than it habitually is? We may not be able to understand what the rule of that is, or the regularity of that is, but if what is sustaining every reality is the energy, the action, of God, then is it so difficult to believe that from God’s point of view and not ours, there are bits of the universal order where the fabric is thinner, where the coming together of certain conditions makes it possible for the act of God to be a little more transparent? And when we talk of miracle, it’s that. (Shortt, 2005, p. 7f)

Williams (2007a, 45) gives some indication of what might open the world up to the underlying purpose of God: …if certain things come together in the world at this or that moment, the “flow” would be easier and more direct. Perhaps a really intense prayer or a really holy life can open the world up that bit more to God’s purpose so that unexpected things happen. We’re never going to have a complete picture of how that works, because we don’t have God’s perspective on it all. But we can say that there are some things we can think, say or do that seem to give God that “extra freedom of manoeuvre” in our universe.

So concerning the incarnation and resurrection of Christ he says (Williams 2007a, 48): Just what would the trust of Mary have had to be like for the door of life itself to open in her body? What must the faith of Jesus and his closeness

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And again, on the question of how intercessory prayer works (Williams 1994, 141): We have one absolute instance … Jesus on the cross … It works in a man whose heart is open to God and to all the world, so open that it is broken to death … It is only through such open hearts that God can work.

And conversely (Williams 2007a, 47): In the fourth chapter of St Mark’s Gospel there is a passage that has rather scandalized some Christians, where we’re told that in Nazareth Jesus “could not do many mighty works” because the people were sceptical. Even where Jesus was, not all the factors always came together.

This is quite contrary to any notion of a universe which is essentially routine and unsurprising in its workings but ruled by a God who occasionally interferes to produce the extraordinary. Instead, the world itself is more wonderful, potentially surprising and hopeful than we can see. Any miracles or any circumstances which we may attribute to God’s providence are not arbitrary interventions or manipulations but the outworking of the logic of this universe. It is a logic which is of God, and at the deepest level it is the principle of self-giving love and openness to the other which makes the difference and allows creation to move forwards. God’s act of creation is a self-renunciation which respects the world’s integrity. The world is given existence, with all its inherent possibility, and God remains present to it without ever imposing or forcing any state of affairs. If creation’s glorious freedom is to be realised, it is to be opened up from within, in a long process that takes time and patience. Hence the incarnation. Hence the growth of the faith of Israel and the faith of Mary to make possible the incarnation. Hence the resurrection and the outpouring of the Spirit as the consequence of the self-giving of Christ. One of the many questions raised by all this is whether it is consistent with modern science. It is clearly not included in today’s physics, but is it excluded by what we know? One easy answer might be to say that science can never say what can’t happen. Scientific theories only stand to be disproven. But perhaps we can go a little further, with Williams, when he says in relation to Russian Orthodox theology of the Holy Spirit (Williams 2008, 44):

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The world revealed by contemporary physics is a world far less tidy than the world you might have seen in 1900, and surprisingly, a lot of theology has still to catch up with that fact. While secular culture goes on in different directions, theologians often stay with tired and elderly models of what the world and science look like. The world in which scientists now operate, a world in which language is stretched to its limits and beyond in describing reality, is a world in which it is increasingly difficult to think of the universe as a cluster of labelled bits of stuff. It’s a world in which randomness and unpredictability have once again become interesting and challenging. It is recognisably the world which this theology of the Spirit is talking about.

It is certainly true that, as science has progressed, the mystery of the universe has only deepened. That might not be enough to convince anyone of the miraculous, even less of the influence of faith, but we should remember that consciousness is the biggest unsolved problem where presently no-one really has the tools even to begin. In reviewing Conor Cunningham’s Darwin’s Pious Idea, Williams (2011, 8) has this to say about the widespread assumption that the foundational truth of the universe is hard, physical interaction: The possibility of a first-person perspective, if it truly emerges from the unfolding logic of material combination and recombination, simply tells us that the notion of a necessarily “mindless” matter is not sustainable. If the nature of a gene is to carry a message, it is the nature of the recipient vehicle in a new generation to be able to “understand” it. To adapt the famous remark about one mythological cosmology, it’s mind all the way down. Intelligence as we define it entails self-consciousness, the firstperson perspective; but something seriously analogous to intelligence has to be presupposed in matter for the entire system of transmitted patterns and “instructions” to be possible. At least some physicists … have argued that it is more true to say that matter is a property of consciousness than the other way around––echoing the ancient philosophical dictum that the body is “in” the soul rather than the soul in the body.

It may be argued that Rowan Williams’ account of divine action speculates in the gaps in our knowledge of the world, but it certainly doesn’t look for a gap for God. There is space for providence and miracle but without any loss to creation’s integrity and responsibility. The story of salvation is not a sequence of episodes of divine intervention but an outworking of inherent possibility activated by divine energy. Williams nowhere sets out specifically to argue a theory of divine action, but together these scattered remarks adumbrate something which combines a classical understanding of theology with a radically mysterious

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understanding of matter. Belief in providence or miracle poses two key questions to any account of divine action: How is such purpose and extraordinary realisation possible in a world of scientific law? Given that possibility, why doesn’t it happen more often? Classical theology has no problem with the first question for God is not bound by such law. What makes Williams’ account interesting is how it offers an answer to the second question, by suggesting that the world is undergirded by a deeper law grounded in the self-giving nature of God. It is a vision of a world which “may not be secure but is pulsing with something unmanageable, terrible and wonderful just below its surface” (Williams 2007a, 49).

Bibliography Shortt, R. 2005. God’s Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation, London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Williams, R. 1994. Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses, London: Darton, Longman and Todd. —. 2000. On Christian Theology, Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2007a. Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief, Norwich: Canterbury Press. —. 2007b. Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, London: SCM. —. 2008. A Margin of Silence: The Holy Spirit in Russian Orthodox Theology, Quebec: Lys Vert. —. 2011. Darwin’s Pious Idea by Conor Cunningham, reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, 22 April 2011.

