Evolutionary Theologies and Divine Action1

Abstract

Two challenges loom large for efforts to develop a theology of evolution. The first is the problem of purpose: can evolutionary processes, in which chance plays so prominent a role, be understood as the context of God's purposive action? The second is the problem of the pervasiveness of suffering and death in evolution. To the extent that we succeed in responding to the first difficulty by giving an account of how God's purposes are enacted in the history of life, we deepen the conundrum about God's relation to natural evils. In particular, if we embrace evolution as God's clever way of making life make itself, we will find it difficult to sustain the classical theological claim that death is a disruptive interloper in God's good creation.     

Minds and Bodies: Human and Divine

Does God have a mind? Western theism has traditionally construed God as an intentional agent who acts on creation and in relation to humankind. God loves, punishes, and redeems. God's intentionality has traditionally been construed in analogy to human intentionality, which in turn has often presumed a supernatural dualism. Developments in cognitive science, however, render supernatural dualism suspect for explaining the human mind. How, then, can we speak of the mind of God? Borrowing from Daniel Dennett's intentional stance, I suggest that analogical reasoning regarding the mind of God be abandoned in favor of an ontologically agnostic approach that treats God as an intentional system. In this approach, God's purposive action is an explanatory feature of the believer's universe, a real pattern that informs our values and beliefs about the world and our place in it.     

What Does it Mean to call God Good?

Contemporary expositions of God's goodness commonly err either (1) by subjecting God to moral laws, which is to question His sovereignty, or (2) by failing to establish that God will always act in accordance with moral principles, which removes the theist's ability to appeal to God's goodness in response to problems of evil. Current attempts at intermediate positions which avoid these two problems fall short. In this paper, I aim to construct a better intermediate position and account of God's goodness. I do this by claiming that God's ability to create is best explained in terms of God's self-love. Since God, as the greatest possible being, must be able to create, He must love Himself. I argue that this in turn entails that God loves all things, since by loving Himself, God loves the pre-existent ideas of everything that will come to exist, and by extension the things themselves. This, I argue, allows us to have confidence that God will act in accordance with moral principles, but without subjecting Him to moral laws.     

Divine Freedom and Free Will Defenses

This paper considers a problem that arises for free will defenses when considering the nature of God's own will. If God is perfectly good and performs praiseworthy actions, but is unable to do evil, then why must humans have the ability to do evil in order to perform such actions? This problem has been addressed by Theodore Guleserian, but at the expense of denying God's essential goodness. I examine and critique his argument and provide a solution to the initial problem that does not require abandoning God's essential goodness.     

Karl Barth and the Purification of Divine Simplicity

Johnson investigates Karl Barth's critical appropriation of the doctrine of divine simplicity. While Barth is critical of traditional formulations of the doctrine, he understands himself to be refining the doctrine rather than rejecting it. Barth notes that Scripture attributes a diverse set of perfections to God in describing his salvific actions. These diverse perfections, however, have a fundamental unity: God does not contradict himself, but rather his perfections describe his unified, trustworthy agency. For this reason, we can know that in God's inmost being, God is not self‐contradictory but utterly unified or simple in his self‐fidelity. Johnson points out that a key element of Barth's doctrine of God is that it can never be the mere deduction of an abstract, transcendent entity; rather, it must begin with the transcendent God's relationship to creation, and therefore must begin with Jesus Christ, who reveals the true being of God. Johnson identifies three guidelines for speaking of Barth's doctrine: each one of God's perfections must be seen as perfections of his one divine being; God's one being does not exist above and behind his revealed perfections; and God's revealed perfections are essential to his divine nature. On this basis, Johnson explores what Barth has to say about the relationship between God's freedom and his self‐fidelity, including as this regards his freedom to live his one eternal life for us.     

Divine Immutability,Divine Action and the God–World Relation

In his thought‐provoking critique of classical Christian theism, Isaak Dorner argues that a traditional understanding of God's immutability precludes any diversity in God's action and presence in the world. Dorner reasons that the view of God developed in scholastic thought entails a ‘uniform’ divine causality in which God cannot act in new and distinct ways according to the various circumstances of his creatures. This sort of critique elicits the question of whether God's immutability, if taken to include his pure actuality, flattens out his action such that he is no longer truly engaged in the lives of his creatures. In this article, I propose that a development of the virtual distinction found in scholastic theology proper will enable us to integrate (1) the pure actuality of God and (2) what we may call the formal and temporal diversity of God's action pro nobis that confirms his authentic involvement in the world. Unfolding the explanatory power of the virtual distinction will require considering its relationship to the concept of God's pure actuality and analyzing different aspects of divine action in which the diversity of that action might be located.     

