The Tension of God's Involvement/Intervention within Theistic Evolution

As scientific developments further our understanding of the origins of humanity and the universe as a whole, those of us who hold to TE are exposed to a tension that exists from the course of evolutionary history. As science develops, there are fewer and fewer “God of the gaps” areas that seem ripe for God’s direct involvement within that history. Abiogensis is a good but disputed one and of course the origins of the actual universe. For TE proponents, I see two camps of thought for how to understand God’s involvement (please share more if you have any!)

  1. God set up all the right conditions in order for life to develop so after intial creation state (Big Bang), there was no further needed intervention until humanity came on the scene.
  2. God set up the conditions for the Big Bang, but at various points, God “intervened” with creation to produce the effects he intended, the advent of humanity as one possible desired effect.

There is a tension that exists here however: in option 1, you basically give all ground away for God to seemingly be involved in creation, and he becomes more like a Deist watchmaker. You cede all ground for the non-theist proposal of, “Well if everything can be explained through naturalistic means, does that mean we’re just waiting for a natural explanation of the universe?” (Does God become necessary argument)

In option 2, you cede ground by saying that God’s initial conditions weren’t adequate enough for the purposes of working on its own blueprint. The non theist would say, “ If God designed the universe as He wanted, why would He need to intervene at certain points at all?” It seems to undermine any intelligent design arguments (from a TE perspective of intelligent design). Now I think there are some interesting options to approach this but I’m interested in people’s take here.

Which situation is more favorable in your opinion? A God who has to intervene in His creation, seemingly undermining his creative ability for the start, or A God who seems removed from creation but clearly showed the capacity to bring forth “desired results” (you can debate if there are any intended desired results) within His creation. For non-theists, which option for you would make more sense to you if you believed God existed?

P.S. My statements of hypothetical non-theists isn’t to share any negative sentiment to them or win a argument with them. The arguments they give are completely fair and should be noticed.

P.S.S. I’m aware of arguments as God being the sustainer of the universe and the argument of that Prime Mover that could solve option 1. But feel free to discuss it more!

‘Pool shot’ vs ‘tinkerer’.

Which is preferable requires deciding on the character of the creator more than on their capability.

Is the creator the type of character who would know exactly what they want to happen, and get everything set up correctly from the beginning? Or the type of character who wants to experiment and interact with their creation, and take things as they come?

(The Bible leans towards the latter).

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In a different thread @TedDavis made me aware of a really great article written by a Christian physicist on the topic of randomness (it may partly be behind a subscription wall however, but most of the article appears to be available).

Essentially, the best we can do is to say that nature appears to include random processes and natural laws. Anything beyond that is left to belief instead of science or logic. When I did believe in God, this is the position I held. What appears to us as natural law and randomness is being controlled by God in some sense we can’t wholly understand.

I also like this quote from one of Darwin’s proteges:

To avoid misapprehension, however, I may here add that while Mr. Darwin’s theory is thus in plain and direct contradiction to the theory of design, or system of teleology, as presented by the school of writers which I have named, I hold that Mr. Darwin’s theory has no point of logical contact with the theory of design in the larger sense, that behind all secondary causes of a physical kind, there is a primary cause of a mental kind. Therefore throughout this essay I refer to design in the sense understood by the narrower forms of teleology, or as an immediate cause of the observed phenomena. Whether or not there is an ultimate cause of a psychical kind pervading all nature, a causa causarum which is the final raison d’être of the cosmos, this is another question which, as I have said, I take to present no point of logical contact with Mr. Darwin’s theory, or, I may add, with any of the methods and results of natural science.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution, by George J. Romanes, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.

In this case, Romanes describes intelligent design as God acting directly in nature in ways that natural laws can not. Theistic evolution would be more along the lines of “ultimate cause of a psychical kind pervading all nature, a causa causarum which is the final raison d’être of the cosmos”.

If we think that God knows what can be known, He could start this universe with such laws and conditions that would lead towards a planned direction. Teleology through the initial laws and conditions, which would make everything after that to look just ‘natural’ processes.