CHAPTER TWELVE SPECIAL DIVINE ACTION: A CATEGORY MISTAKE? CHRISTOPHER C. KNIGHT

Introduction Until relatively recently, the phase of the dialogue between science and theology that was inaugurated by the work of Ian Barbour in the 1960s was dominated by questions about divine action. It was generally felt that there was a need to defend the notion of “special” divine action i.e. action over and above the “general” divine providence that is built into the world through its benevolent character. This distinct mode of action was held to represent a response by God to events in the world (such as intercessory prayer) and generally believed to be an intrinsic part of traditional theistic belief. Behind the resulting search for a coherent model of special divine action there often lay a threefold motivation. First, there was an essentially apologetic search for what was often called “consonance” between scientific and theological world-views. Second, there was a reaction against the types of natural theology that had spoken about “proof” of God’s existence. In place of such an approach, it was often said, what was needed was the development of a “theology of nature” which, while rooted in the revelation and religious experience that had given rise to a specific religious tradition, could acknowledge that certain aspects of any such tradition might need reformulation in the light of the naturalistic understandings of modern science. Third, there was a reaction against the notion––prevalent in many religious traditions at one time––that God’s action should be identified with events for which no scientific explanation seemed possible. (This understanding––because of its focus on “gaps” in scientific explanation––was often dubbed as belief in the “God of the gaps”.)

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This “God of the gaps” understanding was sometimes seen (perhaps over-simplistically) as a reaction to, or reflection of, the deism of the eighteenth century, which had stressed that the “clockwork” universe posited by Newtonian physics had no need for God except as its designer and initiator. God was, for this approach, no more than an “absentee landlord,” and the concept of events resulting from “special” divine action was seen as problematic because it seemed that such events could only be understood in terms of God interfering supernaturally with the clockwork cosmic mechanism. In this context, those who wanted to defend such interventionist action felt that they had to look for evidence in terms of “gaps” in explanation. The two places where gaps seemed evident was in events deemed miracles (difficult to defend in terms of incontrovertible evidence) and in the universe’s apparent design, which even the deists acknowledged was good evidence for the existence of at least some kind of God. In these circumstances, the kind of apologetic argument based on design––as developed by people like William Paley––seemed to many to be one of the main grounds on which theistic belief could be rationally held. If you found a watch, Paley had argued, then even if you didn’t know what it was for, its intricate design would indicate to you that it had been designed and made by an intelligent watchmaker. In the same way, he argued, the intricate interconnectedness of things in the world pointed to the existence of a kind of cosmic watchmaker: God. When Darwin’s theory of evolution through chancemutation proved able to provide an explanation for much of the biosphere’s supposed design, therefore, there was something of a crisis among theistic believers (which still goes on among supporters of the “Intelligent Design” movement, who insist that Darwin’s explanation of evolution as the “blind watchmaker”––is unsound.)

God’s immanence Early theological responses to Darwin were, however, less monolithically antagonistic than is often supposed, and in particular there was a defence of the Darwinian scheme by Aubrey Moore, published in 1889, that was to be of considerable importance to the later dialogue between science and theology. What Moore pointed out was that the commonly-held view of God’s creative action as a series of “special” acts had a major theological flaw. The Darwinian view, he argued “is infinitely more Christian than the theory of ‘special creation.’ For it implies the immanence of God in nature, and the omnipresence of his creative power.” Those, he went on, who “oppose the doctrine of evolution in defence of a ‘continued

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intervention’ of God seem to have failed to notice that a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence” (Moore 1889, 84). It is a reaction against this “ordinary absence” of the “God of the gaps” that has characterised much of the mainstream science-theology dialogue of our time. If we look at the work of the three main figures who have until recently dominated that dialogue––Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne––we find that each––albeit in a slightly different way– –has defended the notion that (as Peacocke puts it) “it is now clear that God creates the world through what we call ‘chance’ operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes a launching pad for the next” (Peacocke 1993, 119). None of these three has, however, given up the notion that––in addition to the general providence provided by a world that develops through an interplay of chance and necessity––there occur events that need some notion of “special divine action” to account for them. Being wary of the old notion of “supernatural intervention”, however, they (and their followers, who constitute the majority within the current science-theology dialogue) have tried to find plausible ways in which God can respond to events in the world without setting aside the laws of nature. They have focused in this search on ways in which the world as the scientist now perceives it is not the deterministic world of Newtonian physics, so that some sort of “causal joint” seems possible, through which God can influence the outcome of the laws of nature without setting them aside. Some, following William Pollard, have seen quantum indeterminacy as important in this. Others, like Polkinghorne, have seen this view as inadequate and have posited an as-yet unknown site of ontological openness, indicated by quantum and chaotic phenomena. Others, like Peacocke, have seen a possible solution in “top down” phenomena, in which complex wholes have effects on the parts of which they are made up. However, none of these schemes is truly “noninterventionist” in the way that is sometimes claimed, since any event that God brings about, through one or other of the “causal joints” that are postulated, must be the result of a decision by God to “interfere” with the usual range of possible natural outcomes to that situation, choosing one rather than any of the others. What is envisaged is merely a rather more subtle kind of interference than that envisaged by those who once talked about “supernatural intervention.” Moreover, this kind of approach is unable to give any account of what is sometimes called “the instrumental substructure of God’s acts”––the chain of events that leads from God’s basic action to the event that is identified as God’s providential aim. In

