Abstract
Miracle accounts are found in most—if not all—religions, providing a promising topic for a scholarly comparison of religions. My focus is the concept of divine action in Christian theology, in which the idea of miracles is one of the many forms of how Christians such as me think about the diversity of God’s action in creating and redeeming the world. The credibility of miracles was seriously challenged by the rise of the natural sciences and Enlightenment philosophy. This led to a profound split between conservative and liberal Christian theologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Conservatives accept miracles as objective events in nature, even if they conflict with science, while liberals seek harmony with science, even if it reduces miracles to subjective interpretations of ordinary natural processes. In this paper I will explore a new approach to divine action based on contemporary quantum mechanics. This approach overcomes the split between conservatives and liberals on divine action. It includes the conservative commitment to viewing miracles as objective events in nature and the liberal commitment to harmony with science. I call this “non-interventionist objective divine action” (NIODA). It depicts God acting objectively in nature to affect the flow of natural processes but in a way that is consistent with the theories of natural science. In this paper I will lay out the arguments in favor of QM-NIODA and respond to a number of important challenges that require further reflection.
This paper arose out of my lecture for “The Comparison Project,” a program in comparative philosophy of religion at Drake University directed by Timothy Knepper. The 2017–2019 series, organized and facilitated by Karen Zwier and David Weddle, explored the theme of miracles from the perspective of different religious traditions and sciences. A previous version of this paper was published in Russell 2018 (which I thank Fortress Press for permission to reuse). The present version is highly edited and includes extensive new material. I thank Karen Zwier and David Weddle for their extensive editorial comments on the previous version of this paper, which have been invaluable to me, and for which I am very grateful.
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Notes
- 1.
“A portent (miracle), therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature” (Augustine, 1887 [426], book XX1, ch. 8).
- 2.
For an interpretation of Aquinas by a leading, contemporary, Dominican scholar, see Dodds, 2012, p. 247–258 (especially p. 253).
- 3.
Schleiermacher actually gives an extensive and nuanced discussion of miracles in The Christian Faith in which their dependence on God and the whole of nature is clearly construed (Schleiermacher, 1986, pp. 170, 178–184).
- 4.
Timothy McGrew describes four types of criticism: why should Hume’s definition be privileged over earlier ones, what kind of “natural laws” are being assumed, do such laws actually exist, and what does their violation mean.
- 5.
As Pannenberg writes: “The proleptic character of the Christ event … [signifies that] the resurrection of Jesus is indeed infallibly the dawning of the end of history … the onset of the end had occurred only in a preliminary way, happening in Jesus himself … for the rest of us, the resurrection of the dead, which already happened to Jesus, is still outstanding” (Pannenberg, 1970–1971, vol. 2, p. 24). See also Ted Peters: With the term prolepsis, “the gospel is understood as announcing the preactualization of the future consummation of all things in Jesus Christ…. As prolepsis, he [Jesus Christ] embodies the promise because he anticipates in his person the new life that we humans and all creation are destined to share” (Peters, 2015, p. 608).
- 6.
Dilley’s essay was highly formative for me in the years preceding the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences / Vatican Observatory series on “scientific perspectives on divine action,” in which I was to create my response “QM-NIODA.”
- 7.
In her analysis of these theologians (on pages 68–74) Murphy is careful to stress the complexity of their views and the fact that they do not fit neatly into a rigid conservative/liberal typology. Nevertheless a typology such as this is useful to give an overview of the problem and its prevalence in modern theology—and in the church communities.
- 8.
Murphy also offers a way forward using the theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, the philosophy of science of Imre Lakatos, and post-foundationalist epistemologies. See Murphy, 1990. Also see Murphy’s contributions to the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences / Vatican Observatory series on “scientific perspectives on divine action”
- 9.
As I discussed above, I fully believe God can also act in truly miraculous ways, but that is not the subject of this chapter. Still my use of both NIODA and miracles can raise some very important “push-back” questions that I must eventually address. For example, as Karen Zwier wrote in a very helpful comment to an earlier draft of this paper: “If a person (such as you) believes in both ‘truly miraculous’ action and NIODA, how do we know which way God is acting for which types of events. Is there some theory about this? For biblical miracles, are we to understand them as ‘truly miraculous’ (i.e. interventionist) or are they instances of NIODA? What about contemporary Christian claims to miracles, such as healings? What about answered prayers? What kinds of events fall into either category? And why do we need two categories at all?” My short response to these excellent questions is that the term miracles was used in the tradition to refer to especially important and revelatory events of divine action without an adequate stress on their eschatological context, leaving unclarified the distinction between the context of eschatology and the context of creation that most contemporary theologians make. I develop this in terms of miracles as the proleptic domain of the new creation within the context of the current creation. I intend to write more fully on this distinction in the future.