I believe what I wrote above is true. I also believe that God is interacting with His creation in ways that ensure that the general direction of natural and human history stays correct. Because of the ‘correct’ initial conditions and laws, there is probably no need to tinker everything continually but if randomness or other players seem to deviate the future from the planned one, it would be easy for God to make a small ‘push’ that returns the development to the hoped track.

These points are ‘intuitive’ in the sense that, assuming there is God, they feel both possible and rational but I cannot prove them to be true.

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Niether option works.

The first implies that God set the wheels in motion and then stood back and watched, the second that God had to keep adjusting and tinkering.
Also God of the Gaps was dismissed in the late eighties.

If you make a curry properly it takes several hours because you have to keep adding things at the right moment, that is not “tinkering”, it is necessary, If that applies t a curry how much more to a Universe.

The main theistic objection to scientific evolution is that it excludes God, and tries to achieve everything without His help et alone interference. If there are guidelines or parameters involved science cannot identify them, or even if they did, assign them to God.

This is the continuing flawed “discussion” that has gone on here for as long as I have been here, if not before.
It ends up with semantics, and linguistics or (mis)understandings.
Any tension is human made. Scientists defend their honour and abilities, Christians defend Scripture and God. Each one criticises the other for inflexibility and misconception. If there was ever a case for a non biased mediator it is here, but I guess it would result in “compromises” which, I am told is the art of dissatisfying all parties.

Richard

If God is the cause of causes, there’s no difference between His action and “natural causes”, and “natural law” becomes nothing except the normal dependable ways that God does things.

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I’ve made cookies that are similar; you have to mix one set of ingredients then let them sit while you do something else, then mix the results, then chill it, and don’t add the next set of ingredients until the batch is well-chilled.
There are parallels in botany, BTW, developments in flowers that require time to pass along with changes in temperature, humidity, or light levels (or some combination). Progression in stages seems to be an ordinary feature of Creation.

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I don’t think one explanation can cover the whole set of history of the universe because there are two very different epochs.
Think of it like a party. I once helped with a birthday party for my niece where it took over eight hours to get everything ready, then the party once the kids arrived lasted something like an hour. The difference was that the kids arrived.
So assuming a sort of Deistic view for the moment, there is no reason that how God relates to the universe shouldn’t change “once the kids arrive”. Thirteen billion years of one approach give way to a different approach once life is on the scene, and moreso even once humans are around.
Think of it as an equation; it functions along quite nicely until some new terms show up, at which point things shift. The big equation is still there but the addition of those new terms alters how things go.

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@Theangeloffury

God doesn’t NEED to intervene in his natural creation … because it IS his creation. Then the arrival of moral agents with Free Will (the “kids” have arrived!). And that doesn’t happen for BILLIONS of years…. which is but an INSTANT of time for the Divine realm.

After the arrival of humans with God’s Image, the roller coaster begins with human prayers, decisions, choices, etc. Choices begin, followed by God’s responses - - and for the most part the importance of Evolution in the story of creation is over.

I generally agree with the caveat that some Christians hold to doctrines in spite of the capability of the Creator or their own preferences. For instance, many hold to a literal doctrine of hell, despite wanting a universalism/universal reconciliation to be true (and within the capacity of the Creator). I agree though that outside of some Reformed circles, your latter option seems to make more sense with the Biblical picture.

Thank you for sharing this article; I found it extremely helpful. Especially the example of the meteor impact that wiped out those poor dinosaurs. It’s helpful to separate the horizontal and vertical chains of causation. And even holding to the fact that if God did set everything in motion in their independent paths, you could argue that it wouldn’t surprise God that certain independent paths would/could cross. And maybe the ultimate providence lies there.

I can agree with this. Like the article that @T_aquaticus shared, even those “random” events have their ultimate causal route in God, which would imply God’s will for the evolutionary trajectory to work that way. You do pose a good question on what hypothetical scenarios could cause God to do a subtle course correct. I have ideas but nothing too developed to share right now.