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addition to these issues there are others––identified by Nicholas Saunders– –that lead me to agree with his conclusion that “the prospects for supporting anything like the ‘traditional understanding’ of God’s activity in the world are extremely bleak” so that “it is no real exaggeration to say that contemporary theology is in a crisis” (Saunders 2002, 215). My only disagreement with Saunders in his assessment is that I believe that his notion of the “traditional understanding” of God’s action is too narrow, being focused on supposedly biblical perspectives rather than on the Christian tradition as a whole. Here I agree with Wesley Wildman’s belief that much of the support for the “causal joint” account of special divine action comes from what he calls a “personalistic theism … of the distinctively modern kind, which sprang up when the seeds of the Hebrew Bible’s anthropomorphism germinated in the fertile soil of an increasingly literate culture filled with bibles from the newly invented printing press. It is a distinctively Protestant deviation from the mainstream Christian view.” What happened, he goes on to ask rhetorically, “to the classical doctrines of aseity and immutability, the affirmations that God is selfcontained and does not change through acting or feeling? What happened to God as the ground of being or being itself? How does [the defender of this approach] deflect the classical intuition that God as a being can be no God at all but merely an idol of the human imagination?” (Wildman 2006, 166). Once we recognize that there is at least an element of truth in this assessment, part of our strategy in trying to re-think divine action must surely be to re-assess traditional understandings, and this is indeed by part of the argument that I set out in my book, The God of Nature (Knight 2007) and will outline here. An equally important part of my argument in that book is, however, my exploration of the way in which the naturalism at the heart of the scientific enterprise might be interpreted in a theistic way, and it is with this that I shall begin here.

Strong theistic naturalism There have been some––Arthur Peacocke in particular––who have described themselves as “theistic naturalists” because––although they adopt a causal joint explanation of special divine action––they put a great deal of stress on naturalistic perspectives. This approach I have dubbed “weak theistic naturalism” (Knight 2007, 27) to distinguish it from the “strong theistic naturalism” that I wish to explore, in which all events result entirely from the “laws of nature” that God has built into the world,

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there being no events that result from God’s temporal response to situations or events. If we ask theists why they are wary of this kind of strong theistic naturalism, two issues tend to predominate. One is that there is a perceived need for God to “guide” a world in which chance mechanisms seem to entail a basic unpredictability about outcomes. Here, they often seem to take up the view of biological evolution defended by Stephen Jay Gould (1989), who has stressed the way in which “promising” evolutionary pathways have, in the past, sometimes been terminated by chance events. In response to this argument I have urged that we need to recognize that this view of evolution’s unpredictability is not held throughout the biological community. Richard Dawkins, for example, has noted the independent evolutionary origin of certain functional attributes (the eye, the venomous sting, and echolocation, for example), and suggests that if we did a systematic count of such independent origins we would find “certain potential evolutionary pathways which life is eager to go down. Other pathways have more resistance … Evolution repeatedly races down the easy corridors, and just occasionally, and unexpectedly, leaps one of the hard barriers.” (Dawkins 2004, 604) In this sense, Dawkins seems to imply, evolution does have a degree of predictability. A far stronger version of this position has, however, been taken by Simon Conway Morris, who has speculated that “an exploration of how evolution ‘navigates’ to particular functional solutions may provide the basis for a more general theory of biology … It is my suspicion that such a research programme might reveal a deeper fabric in biology, in which Darwinian evolution remains central as the agency, but the nodes of occupation are effectively determined from the Big Bang” (Morris 2003, 309-10). If the issue of unpredictability in evolution is by no means as strong an argument as it seems to be to some who want to insist that special divine action occurs, neither is their argument about the necessity of positing a particular kind of “personal” God. In response to this argument I have urged, with Wesley Wildman, that such a view may not be as traditional as they believe. I have also urged that any panentheistic approach––in which the world is in some sense “in God”––will counter the argument that only a personalistic theism can avoid the tendency of a strong theistic naturalism towards the “absentee landlord” God of deism. (How can God be absent from a world in which God is in everything and everything is in God?) In addition, I have argued (Knight 2007, 28-9) that personal responses can, philosophically, be “naturalistic” in the sense that they do not need a

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separate decision and personal action on each occasion. Take, for example, the human providence that is involved in a parent supporting a child at university. In practice, this is likely to involve a mixture of general and special providence (“The money that comes regularly from my bank account to yours––my general providence––wasn’t designed to cover car repairs, but only normal, everyday expenses. Here, therefore, is some extra cash––special providence––to cover the repairs your car needs.”) In principle, however, the “special” providence required in response to something out of the ordinary is only the result of lack of wisdom in predicting possible eventualities. A parent’s financial provision could, for example, include a number of if-then statements added to the standing order to the bank (“Transfer such and such an amount every month to my daughter’s account to cover her everyday expenses, and if she provides receipts for repairs to her car, then transfer to her account enough additional funds to cover those repairs.”) If humans can in principle be wise enough to avoid the necessity of special providence, do we really want to deny an absolute wisdom of this kind to God? In addition to this kind of philosophical argument, I have urged another (Knight 2007, 34-9): that any kind of naturalism that rejects the possibility of those unusual events that we call miracles is a flawed one. Such events, I have urged, are unusual not because they do not obey the universe’s fixed instructions but because they constitute emergent phenomena comparable to regime change phenomena, of the kind explored in this context by John Polkinghorne (1986, 74-5), or to instantiations of new laws of nature, of the kind explored in this context by Robert John Russell (2002).