Sola Gratia as Divine Attribute: Resurrecting the God of the Gospel

Can we speak of sola gratia as a divine attribute so as to affirm that all that God does is grace? Traditionally, Western Christian theology has answered that question negatively, placing God's justice in opposition with God's grace and presenting a God whose love does not seem to be unconditional. This has been especially evident in the ways in which Scripture, the work of Christ, justification by faith, and the distinction between law and gospel commonly have been interpreted. By rethinking those traditional interpretations on the basis of an understanding of divine grace as unconditional love, we can indeed proclaim a God of sola gratia and a gospel capable of transforming human lives and responding effectively to the crisis of faith we face today.     

Divine hiddenness and creaturely resentment

On Schellenberg’s formulation of the problem of divine hiddenness, a loving God would ensure that anyone capable of having a relationship with Him, and not resisting it, would be granted sufficient evidence to make belief in God rationally indubitable. And He would do this by granting a powerful religious experience to every person at the moment he or she reaches the age of reason. Here I lay out a new reason why God might delay revelation of himself, justifiably allowing for some nonresistant nonbelief.     

AN EPISTEMICALLY DISTANT GOD? A CRITIQUE OF JOHN HICK'S RESPONSE TO THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE HIDDENNESS*

God is thought of as hidden in at least two ways. Firstly, God's reasons for permitting evil, particularly instances of horrendous evil, are often thought to be inscrutable or beyond our ken. Secondly, and perhaps more problematically, God's very existence and love or concern for us is often thought to be hidden from us (or, at least, from many of us on many occasions). But if we assume, as seems most plausible, that God's reasons for permitting evil will (in many, if not most, instances) be impossible for us to comprehend, would we not expect a loving God to at least make his existence or love sufficiently clear to us so that we would know that there is some good, albeit inscrutable, reason why we (or others) are permitted to suffer? In this paper I examine John Hick's influential response to this question, a response predicated on the notion of ‘epistemic distance’: God must remain epistemically distant and hence hidden from us so as to preserve our free will. Commentators of Hick's work, however, disagree as to whether the kind of free will that is thought to be made possible by epistemic distance is the freedom to believe that God exists, or the freedom to choose between good and evil, or the freedom to enter into a personal relationship with God. I argue that it is only the last of these three varieties of free will that Hick has in mind. But this kind of freedom, I go on to argue, does not necessitate an epistemically distant God, and so the problem of divine hiddenness remains unsolved.     

God's Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar

Abstract: A recent disagreement between Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar highlights some of the issues involved in discussing the relationship between God's triunity and determination to be God‐with‐us. Can we say that God's determination to be with us is the basis of God's triunity? Must we identify the Son's being as eternally toward‐incarnation? How does God's freedom relate to God's eternal decision to be God‐with‐humanity? In this article I argue (contra McCormack) that God's triunity logically precedes God's determination to be with us, but (contra Molnar) that this logical precedence entails neither that the pre‐incarnate Son is utterly unknown to us nor that God retains some freedom to be God‐without‐humanity.     

Divine hiddenness and the opiate of the people

The problem of divine hiddenness has become one of the most prominent arguments for atheism in the current philosophy of religion literature. Schellenberg (Divine hiddenness and human reason 1993), one of the problem’s prominent advocates, holds that the only way to prevent completely the occurrence of nonresistant nonbelief would be for God to have granted all of us a constant awareness of Him (or at least a constant availability of such awareness) from the moment we achieved the age of reason. Now, if that were the case, we might be faced with a difficult obstacle to the development of a proper, meaningful relationship with God: namely, since the experience of God would be so unutterably wonderful (at least for some), we could be at risk of coming to commune with God not from love of Him but for the amazing experience that that communion involves. In other words, given that mystical union with infinite perfection is, qua experience, inconceivably better than that of any drug, we might come to treat God as something analogous to a powerful narcotic, seeking the experience for the pleasure of the experience more than from any devotion. Since God wants to foster genuinely meaningful relationship with Him, He rightly delays granting us such awareness of Himself, even though that leaves open the risk that nonresistant nonbelief could arise.     