- 10.
Technically Ψ is a complex variable (typically Ψ = x + iy, where x and y are real variables, i = √ (− 1), and its “square” is Ψ*Ψ (where Ψ* = x – iy). Thus Ψ*Ψ = x2 + y2.
- 11.
This move is typically called “inference to the best explanation.” See Douven, 2011.
- 12.
- 13.
Such a possibility is explored in detail in Russell & Moritz, 2018.
- 14.
- 15.
A simple example is a Stern-Gerlach apparatus. See http://www.quantumphysicslady.org/glossary/stern-gerlach-device/. Last visited on May 6, 2021.
- 16.
Of course in any finite sample such as this, the actual results can vary from the expected, 50/50 result. This complicates the meaning of “counterfactual” but in ways that would take us too far afield for this short chapter.
- 17.
In 2008 Wesley J. Wildman offered a similar analysis of the aspects of a quantum event and the possibilities for divine action they represent but without reference to Wegter-McNelly’s publication (Wildman, 2008, pp. 158–159; see especially fig. 3, option #1 [“God could initiate measurement events”], and option #3 [“God could select an outcome state”].
- 18.
I am grateful for private conversations with Wegter-McNelly about this point.
- 19.
As Karen Zwier pointed out (private communications) there are plenty of theoretical physicists who do not subscribe to PSR. That is precisely why Copenhagen is the mainstream view. While this is a very important point, it does not mean that no theoretical physicists subscribe to PSR. In fact, William Stoeger, S. J., whom I refer to in later in this paragraph, did subscribe to it and therefore expected that a new non-local hidden variable theory would eventually be found to replace current QM (private communications).
- 20.
Private communications.
- 21.
For example, see Russell, 2012.
- 22.
- 23.
There is an ongoing debate about the extent to which quantum events are amplified to produce specific effects in the macroscopic world, e.g., Jeffrey Koperski’s work, which I discuss in the next section (13.6).
- 24.
See “Schrödinger’s cat” on p. 332 of the Glossary in Russell, Clayton, Wegter-McNelly, and Polkinghorne, 2011.
- 25.
- 26.
According to Koperski, “quantum determination does work as a mechanism for theistic evolution. If that’s all one wants from quantum mechanical randomness, I have no objection. There is, however, a large gap between a mechanism-for-theistic-evolution on one hand and a robust-model-of-divine-action on the other” (Koperski, 2015, p. 381).
- 27.
Before closing this discussion, I would like to return briefly to Koperski’s challenge to the amplification issue and offer a clarifying terminological distinction. I will refer to the kind of amplification about which Koperski cautions as “immediate,” “sudden,” or “vertical” amplification (think again of the example of the eye registering a single photon) and distinguish it from what I call “temporally long-range” or “lateral” amplification (think of the evolution of species on earth over billions of years). Returning to the theological significance of all this, the instances of special providence resulting from vertical amplification might be limited, as Koperski suggests, but this limitation does not seem to apply to special providence resulting from lateral amplification from genetics/molecular biology to macro evolution/speciation as discussed by theistic evolution and as pertaining to the 3.8-billion-year history of the evolution of life on earth.
- 28.
However, in the gospel of Mark a miracle can occur regardless of whether those who witness it already have faith in Jesus. Jesus often commands his disciples to keep his divinity a secret (i.e., the “Messianic Secret”).
- 29.
See Peacocke, 1999.
- 30.
John Polkinghorne discusses a scenario similar to this in Polkinghorne, 1994, pp. 25–26, 77.
- 31.
Let me close this section by stressing that QM-NIODA—indeed, any serious theory of divine action—leads to the challenge of theodicy: the existence of moral and natural evil in the world in which God acts. There simply is no room to explore this challenge here, but many of us in theology and science have written on it in the past, and I for one intend to continue to pursue it in the future. As the reader might guess, my approach is to turn to eschatology to provide a theological framework in which the challenge of theodicy can be adjudicated. See for example, the essays in Murphy et al., 2007, as well as Russell, 2008.
- 32.
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Russell, R.J. (2022). Non-interventionist Objective Divine Action and Quantum Mechanics. In: Zwier, K.R., Weddle, D.L., Knepper, T.D. (eds) Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion. Comparative Philosophy of Religion, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14865-1_13
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