Traditional perspectives The kinds of argument that seem relevant to an exploration of the possibilities inherent in strong theistic naturalism also have their echoes in ancient Christian thought, especially that of the strongly panentheistic Eastern Orthodox tradition, in which, as Vladimir Lossky has noted, there is no concept “of ‘pure nature’ to which grace is added as a supernatural gift. For it, there is no natural or ‘normal’ state, since grace is implied by the act of creation itself.” (Lossky 1957, 101) The panentheistic dimension of this understanding is manifested particularly in the work of Maximos the Confessor, who speaks, not only of the divine Logos incarnate in Christ, but also of the logos of each created thing, which is in some sense a manifestation of that divine Logos. One modern scholar, Lars Thunberg, has gone as far as to say that for Maximos there is “almost a gradual

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incarnation” (Thunberg 1985, 75), and this is not a peculiarity of the Orthodox tradition, since modern exegesis of the fourth gospel’s use of the Logos concept also has a strong sense that the incarnation in Christ is not so much a supernatural intrusion into the cosmos as the completion of a process begun in the creation (see e.g. Need 2003, 403). Not only does this notion of the logoi of created things work against the instinct that tends to reject panentheism, but it also seems to anticipate the kinds of teleological possibilities which, as we have noted, are implicit in some analyses of evolutionary theory (and are also implicit in some understandings of the anthropic cosmological principle.) As Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia has put it, “Christ the creator Logos has implanted in every created thing a characteristic logos, a ‘thought’ or ‘word,’ which is God’s intention for that thing, its inner essence which makes it distinctively itself and at the same time draws it towards the divine realm” (Ware 2004, 160, my italics.) As Lossky has put it, the world, “created in order that it might be deified, is dynamic, tending always towards its final end, predestined in the [logoi]” (Lossky 1957, 101). There is also in this tradition something that seems to echo the notion of miracles as regime-change phenomena. There is a belief that the “natural” world has suffered a transformation in “the Fall” (not necessarily interpreted as a historical event1) and will undergo another when its eschatological fulfilment is accomplished. In this sense, the world as we experience it is seen in Orthodox theology as being far from what God originally intended and ultimately wills, so that in a sense it should be seen as “sub-natural” (Nellas 1997). The traditional Eastern interpretation of the “garments of skin” given by God to Adam and Eve after their disobedience is that they represent our present, sub-natural, psychosomatic make-up, and that this make-up is reflected in the entire sub-natural world in which we find ourselves (in which there is what the Western Christian tradition would call “natural evil.”) Miracles, for this tradition are often seen as a restoration of the world’s “natural” state i.e. as an anticipation of its eschatological transformation, its return to its “natural” state (Knight 2007, 86-95, c.f. Knight 2008). My argument in The God of Nature (Knight 2007) is that my philosophical arguments about strong theistic naturalism and these essentially theological insights may be brought together in a new

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In the Origenist tradition – which has had a significant effect on Eastern Christian thinking despite aspects of it being considered heretical – there is a strong sense that the Fall represents a descent into this space-time world, not an event within it. In this sense it is seen, not as a historical event but as something meta-historical.

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synthesis, in which the distinction between special and general divine action is made redundant. This argument is, as the reader might expect, not a simple one of the kind that can be presented here in detail, and those interested must, therefore, be referred to the book. One of the things that has happened since the book’s publication may, however, be helpful to those who read it now. This is that within the Western, and specifically Catholic, tradition, a study based on the old scholastic distinction between primary and secondary causation––Denis Edwards’s How God Acts (Edwards 2010)––has come to much the same conclusion as I have about the redundancy of the old distinction between general and special divine action. Reading his book side by side with my own will give the reader an additional perspective within which to understand my own arguments about the way in which this distinction constitutes a kind of category mistake.

A Theology of the World’s Faiths One aspect of the argument of my book is that the naturalistic element of its approach is relevant to developing a theology of the world’s faith traditions (Knight 2007, 40-68). This insight is based at least partly on the way in which theologians like Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar have explored the visionary aspect of revelatory experience, but here these insights are interpreted from the perspective of the general model of divine action that I have developed. This was done in the book from a specifically Christian perspective, however, and it was only after its publication that I clarified those aspects of my approach that could be used from the perspective of any faith tradition. This was done in terms of five theses, first set out in a chapter in a collection of essays (Knight 2010, 30) and subsequently expressed, in a journal article, in terms of the insights of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Knight 2013, 63). The five theses are as follows: 1) The human psyche may be understood in principle entirely in terms of the development of the cosmos through natural processes from the Big Bang to the evolutionary emergence of specifically human qualities. All experiences that give the impression of being revelatory of a divine reality are the spontaneous, natural products of the human psyche, and do not require any notion of “special” divine action to explain them. 2) These experiences are culturally-conditioned, in that their specific forms will relate to both the individual psychological make-up and

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culturally-determined expectations of those who receive them. These factors are sufficient to explain why, in different individuals and cultural contexts, there is considerable diversity in the types of such experience and of the religious languages that arise from them. 3) The belief of most religious people, that their faith’s foundational religious experiences have given rise to a religious language that is genuinely referential to a divine reality, is a valid one. This divine reality––as something to which reference can validly be made––is therefore ontologically defensible. 4) The diversity of the religious languages that arise from different revelatory experiences does not imply that they cannot all validly refer to the divine reality. A pluralistic understanding of their referential success is possible. 5) The cosmos, in which the revelation-oriented human psyche has arisen naturalistically, is attributable to the “will” or character of the divine reality to which authentic revelatory experience bears witness. (As those of the Abrahamic traditions might put it, the probability that some creatures would come to know their creator was built into the cosmos, by that creator, from the very beginning). Behind these five theses lies the notion of what––by analogy with ecological niches––I have called the psycho-cultural niches within which revelatory experiences arise. As I put it in the first book in which this concept was explored, the core of this idea is that “just as life is potentially multiform, and will arise and develop new forms ‘spontaneously’ through natural (chemical and biological) processes in accordance with the possibilities inherent in a given ecological environment, so revelation–– psychological in mechanism, but also in part genuinely referential––is also potentially multiform. It too will arise and develop new forms ‘spontaneously’ through natural (psychological) processes, in accordance with the possibilities inherent in a given cultural and psychological environment. Whether we are considering life or revelation, however, neither spontaneity nor naturalness precludes a theological explanation in terms of divine action through the sacramental potential of the cosmos (Knight 2001, 114). The term “sacramental” here is, in fact, at the heart of my whole approach, for it relates not simply to the sacraments of the church but to the theological principle which––for the Eastern Orthodox tradition and also for some Western theologians like Arthur Peacocke––lies at the heart