On preferring God's non-existence

For many centuries, philosophers have debated this question: ‘Does God exist?’ Surprisingly, they have paid rather less attention to this distinct – but also very important – question: ‘Would God's existence be a good thing?’ The latter is an axiological question about the difference in value that God's existence would make (or does make) in the actual world. Perhaps the most natural position to take, whether or not one believes in God, is to hold that it would be a very good thing if such a being were to exist. After all, God is traditionally thought to be perfectly powerful and good, and it might seem obvious that such a being's existence would make things better than they would otherwise be. But this judgment has been contested: some philosophers have held that God's existence would make things worse, and that, on this basis, one can reasonably prefer God's non-existence. We first distinguish a wide array of axiological positions concerning the value of God's existence which might be held by theists, atheists, and agnostics alike. We next construe these positions as comparative judgments about the axiological status of various possible worlds. We then criticize an important recent attempt to show that God's existence would make things worse, in various ways, than they would otherwise be.     

THE TIGHTROPE WALKER

Contrary to a widespread interpretation, Wittgenstein did not regard credal statements as merely metaphorical expressions of an attitude towards life. He accepted that Christian faith involves belief in God's existence. At the same time he held that although as a hypothesis, God's existence is extremely implausible, Christian faith is not unreasonable. Is that a consistent view? According to Wittgenstein, religious faith should not be seen as a hypothesis, based on evidence, but as grounded in a proto‐religious attitude, a way of experiencing the world or certain aspects of it. A belief in religious metaphysics is not the basis of one's faith, but a mere epiphenomenon. Given further that religious doctrine is both falsification‐transcendent and that religious faith is likely to have beneficial psychological effects, religious doctrine can be exempt from ordinary standards of epistemic support. An unsupported religious belief need not be unreasonable. However, it is hard to see how one could knowingly have such an unsupported belief, as Wittgenstein seems to envisage. How can one believe what, at the same time, one believes is not likely to be true? This, I argue, is the unresolved tension in Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion.     

Thomas Aquinas’ Divine Simplicity as Biblical Hermeneutic

Long draws from the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann's commentary on Jeremiah some strong reasons for rejecting the traditional teaching on divine simplicity. Above all, for Brueggemann the book of Jeremiah simply will not work if God is simple: God explicitly tells Jeremiah that God suffers and also that God changes in response to Israel. According to Long, however, Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity actually upholds the points that Brueggemann draws from Jeremiah. Long argues that theological accounts of divine simplicity should especially have two purposes: to serve as a way of manifesting in speech the mystery of the Triune God, and to affirm God's transcendent sovereignty over creation. In light of Brueggemann's approach, Long examines four early Reformed theologians: Peter Vermigli (1499‐1562), Girolamo Zanchi (1516‐1590), John Biddle (1615‐1662) and John Owen (1616‐1683). While Biddle rejects divine simplicity, the others uphold it. Long shows that their teaching on divine simplicity focuses on God's transcendent sovereignty over creation. By contrast, Long finds Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity to be more helpful in upholding Brueggemann's insights, insofar as Aquinas uses the doctrine to defend the simplicity of the Triune God. Rather than focusing on God's sovereign power, Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity focuses on getting the Trinitarian processions right.     

The fairness of Hell

The Christian conception of Hell as everlasting punishment for past sins is confronted with two charges of unfairness. The first is the inequity of an eternal punishment. The never‐ending punishment seems disproportionate to the finite sin (Kershnar, Lewis, Adams). A second and related problem is that the boundary between sins that send one for all eternity to Hell and those sins that are slightly less bad that are compatible with an eternity in Heaven is arbitrary and thus it is unfair that sinners so alike are treated differently (Sider). Hell, as traditionally conceived, is then claimed to be incompatible with God's traditional attributes such as his commitment to justice, omniscience and omnipotence. The unfairness can be avoided by appealing to God's foreknowledge and a debt/atonement theory of punishment. My view is analogous to refusing to parole the unrepentant. If a wrongdoer is eternally defiant, then he can never be released from Hell for his debt won't ever be paid if he isn't reformed and reconciled with the wronged. So it doesn't matter that his initial sin was a finite wrong not deserving of infinite punishment nor a sin no worse than that of the penitent in Heaven.     