This is an intriguing sentiment to me especially if you are specifically alluding to your thoughts on this discussion. I would love to hear more about this if your open to. Feel free to DM if you feel like further discussion will derail this conversation. I wonder what additions would/could be added? Would God adding something to the universal soup here be seen as another style of “God of the Gaps” argument (that creation had a gap that needed filled by a direct intervention)? Additions don’t necessarily have to be tinkerings, but its hard to see why God would add things in that manner. Though i would equally find it difficult to find evidence of this that doesn’t end up being a ID argument. But im curious to hear more if you want to share. On “God of the Gaps”, I agree that I don’t find the argument helpful, except with one major caveat. Until science ever figures out how the Big Bang was caused or how the laws of the universe came to be that allowed for the Big Bang, there will always be this God sized Gap at the universe’s origins. I don’t see another way to describe this gap in our scientific knowledge since for many this is one of our foundational beliefs of God.

I honestly should of picked it up sooner. But maybe it’s a modern understanding that God doesn’t intervene with the “natural” world or breaks its laws. Mitchell has a good explanation of miracles actually naturally through quantum mechanics so I guess there’s some disconnect with me how the Divine presence in creation and how He interacts with what He has created. Outside of the Incarnation, a good question is what does that even look like for God to “intervene” or “course-correct” within evolutionary history? And whether we can even detect that?

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This is what I would say. You are leading with a mechanistic image of God where he steps in to correct things like a mechanic fixing a car. God cannot interfere or intervene in nature. He is already upholding it and creating it from nothing at every instant as the prime mover or actus purus.

Davies adds: “You cannot intervene in what you are doing yourself. And, say classical theists, God cannot literally intervene in his own created order.”

Feser “Like the term “violation”, the term “intervention” wrongly suggests that a miracle is a kind of violent motion, as if God has to force things to go in a certain direction. That would be a fitting characterization if the world were a machine and God a machinist who occasionally steps in to fine-tune it, but it is highly misleading given the conception of God and his relationship to the world argued for in this book.”

Feser A better analogy might be to think of the world as music and God as the musician who is playing the music. Divine conservation of the ordinary, natural course of things is comparable to the musician’s playing the music according to the written score as he has it before his mind. God’s causing a miracle is comparable to the musician temporarily departing from the score, as in the sort of improvisation characteristic of jazz. The musician hardly has to force the music to go in some way it wasn’t already going; every note, including the written ones that precede and follow the improvised ones, is produced by him. Still, the improvisation definitely adds to the score something that wasn’t already there, just as, in Ramelow’s words, a miracle goes “beyond nature” and “elevates it to a higher power.”

Lacking a proper grounding in metaphysics and classical theism all sorts of problems emerge. We don’t need gaps for God to fill to prove his existence. Every single material object in the universe already does that at all times.

Vinnie

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One scenario I have sometimes been wondering is what God would do if the not-so-rational leaders would start a total nuclear holocaust. A nuclear holocaust that kills all or almost all humans is a real possibility - it only needs that one misinformed head of state commands the nuclear missiles to be launched. The other nations would feel a need to respond, which would ensure mutual destruction.

I am not sure how God would respond.
It might be that He somehow prevents the scenario from happening - it would be fairly easy, for example by letting the misinformed leader to die before s/he gives the command.

Some texts in the Hebrew Bible (OT) suggests another possibility. God might let humanity to reap what they sowed, and then start towards the long-term goal with a small group of survivors - like the survivors in the story of Noah. That might slow the long-term play by a few thousands of years but God does not seem to think of time the same way as we short-lived humans think. A few thousands of years is just a wink of the eye.

By the way, the few survivors would probably not come from USA, Europe, European parts of Russia or the important parts of China. These would all become totally eradicated from humans, no matter how well the survivalists try to ensure that they are left alive. ‘Shelters’ from a nuclear holocaust do not save, these may just prolong the suffering before death.

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What you wrote is completely rational within your worldview, with the presuppositions that you believe to be true. The rationale does not hold within the worldviews that are based on different presuppositions.

I believe that there is one Creator, God, so I am inclined to accept many of your claims that are based on the same assumption. Also some other worldviews that accept the existence of one or more creator gods might agree or at least, understand what you are telling. I have dived recently into the world of ancient Egyptians and I think they might accept your viewpoint with some deviating twists. However, there are many worldviews where your claims would be nonsense.

What rationale does not hold? If someone has a metaphysically poor and indefensible conception of God, then they will see God as stepping in to fix broken aspects of nature. It’s not so much about worldviews as it is about metaphysical arguments and scripture.