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of any profound understanding of these sacraments. For Peacocke, there is “a real convergence between the implications of the scientific perspective on the capabilities of matter and the sacramental view of matter which Christians have adopted … Briefly, it looks as though Christians, starting, as it were, from one end of their experience of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit acting on the stuff of the world, have developed an insight into matter which is consonant with that which is now evoked by the scientific perspective working from matter towards persons, and beyond” (Peacocke 1986, 124). The Orthodox may not usually come to this insight from the same direction, but Peacocke’s sense of the sacramentality of the created order is certainly reflected in their thought. For Philip Sherrard, for example, “what is indicated or revealed in the sacrament is something universal, the intrinsic sanctity or spirituality of all things, what one might call their real nature” (Sherrard 1966, 134). For Alexander Schmemann the sacrament is, quite simply, “a revelation of the genuine nature of creation” (Schmemann 1987, 33). It is this vision of the “genuine nature of creation” that has given rise to all that I have written in this essay and elsewhere. Whether it is an authentic vision or otherwise is for the reader to judge.

Bibliography Dawkins, Richard, 2004. The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Edwards, Denis, 2010. How God Acts: Creation, Redemption, and Special Divine Action. Minneapolis, Fortress Press. Gould, Stephen Jay, 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: Norton. Knight, Christopher C., 2001. Wrestling With the Divine: Religion, Science, and Revelation. Minneapolis, Fortress Press. —. 2007. The God of Nature: Incarnation and Contemporary Science. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. —. 2008. The Fallen Cosmos: An Aspect of Eastern Christian Thought and its Relevance to the Dialogue Between Science and Theology, Theology and Science 6, 305-315. —. 2010. Homo Religiosus: A Theological Proposal for a Scientific and Pluralistic Age, in Murphy, Nancey, and Knight, Christopher C, eds., Human Identity at the Intersection of Science, Technology and Religion. Farnham: Ashgate, 25-38.

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—. 2013. Biological Evolution and the Universality of Spiritual Experience: Pluralistic Implications of a New Approach to the Thought of Teilhard de Chardin, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 48, 58-70. Lossky, Vladimir, 1957. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke. Moore, Aubrey L. 1889. Science and Faith. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. Morris, Simon Conway, 2003. Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Need, Stephen W., 2003. Rereading the Prologue: Incarnation and Creation in John 1:1-18, Theology 106, 397-404. Nellas, Panayiotis, 1997. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Human Person. Crestwood: St.Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Peacocke, Arthur, 1986. God and the New Biology. London: Dent and Sons —. 1993. Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Human and Divine. London SCM. Polkinghorne, John, 1986. One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology. London: SPCK. Russell, Robert John, 2002. Bodily Resurrection, Eschatology and Scientific Cosmology, in Peters, Ted, Russell, Robert John, and Welker, Michael, eds., Resurrection: Theological and Scientific Assessments. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Saunders, Nicholas, 2002. Divine Action and Modern Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmemann, Alexander. 1987. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, Crestwood N.Y.: St.Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Sherrard, Philip. 1966. The Sacrament, in A.J.Philippou, ed., The Orthodox Ethos: Essays in Honour of the Centenary of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, vol.1. Oxford: Holywell Press. Thunberg, Lars, 1985. Man and the Cosmos: The Vision of St.Maximus the Confessor. Crestwood N.Y., St.Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Ware, Kallistos, 2004. God Immanent yet transcendent: The Divine Energies according to St.Gregory Palamas, in Clayton, Philip, and Peacocke, Arthur, eds., In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 157-168. Wildman, Wesley, 2006. Robert John Russell’s Theology of God’s Action, in Peters, Ted, and Hallanger, Nathan, eds. God’s Action in the World: Essays in Honour of Robert John Russell. Aldershot, Ashgate.

EPILOGUE THE SCIENCE AND RELIGION FORUM: A SHORT HISTORY JEFFREY ROBINSON

The Science and Religion Forum (SRF) had its inception in a series of discussions involving scientists, theologians and clergy which took place in Oxford in the early 1970s. The object of these discussions was to identify a way of facilitating the dialogue on the relationship of scientific knowledge to religious faith and practice. As a result of these discussions the Forum was formally established at a meeting in Durham in 1975. The key figure in the early discussions was Arthur Peacocke who was to become the Forum’s first Chairman, and later a Vice President and then President. The Forum grew steadily in size in its early years and was awarded charitable status in 1994. By the early 2000s it had grown to well over 300 members but the merging of the ‘Christ in the Cosmos Initiative’ (CCI) with the Forum in 2003 added an additional 100 members in that year. CCI had been founded by the Revd Bill Gowland, former Chairman of the Methodist Conference, with the aim of bringing scientific knowledge to the layman; but in 2003 it seems to have taken the view, in the light of declining membership numbers, that it might be better to meet this aim by joining with the Forum. The merger took effect in 2005: CCI transferred its financial assets to the Forum and expressed the hope that the Forum might be willing to continue the annual Gowland Lecture which CCI had established in honour of its founder. This the Forum agreed to do, and the Gowland Lecture, open to the public, has become an important feature of each year’s annual conference. SRF exists to promote discussion between scientific understanding and religious thought on issues at the interface of science and religion, and membership is open to people of any religion or none. Right from the start the annual conference has been the Forum’s main activity, and there have so far been 38 annual conferences held at different locations across the UK. The Forum has tried to provide a balance between north and south in