Reforming Theology,Reframing Science

Abstract : What is the role of science in theology? What internal dynamics compel theology to take science seriously? Those are the questions—posed in a characteristically cautious academic fashion. There is a back‐story that needs to be told, however, if we are to get at these questions with the vigor they require: Without radical reformation of theology, there is little chance that we can even begin to work on the agenda that science poses to Christian faith and life. Faith is a journey in which we seek to make sense of the world and our lives in it in the light of the gospel we have received. The gospel is about God, God's presence and redemptive work in Jesus Christ and God's continuing presence in the Holy Spirit. But since it is God's presence and work in the world and for us, the gospel is also about the world and about human being—and that is where science comes in, provoking its reformation. Science is now an irreplaceable source of knowledge about the world and ourselves, and in some respects its knowledge is normative. Scientific knowledge has reshaped our view of the world and ourselves in ways that are so commonly known that it is unnecessary to elaborate. To relate our gospel to our actual lives in the empirical world—that is theology's motivation for taking science seriously. But theology must be reformed and reshaped if it is to be capable of taking science seriously. In this essay we focus on this reforming of theology.     

Wittgenstein on the Resurrection

Wittgenstein probably did not believe in Christ's Resurrection (as an historical event), but he may well have believed that if he had achieved a higher level of devoutness he would believe it. His view seems to have been that devout Christians are right in holding onto this belief tenaciously even though, in fact, it's false. It's historical falsity, is compatible with its religious validity, so to speak. So far as I can see, he did not think that devout Christians should believe that it doesn't really matter whether or not that alleged historical event occurred.     

A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF EVOLUTION AND PARTICIPATION

Recent controversies surrounding the discernment of design in the natural world are an indication of a pervasive disquiet among believers. Can God as creator/sustainer of creation be reconcilable with the belief that God's work is indiscernible behind secondary evolutionary causes? Christian piety requires that the order experienced in the natural world be evidence of God's love and existence. Theistic evolutionary models rarely examine this matter, assuming that God is indiscernible in the processes and order of the world because only secondary causes can be examined. This leaves antievolutionary perspectives to interpret and address the problem of seeing God in the world. I examine these issues in order to gain more credibility for the religious longing to discern God in nature while at the same time affirming the indubitable truth of an evolutionary history. I argue that God's trinitarian nature, hiddenness, and incarnation give us reason to believe that God's presence in the natural world will be discernible, but only within the natural processes, and thereby only in an obscured fashion. I also argue that newer understandings of evolutionary mechanisms are more consistent with theological appropriation than are strictly Darwinian ones.     

GOD OF THE GAPS OR THE GOD OF “DESIGN AND DOMINION”? RE-VISITING NEWTON'S THEOLOGY

Starting with Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton's theology has often been caricatured as putting forward a “God of the gaps” argument for God's existence and continued involvement in the world. Peter Harrison has pointed out that this characterization of Newton's theology is “not entirely clear.” A closer look at Newton's letters and the drafts to the Opticks reveals that, rather than arguing God's providential ordering and care over the world, he takes these for granted and is reluctant to specify instances of this order and care based on his physical research. He certainly believes in gaps in mechanical causes but is more eager to fill those gaps with nonmechanical natural causes than with God. Further, his system does not exhibit the two most prevalent weaknesses attributed to “God of the gaps” theologies: (1) that by describing God as intervening in natural causes his skill as a designer is maligned and (2) that by describing the physical details of God's involvement in the world one puts too much weight on theories likely to be replaced as science advances. Newton avoids the former weakness because it is only God's masterfulness as designer that he ties in any way to his theories of the physical world. He avoids the latter because he never points to God as the direct cause of any specific physical processes. Newton hoped that his system would cause his readers to marvel not only at God's providence but also at humankind's inability to sufficiently understand it.     

Speaking of Possibilities: The Theistic Actualism of Anselm's Divine Locutio

In his Monologion, Anselm represents God's knowledge of his creative possibilities, not in the intellectualist and Platonic terms of Augustine's divine ideas, but in the linguistic, poetic, and semi‐Stoic terms of a divine “utterance” or “expression” (locutio). Through his shift in theological metaphor, Anselm makes a subtle yet significant departure from the prevailing, “possibilist” model of divine possibility in western theology—according to which God's possibilities are known prior to and independently of any act or intention to create—towards a radically alternate, analogical and “actualist” appreciation of God as the sovereign speaker and inventor of his own possibilities.