Either the A-T conception of God is correct or it is not. It rises or falls based on the arguments. It seems some of this forum think philosophy is all just “relative” opinion.

As I have discussed several times here, it is not possible for there to be more than one God. It’s not a worldview. It’s a metaphysical argument base on modern formulations of Aristototle’s act and potency and several other arguments.

People can believe whatever they want about science, morality, God, gun control, abortion, philosophy and science. All they have to do is show which premises are false or that the conclusion does not follow from them. Otherwise, I am not interested in rhetoric.

Vinnie

That rather depends on what is meant by “God”. It may not be possible to have more than one ‘prime mover’, but that doesn’t prevent the simultaneous existence of e.g. Odin and Loki.

I do not see a problem with God being engaged with the natural process of life after the initial conditions of life had been created. God as God cannot be made captive to nature. In my studies of medieval Franciscan Duns Scotus I discovred his beliefs in God that while God may have free acting causes in nature that are not predicable God can always elect to do something new. God may constrain Himself in some ways but still free to act in others. We know God first acts in Israel to establish His laws but always planned to do a new thing in the Incarnation, going beyond what went before. God can always interact with the world in a new way, and so it is not for us to decide how He may act or not. In this way we can say that God could subtly effect changes in DNA and organisms response to environments without stopping the overall freedom of natural processes.

Wolhart Pannenberg in God and Nature also thought of God in Spirit moving ahead of evolution drawing things along like a field of attractive force.

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As much as I would like that claim to be true, I am not convinced.

My understanding about that kind of philosophy is limited but I tried to understand it while I attended a course on the philosophy of religion. The thinking just did not stick. That kind of metaphysical thinking seemed to form an idealistic virtual reality that was only partly in touch with the real reality. Within the virtual reality, everything worked logically. Looking from outside, the assumptions seemed to be too limiting to give generalizable conclusions.

In addition, I do not appreciate the Greek philosophy much, not Platon, Aristotle or others, so the basic assumptions behind the logic would need to be justified, starting from something else than Greek philosophy. The Greek thinkers were children of their time and their ideas were great within that mental framework but not something that would be great today.

Sorry. I may well be wrong but that was my impression. Maybe I should return to the topic when I have more time and re-evaluate the assumptions and conclusions.

Edit:
While reading about the polytheistic stories and beliefs of the ancient Egypt, I noted that the belief in several gods sometimes approached monotheism. For example, in the cosmogeny of Memphis, the god considered to be the patron god of Memphis (Ptah) was pictured as being the single deity or absolute spirit behind everything. What happened in the creation story through multiple gods was understood as actions of this single spirit through the other gods, like the other gods were just limbs or tools of the absolute spirit.

I have read similar kind of comments about other polytheistic religions, for example Hinduism. Maybe all followers of the polytheistic religions do not think so but some describe their belief so that above or behind the multitude of gods, there is a single deity. Especially the first creating act is often pictured as the work of a single spirit or deity.

Maybe the rationale that there can be only one god above others is grasped intuitively even in otherwise polytheistic cultures.

So the God described in the Bible, who does intervene in nature, cannot be the prime mover.

@Roy

One person’s fairy tale is another person’s holy writ. Metaphysics is not testable like Physics can be.

The Bible is neither a science textbook nor a philosophy manual. It uses ancient cosmology and phenomenological language. A-T Philosophy gives us a proper metaphysical understanding of how the world operates in relation to God in light of creation ex-nihilo and God as being itself. Numerous passages describe both God and Jesus as the creator and sustainer of all things.

Depending on how words are defined you might want to say God intervenes in nature but A-T philosophy rejects this as an external meddler. That is what “intervention” conjures and that is what is objected to. God is the sustaining cause of all being. When God performs a supernatural miracle, he acts from within nature, elevating it to a higher power. He does not violate natural law which many A-T’s think is metaphysically impossible. A better word is suspending natural law and this ties into how laws of nature are understood from the get go. If you want to call that “intervening” I won’t argue against but nature depends on God at every instant. You can’t have the physical world without God but you can have God without the physical world. So asking about God vs evolution is the wrong question in my mind. It is not a question of God vs evolution. There is no either or here. The only proper questions is: how did God choose to create us. That is a question science can shed a lot of light on.