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choosing locations and eighteen have been used in total: five of these, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Chester, and the High Leigh Conference Centre in Hoddesden, have each hosted the conference at least three times. The topics covered by the conferences have included most of the key themes in the science and religion debate, but four broad areas have predominated: physical sciences/ cosmology-related topics: man and his place in the universe: evolutionary/ biological sciences-related topics; and divine action (the topic for 2013 but also discussed in 1978 and 1991). A number of conferences have been jointly organised with other bodies including the British Ecological Society (1996), the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1997), the Ian Ramsey Centre and the Cavendish Laboratory (2005), the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology (2010), and Cumberland Lodge, Windsor (2011). Publication has become a major activity for the Forum. This began in 1982 when, at the Guildford meeting that year, it was decided to publish Reviews in Science and Religion. The first issue appeared in June 1982 and May 2013 saw the publication of issue no 62 in the series. Originally it was intended that Reviews should contain articles that had already appeared elsewhere, and this policy was followed during the first 15 years of publication (the period of office of the first editor). Reviews began to change with the inclusion of specially commissioned articles, and now consists mainly of original reviews of books in the science and religion area, together with longer commissioned articles on the ideas expressed in a particular (not necessarily new) book. Reviews has become an important part of the Forum’s activities, and for this SRF owes much to the sterling efforts of the four members who have held the post of editor during the last 31 years. The publication of SRF conference proceedings is a comparatively recent addition to this publishing activity, and began with the proceedings of the 2006 conference on Creation and the Abrahamic Faiths. Published proceedings have been produced every year since then, with the exception of the proceedings of the joint conference with ESSSAT in 2010, and the present volume represents the sixth in the series. The full list of volumes published to date (all by Cambridge Scholars Publishing) is as follows: Creation and the Abrahamic Faiths (ed N. Spurway) 2008 Theology, Evolution and the Mind (ed N. Spurway) 2009 Matter and Meaning: is Matter sacred or profane (ed M. Fuller) 2010 Darwinism and Natural Theology: evolving perspectives (ed A. Robinson) 2012 Inspiration in Science and Religion (ed M. Fuller) 2012.

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The Concept of the Soul: Scientific and Religious Perspectives (ed M. Fuller) 2014. When the Revd Dr Arthur Peacocke died in 2006 SRF received a generous bequest from his estate. The Forum encourages student membership, and the Peacocke Bequest allowed the Forum to establish an annual student essay prize competition as an important part of its activities designed to reach out to students. The prize is offered for an essay directly relevant to the theme of the Forum’s annual conference, and is open to all undergraduate and post-graduate students in full or part-time education. Throughout its existence SRF has benefitted from having in its membership some of the leading thinkers in the field of science and religion. This, along with the many others who have spoken at the Forum’s annual conferences, has been an important contributory factor in allowing the Forum to realise its aims and achieve its current standing.

CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Barrett worked in plasma physics for thirty years in the UK, USA and South Africa. Since retiring in 1994 he has been active in the field of science-and-theology, first in the UKZN School of Physics and, more recently, in the UKZN School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics. He has written Science and Theology since Copernicus (Continuum, 2004) and a number of papers for South African theological journals. Peter Colyer is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Christianity and Culture, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and a former Secretary of the Science and Religion Forum. He is author of The Prescientific Bible (Circle Books, 2013) and The Self-emptying God (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Philip Clayton, Ingraham Professor at Claremont School of Theology, holds a joint PhD in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Yale University. He has held guest professorships at the University of Munich, University of Cambridge, and Harvard University. The author of several dozen books and several hundred articles, he specializes in theology and science, comparative theologies, and constructive Christian theology. Mike Fuller holds degrees in Chemistry and Theology. He is Pantonian Professor at the Theological Institute of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and an Honorary Fellow of New College, University of Edinburgh. He has published numerous articles on the interrelationships of science and religion, and is the author and editor of a number of books in the area, including Atoms and Icons, Is Religion Natural? and two three previous volumes in the Cambridge Scholars Publishing Conversations in Science and Religion series. Mark Harris is Lecturer in Science and Religion at the University of Edinburgh, and is responsible for Edinburgh’s MSc programme in Science and Religion. He is an experimental physicist who has latterly turned to biblical studies and theological topics. He is particularly interested in the theology and interpretation of miracles, and in the way that scientific

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catastrophism has become a driving force in popular interpretations of the Bible. Mark Hart is Rector of Plemstall and Guilden Sutton, Chester. He has degrees in Mathematics, Aerodynamics and Theology and was ordained after 10 years of aerodynamics research in the automotive and power generation industries. He is the author of Straight to the Pointlessness, published by Bloomsbury. Louise Hickman lectures in Philosophy and Ethics at Newman University, Birmingham. She is the editor of Reviews in Science and Religion, the journal of the UK’s Science and Religion Forum. She has published several articles most notably on late Eighteenth Century thought and is currently writing a monograph entitled Eighteenth Century Dissent and Cambridge Platonism. Christopher C. Knight received a doctorate in astrophysics before getting a degree in theology. Having been an Anglican priest for many years - his last post being that of Chaplain, Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge - he is now a priest of the Orthodox Church. He works as the Executive Secretary of the International Society for Science and Religion and is a Research Associate of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge. His most recent book is The God of Nature: Incarnation and Contemporary Science (Fortress 2007). Daniel R. Langton is Professor of the History of Jewish-Christian Relations at the University of Manchester and co-director of its Centre for Jewish Studies. He is Secretary of the European Association for Jewish Studies and co-editor of the Jewish Studies journal Melilah. He is currently writing on Jewish theological engagement with Darwinian Theory. His main publications include Claude Montefiore: His Life and Thought (Vallentine Mitchell, 2002) and The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He was co-editor of the Judaism section of Springer's Encyclopedia of Science and Religion (2013). Jeffrey Robinson completed a PhD in zoology at the University of Edinburgh. He has worked at the universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh where he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship in the School

