Gregory raised the question of occasionalism in a reply to the last post, hinting at its presence in the BioLogos leadership and asking me about the alternatives to it in the pre-evolutionary era. Historical philosophy is a bit above my pay-grade, but it might be useful to discuss it in view of the ongoing question of divine agency in evolution. So here’s my overview for proper historians and philosophers to come back with corrections.Gregory writes:
Falk often speaks of Gods ever-present indirect action through natural processes. This can be seen as a form of occasionalism as well.
I really don’t agree that this is occasionalism, and certainly wouldn’t pin that in any form on Darrel Falk. Occasionalism, the idea that God is the only real cause of events, was never a mainstream view in Christendom (a few of the later Ockhamists excepted, I read). Rather it was proposed by the 11th century Muslim scholar al-Ghazali, and became prevalent in Islam, with the result that, combined with a view of God’s sovereignty amounting to arbitrary caprice, it has been the common explanation for the complete eclipse of Muslim science from that time. It also accounts for that strand of Islamic fatalism one comes across sometimes: “It is the will of Allah” (shrugs and wanders across busy highway).
In Europe, particularly under the influence of Thomas Aquinas, a different idea prevailed, based on the idea of secondary causes. God creates all things with propensities built into their nature: stones by their nature fall, lions by nature hunt and so on. God is ultimately the cause of every event, because he sustains everything, including every cause, in existence. That concept of sustaining, which had its roots in the Bible long before Aquinas, lies behind Darrel Falk’s statement of the BioLogos position against William Dembski. In fact Dembski takes it as a given and did not mention it in his article simply because it is irrelevant to the idea of divine government: that is why it is not occasionalism, which is everything to do with hands-on management. Aquinas held that God is the first cause even of sinful human acts, yet is not morally responsible for them. His arguments for this don’t matter here, but it shows that “sustaining” has only an indirect reference to the outworking of God’s will in the world.
The mediaeval philosophers held that this primary causation does not preclude God’s acting separately, for example by miracle. So though they knew that the nature of plagues is to kill, they still attributed particular plagues to God’s specific judgement on sin, rather than solely on the disease acting out its nature. The Reformers (I think) codified this theologically in relation to the Bible. They noted that though lions hunt by nature, the psalmist said their prey was provided, or withheld, by God. Though sparrows by nature die, the individual circumstances are attributed by Jesus to God’s providential will. Thus they distinguished general providence – God’s creation and sustaining of the various natures of things – and special providence, which was God’s direct action not just in signs and wonders, but in his government of the everyday world both of men, and of “nature” too.
With the rise of Newtonian science, the concept of “natures” was largely replaced with that of “natural law” – stones fall because of a law of attraction, not an inbuilt propensity. This led, maybe directly, to the Deistic idea of a mechanical creation. God’s creation was effectively limited to the initial making of things, and the provision of the laws by which they operate. His sustaining role in creation was sidelined, and his special providence, eventually, denied by mainstream science in what was becoming a materially deterministic Universe. Deists, I suppose, would argue that the lion is fed because God’s initial setup was so precise as to guarantee his will for the duration of the Universe.
It was in this context that Darwin’s theory arose – but by then the eclipse of providence had left space for the idea of absolute chance, which is why he was able to state evolution as a combination of deterministic law and contingency, without any reference to God’s will. This “chance” element has only been accentuated by the loss of physical determinism through relativity and quantum physics. The result of this is that, even with the re-affirmation of God as First Cause (ie sustaining power or general providence), from my observation the BioLogos “preferred” view of evolution remains a combination of natural laws (in the Deistic sense) and a contingency that is, essentially, independent of God. Miracle, rather than special providence, becomes the only recognised mode of “direct” divine action, and is considered in this view to be unlikely in the realm of nature, and particular of evolution.
It is important at this point to notice that Neodarwinian evolution has no mechanism for producing “desired” outcomes. Law is not deterministic enough, and chance is not under God’s control either, any more than sinful human acts are. That’s why Shapiro’s suggestions of “self-motivated” evolution by organisms are so interesting. In Thomist terms, they would provide organisms with “evolvability” as part of their God-given natures – thus giving an adequate “secondary cause”, which provides evolution with a sound philosophical footing. The discovery of laws of genuine self-organisation would have the same effect, but none have been found which could bear the weight of evolution’s complexity. Yet notice that both these ideas still leave out that other essential part of the equation – the special providence of God. Special providence is what makes God an active participant in his creation, rather than a mere observer, and sustainer, of secondary natures (in Thomist terms) or natural law (in modern terms). Special providence is actually the direct alternative to the modern, post-Deist, concept of “chance”.
I would argue that the main task for TEs is simply to recover the truth of special providence, just as they seem simply to have re-affirmed God’s general providence (sustaining power) over against the Deist/Materialist tradition. R J Russell has partially achieved this through accommodating to materialism’s determinism, simply by placing God’s direct activity in a non-deterministic area of science, quantum theory. To me Elliot Sober’s recent paper has made this unnecessary by showing that excluding God’s activity is a philosophical addition to, and not a scientific requirement of, Neodarwinism. Alvin Plantinga achieves the same end by pointing out that natural law is only “binding” in closed systems – and a Universe that is open to an external God is not closed. He concludes there is no valid objection to God’s acting outside or beyond natural law.
Where does this leave the BioLogos position (since that’s where we started out)? In my view, the lack of an adequate view of special providence, given an acceptance of Neodarwinism as currently held by the “scientific consensus”, is unable to provide an adequate account of God’s achieving his will through evolution. As far as I can see, the most that Darrel Falk allows is the possibility that God might occasionally have acted miraculously during the evolutionary process, but alternatively (and possibly preferably) he might have allowed it to work itself out through the historically Deistic concepts of natural law and chance. He says that neither science nor Scripture give grounds to decide between these alternatives. The first point is true, since the methodological naturalism of science recognises no other possibilities. The second, as I have argued frequently before, is untrue – special providence was a necessary construct from a careful reading of Scripture, and remains so now.
Because of this error, TEs have been forced to construct a theology without special providence, which probably explains the popularity of Open Theism amongst them. To label the gap left by special providence as mere “chance” is a step too far towards the purposelessness of atheistic formulations of evolution, so is replaced with the deeply unsatisfactory half-idea of “freedom”. This only really achieves any kind of coherence in Process Theology, but though that has found a place in the science and religion field, it is obviously incompatible with Evangelical teaching – and so incoherence is preferred.
Philosphical issues have not, as far as I can see, been brought into the frame in any significant way by BioLogos. But as I have tried to argue above, the last major philosophical system that tried seriously to find a bridge between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, that is scholastic Thomism (especially as developed during the Reformation under the greater influence of the Bible) insisted that the gap between God as First Cause (with the creation as a series of secondary causes) and the world that we actually see unfolding around us day by day, needs to be filled with God’s direct creative activity. Otherwise Yahweh is merely the God who exists, rather than the real meaning of his name – the God who is there for us, and for all creation.