A discussion on Miracles by Feser is appropriate: (Five Proofs)

What, then, is a miracle if not a violation of the laws of nature, and how could miracles occur if laws are metaphysically necessary? Ramelow sums up the Thomistic answer as follows:

What defines a miracle is not merely that it is an exception to what is natural (which would be true for defects as well), but that it elevates the nature of a thing to a power that cannot be accounted for by this nature. Unlike said defects, miracles are exceptions that are super-natural rather than sub-natural. As such, then, miracles are not violations of the laws of nature. Even though they would have to be called “physically impossible,’ yet they are not contrary to nature; rather, they are beyond.

Hence, it would be a sheer mistake to think that the difference between ordinary events and miracles is that whereas the former happen on their own, God causes the latter. The world is not like an airplane on autopilot, with God interfering from time to time to
perform a course correction. God is the ultimate cause of all things, the natural and preternatural as much as the miraculous. Indeed, as the arguments of his book show, it is the ordinary, natural course of things, and not miracles, which is the most direct evidence of God’s existence and action as First Cause. As Brian Davies writes:

Some people would say that God can intervene so as to bring it about
that changes occur in the world. On the classical theist’s account,
however, such changes cannot be literally thought of s divine interventions
since they and what preceded them are equally the creative
work of God.86

Davies goes on to quote Herbert McCabe, who says:

It is clear that God cannot interfere in the universe, not because he has
not the power but because, so to speak, he has too much. To interfere
you have to be an alternative to, or alongside, what you are interfering
with. If God is the cause of everything, there is nothing that he
is alongside.87

Davies adds: “You cannot intervene in what you are doing yourself.
And, say classical theists, God cannot literally intervene in his own
created order.”88

Like the term “violation”,the term “intervention” wrongly suggests
that a miracle is a kind of violent motion, as if God has to force
things to go in a certain direction. That would be a fitting characterization
if the world were a machine and God a machinist who ccasionally steps in to fine-tune it, but it is highly misleading given the conception of God and his relationship to the world argued for in this book. A better analogy might be to think of he world as music and God as the musician who is playing the music. Divine conservation of the ordinary, natural course of things is comparable to the musician’s playing the music according to the written score as he has it before his mind. God’s causing a miracle is comparable to the musician temporarily departing from the score, as in the sort of improvisation characteristic of jazz. The musician hardly has to force the music to go in some way it wasn’t already going; every note, including the written ones that precede and follow the improvised ones, is produced by him. Still, the improvisation definitely adds to the score something that wasn’t already there, just as, in Ramelow’s words, a miracle goes “beyond nature” and “elevat[es] it to a higher power”.

Discussion from Oderberg (Real Essentialism)

It is commonly thought that a miracle, if such were possible, would involve a breach of one or more laws of nature, thus reinforcing the idea that the laws are not metaphysically neces- sary. In other words, a miracle is usually thought to show that a law of nature might fail to hold. This, however, is the wrong way of conceiving of miracles. A miracle would not be a breach in the laws of the nature, but a suspension of the laws.

But if the state can choose to fail to enforce a law or else to revoke it altogether, why doesn’t God have the choice? Since the laws of nature are the laws of natures, for God to interfere with an operative law would by that very fact involve God’s preventing natures from operating according to what they are, which is not a mere semantic impossibility but a fundamental metaphysical one. God is bound by the natures He creates as much as by the laws of logic, which, as I have claimed, are but a species of essentialist necessity. He could, of course, annihilate the natures he has created and replace them with new ones that operated according to different laws: He could, perhaps,35 replace all current organisms with new kinds of organism that could rise from the dead according to a law of reverse entropy that replaced the current thermodynamical law. That is not, however, the same as preserving the natures that do exist but frustrating their operation according to the current laws. For the current laws simply describe how the natures that do exist must operate. Why couldn’t God, say, prevent salt from dissolving in water by a momentary interference, without annihilating the natures of salt and water? But then He would have to change the nature of something else – space, time, the atmosphere, or something else involved in normal dissolution – and to change the nature of a thing is to annihilate it altogether, whether or not it be replaced by some other kind of thing with a different nature. I conclude that the possibility of miracles does not refute necessitarianism about the laws of nature.

Vinnie

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