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of Biological Sciences in 2006. He has been Secretary of the SRF since 2011. Bethany Sollereder gained her master’s degree from Regent College in Vancouver and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research is centred on the problem of evolutionary theodicy. She has published in various journals including Theology and Science, and Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith as well as being a regular contributor to Reviews in Science and Religion.  Bertrand Souchard is a lecturer in the Catholic University of Lyon (France) where he has a Chair in Science and Religion. He has published several books, the two most recent of which are 42 Questions sur Dieu, Des Réponses Simples et Concrètes sur le Christianisme (Salvator, 2007) and Dieu et la Science en Questions, Ni Créationnisme, ni Matérialisme, (Presses de la renaissance, 2010).

INDEX

altruism, 101, 107, 110 anthropocentrism, 69, 71 Aquinas, Thomas, 98, 109, 133 Aristotle, 55, 95-8 artificial intelligence, 123 ascension, 23, 39, 41 atheism, 7, 91, 98 Attfield, Robin, 63 Augustine, 33, 61f, 122, 132f Baillie, John, 104 Barbour, Ian, 118, 137, 139 Barrett, Justin, 48 Basil of Caesarea, 122 Berger, Peter, 53 Big Bang, 23f, 116, 141, 144 Borodin, Leonid, 50 Boyle, Robert, 123 Brown, William P., 74 Brownlee, Donald, 105 Calvin, John, 115f Caputo, John, 18 Cartwright, Nancy, 124 Cather, Willa, 19 causation, primary and secondary, 65, 144 chance, 1, 62, 70, 83, 116, 138-41 chaos theory, 123, 139 Clayton, Philip, 22, 38, 53 climate change, 72 Coakley, Sarah, 101, 106-9, 112 cognitive science of religion, 48 consciousness, 9, 55, 86, 90, 102, 135 Constantinople, Council of, 97 Copernicus, 105 Corey, Michael, 69

creation (see also God, as creator; God, as immanent in creation), 5, 10, 12, 29, 62-70, 74, 76, 81, 84, 88, 92, 95, 97f, 103-5, 110-2, 117, 119, 125-8, 131f, 142, 146 as revelation of God, 106, 146 co-creation, 68, 76 creatio continua, 28, 65, 67 ex nihilo, 28, 62-4, 131 flourishing of, 67, 71, 73 freedom of, 8, 71f, 75f, 116-9, 134 God's concern for, 1, 8, 11, 13, 70, 131 integrity of, 65, 134f narrative of, 86, 101, 104, 125 new, 21f, 28-36, 38, 40, 42, 64, 67f, 76, 106, 119, 125 out of chaos, 64 purpose of, 66, 71, 73 relationship to God, 8, 65, 98, 109f, 119, 131, 133 special, 138 Creationism, 12, 66 cryonics, 123 Cunningham, Conor, 135 Darwin, Charles, 61, 79ff, 84, 91, 105, 138 Dawkins, Richard, 7, 47, 141 Deane-Drummond, Celia, 111 deism, 1, 11, 132, 137, 138, 141 Descartes, Rene, 97 determinism, 116, 123, 139 dualism, 3, 64, 97ff Dunn, James, 41 Dyson, Freeman, 25, 29

158 Edwards, Denis, 111 Ellis, George, 17 emergence, 3, 9, 59, 81, 84, 86, 92, 102, 105, 110, 142, 144 empiricism, 121, 123, 126, 127 energy, 95ff, 133, 135 Enlightenment, 83 environment, 23, 69, 72, 145 Epicurus, 98 eschatology (see also resurrection), 21ff, 56, 67f, 76, 106, 119, 143 Evil, problem of, 8-11, 15, 28, 31ff, 63ff, 79, 87-92, 115, 119 non-human animal suffering, 62, 66ff, evolution, 8f, 34, 48, 59, 62ff, 79, 84, 86, 92, 102, 106ff, 116, 138, 141, 144 theory of, 59, 81-4, 91f, 107, 138, 143 extinction, 23, 69, 71ff Farrer, Austin, 109 Foster, Michael, 105 freewill (see also creation, freedom of), 8, 62f, 87, 90, 92, 110, 117f Freud, Sigmund, 105 Gärdenfors, Peter, 105 Gnosticism, 25 God (see also creation; kenosis, Omega Point, panentheism, pantheism), 84f, 91f, 95ff, 104ff, 108ff, 115-25, 127, 131ff, 13643 arguments for the existence of, 108, 137f as creator, 5, 35, 41, 62, 64, 69, 84, 105f, 111, 116, 132, 134, 138f, 145 as first cause, 65, 87, 91 as ground of being, 140 co-suffering of, 66, 68, 76 divine will, 84, 115f, 132, 143, 145 experience of, 10, 55f, 145

Index goodness of, 92, 96 hiddenness of, 87, 118 immanence in creation, 85, 95, 98f, 109, 132f, 138 immutability of, 140 in relation to creation, 65, 70f, 73f, 119 love of, 19, 62, 65f, 68, 71f, 87, 97, 105f, 112, 119, 132, 134 of the gaps, 135, 137f omnipotence, 25, 63, 105, 109, 118 omniscience, 25, 72, 109 transcendence, 95, 98, 132 Trinity, 101, 106-12 Gould, Stephen Jay, 141 Gregersen, Niels Henrik, 102, 110f Hamilton, W. D., 107 Harrison, Peter, 46 Haught, John, 65, 120 Hawking, Stephen, 115 hermeneutics, 32, 36-42, 112 Hewlett, Martinez, 67 Holocaust, 92 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 133 human nature (see also human nature), 83, 103, 108-10, 144 uniqueness of, 105, 119, 144 Hume, David, 46, 121ff, 124, 126ff imagination, 102-6, 110, 112 imago Dei (see also, human nature), 104f incarnation, 72, 97f, 102, 105-11, 133f, 142 indeterminacy, 123, 135, 139 information, 25, 28, 48, 111 Intelligent Design, 12, 66, 138 intuition, 51, 103f, 106 Irenaeus, 106 James, William, 55 Jonas, Hans, 79, 92 Kabbalism, 85, 87, 92

Chance or Providence: Religious Perspectives on Divine Action Kaplan, Mordecai, 79, 92 kenosis, 11, 18, 111, 116-20 Knapp, Steven, 9-11, 13, 22, 38, 53 language as metaphorical, 26, 41 Law, Jeremy, 102, 106 laws of nature, 8f, 30-41, 45f, 63, 121-28, 132, 139f, 142 Leibniz, Gottfried W., 97 Lewis, C. S., 45f, 54f Licona, Michael, 41f Locke, John, 91 love, 19, 34, 36, 41, 55f, 65f, 73, 106f, 111 MacDonald, George, 104 Macquarrie, John, 101 materialism, 89ff, 97ff, 135 Maximus the Confessor, 97, 142 McCabe, Herbert, 133 McDaniel, Jay, 67 McGilchrist, Iain, 56, 59 McIntyre, John, 104, 106 Meyer, Stephen, 12 mind (see also neuroscience), 25, 48, 53, 55, 57, 59, 86, 90, 95, 101ff, 106, 111, 135 mind-body relationship, 9, 90 miracles, 6, 15, 21, 40, 45, 47, 50, 65, 119, 121, 123-8, 131, 135f, 142f as part of divine law, 126 as signs, 66, 125, 127 as special interventions, 8, 19, 66, 125, 134f, 137ff as trangressions of laws of nature, 122 as transformative events, 49f as transgressions of laws of nature, 45-50, 123-5, 128, 132 community-based approach to, 127f Mithen, Steven, 102 Moltmann, Jürgen, 67f

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Moore, Aubrey, 138 morality, 7, 9, 81, 90, 108, 110ff Morris, Simon Conway, 141 Murphy, Nancey, 17 natural selection, 61, 63, 81, 107, 116 natural theology, 79, 101, 106, 108ff, 137 naturalism, 140-4 neuroscience, 56-9 Newton, Isaac, 137, 139 Nietzsche, 1 Nowak, Martin, 101, 107f Nussbaum, Martha, 55 O’Collins, Gerald, 34ff, 40 Omega Point, 25, 34 Oord, Thomas, 64 Page, Ruth, 65f, 70ff Palamas, Gregory, 97 Paley, William, 138 panentheism, 84, 87, 91f, 141ff pantheism, 91, 97ff, 132 Peacocke, Arthur, 22, 63, 66, 109f, 139f, 145f Peters, Ted, 67 Plato, 64, 98f pneumatology, 108, 111 Polanyi, Michael, 103, 127f Polkinghorne, John, 17, 22, 26-42, 56, 105, 109f, 139, 142 Pollard, William, 139 process theology, 1, 64, 92, 118, 131 providence, 6f, 9, 36, 61, 134ff and chaos theory, 17, 139 and human consciousness, 9f, 53, 59 and laws of nature, 11, 17 and quantum indeterminacy, 17, 139 and religious language, 7f, 12ff, 17ff

160 as continuing creation, 65, 67, 132 as divine lure, 10, 19, 65, 72ff, 112, 120 as fine tuning, 124 as general influence, 139 as guiding influence, 5, 15 as organising principle, 85f, 88, 91f, 111, 143 as participatory, 10f, 71 as relational, 65 as sovereignty, 115, 131 as special intervention, 12 as upholding, 70, 132 belief in as justified, 16 general, 137, 139, 141, 143 grounded in love, 62 open theist approach, 3, 70, 72 primary and secondary causality, 109 socio-political-ethical aspects of, 50, 115 special, 142ff

Index salvation, 4, 73, 131f, 135 Saunders, Nicholas, 53, 139f Sherrard, Philip, 146 Sherry, Patrick, 112 Sorabji, Richard, 54 soul, 25, 28, 96, 104, 124 Southgate, Christopher, 67f, 111 Spinoza, 91 Spitzer, Robert J., 55 Steiner, George, 108 Stoicism, 54f, 59, 98, 122 Stump, Eleonore, 74 Taylor, John Vernon, 102, 105, 110f Teilhard de Chardin, P., 34, 144 teleology, 68ff, 84f, 88f, 93, 98, 143 theodicy (see also, evil, problem of), 10, 62, 67ff theology of nature, 111, 137 thermodynamics, 32f, 97 time, 8, 25, 28, 31, 33, 56, 72, 109 Tipler, 25, 29 Tracy, Thomas F., 17 transhumanism, 123

quantum mechanics, 123, 139 Rahner, Karl, 144 Raine, Kathleen, 111 realism, 25, 34, 40, 42 reason, 89, 103f, 106 redemption, 28, 62, 67ff, 71-6, 106 religious experience, 58, 137, 145 religious language, 25f, 40, 145 resurrection, 21-42, 96, 133f revelation, 117, 119, 137, 144ff Russell, Robert J., 16, 22, 26-42, 68, 142

virtue (see also, morality), 83, 96 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 112, 144 Ward, Keith, 122 Ward, Peter, 105 Whitehead, Alfred North, 112 Wildman, Wesley J., 8, 70, 140f Wilkinson, David, 22, 26f, 35-42 Williams, Rowan, 54, 131ff Wilson, E. O., 7 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 79ff Wrede, Wilhelm, 39 Wright, Tom, 41, 104