Plantinga, Divine Action, and Free Will

Alvin Plantinga is an excellent philosopher and someone I admire greatly. His new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, offers great arguments and insights. But when it comes to the relationship between science, God’s action, and creaturely freedom, Plantinga’s proposals disappoint.

After affirming early in his new book that evolution can be compatible with Christian faith, Plantinga addresses divine action and its relation to modern scientific concerns. He begins by laying out his view of God.

Plantinga on God

According to Plantinga, God is all-powerful, all knowing, and wholly good. God created the world out of nothing long ago, and God can instantaneously create something from nothing today. In fact, Plantinga says by way of illustration, that God’s power is such as to be able to “create ex nihilo a full grown horse in the middle of Times Square.” While God conserves the world and acts to sustain it, God also sometimes acts in special ways to bring about miracles. With the Heidelberg Catechism, Plantinga says God either causes or permits whatever happens in the world.

With his brief description of God in place, Plantinga addresses divine action in an age of science. He notes that some Christians accept the metaphysical view that the universe is a closed continuum of cause and effect. They believe God cannot interfere or intervene in that closed system. Divine action for modern science is only a problem, says Plantinga, insofar as one affirms a particular metaphysics according to which the universe is causally closed to divine intervention or interference.

Plantinga makes special mention of the Divine Action Project. This project brought together over a fifteen-year period (1988-2003) leading figures in the science and religion dialogue. He cites project participants – most of whom are religious scholars – who criticize the idea that God ever intervenes or interferes in creation.

Plantinga notes that Divine Action Project participants think belief in divine intervention exacerbates the problem of evil, especially God’s failure to intervene miraculously to prevent evil. Participants also worry that there is an inconsistency between believing that God faithfully upholds natural or cosmological laws, while also God periodically intervenes and overrides those same laws.

In response, Plantinga says that problems pertaining to miraculous intervention aren’t really problems at all. “It isn’t up to us whether or not to allow miraculous intervention,” he says. “God will intervene, miraculously or otherwise, if and when he sees fit.” Planting says that “being omnipotent, [God] can act specially in the universe if he saw fit.” And God will intervene “if he has a good reason for doing so; but why suppose we human beings would be in a position to know when he does and when he doesn’t?” In fact, says Plantinga, “God’s ‘options and possibilities’ are far beyond our ken; his ways are ‘past finding out;’ we can hardly expect to come up with a ‘rock solid criteria’ underlying God’s decisions to act.”

Disappointed in the Appeal to Mystery

I was disappointed when I read Plantinga’s arguments here. We find in them the common appeal to mystery on topics pertaining to divine action. God’s ways are not our ways, he says, God’s ways are past our finding out. We can’t understand why God sometimes intervenes and sometimes does not, Plantinga says, because we are not God.

I think it especially odd that Plantinga would appeal to mystery while criticizing participants in the Divine Action Project. At least project participants take seriously the challenges that the problem of evil has for theories of divine action. And they take seriously the issues that divine intervention raise in relation to scientific explanation.

Project participants worry that the regularity and predictability of causation in the universe would be undermined if God periodically intervened. In response, Plantinga says “all that’s required for purposeful free action is reasonable confidence in substantial regularity in the neighborhood of the proposed action. And that’s certainly compatible with God sometimes intervening.”

The implication of Plantinga’s “substantial regularity” language, of course, is that God must not intervene too much. Doing so would undermine the regularity required for the natural world to persist and for free will to be meaningful. Here we find Plantinga shying away from the “God can do whatever God wants to do” argument.  Apparently, there actually are constraints on what God can do, if God also wants some degree of regularity and predictability in creation.

I find few of Plantinga’s arguments about intervention persuasive or satisfying.

On the one hand, he seems quite confident about certain aspects of who God is. God’s essential nature includes the kind of power to create ex nihilo and intervene or interfere as God sees fit. On the other hand, Plantinga is quite willing to appeal to mystery whenever particular conflicts arise with regard to how God’s power relates to the created order. He affirms a view of divine power that raises real questions about evil and miracles, but he appeals to inscrutable reasons God has for doing things.

We need a different view of divine action and divine power than the one Plantinga adopts.

A Better View of God’s Action

We need a clearer understanding of what theists should mean when they say God is specially active or exerts causal influence. Plantinga never tells his readers, for instance, whether God’s intervening is God acting as a sufficient cause. Nor does he speak of God’s causal activity as allowing or requiring creaturely cooperation.

The major issue for most Christians is not whether God acts in the world. For various reasons, most Christians believe God acts. The issue is how God acts.

My own view is that Divine Action Project participants are correct in their view that divine intervention – if understood as God acting as a sufficient cause — creates problems for Christians who want to affirm both scientific investigation and the notion that God works in the world. Divine intervention as sufficient causation creates insuperable obstacles to solving the theoretical aspects of the problem of evil.

Yet I also agree with Plantinga that Christians should affirm that God works in creation and even acts specially in miraculous ways. At stake is how we define divine action, intervention, and the miraculous.

Christians would be wise to say God always acts upon every creature as a necessary and efficient (but not sufficient) cause. God does not ever intervene, if by “intervention” we mean acting as a sufficient cause.

But saying God always acts upon every creature and every part of creation is also to deny that the universe is causally closed from God’s activity. God doesn’t intervene, if by “intervene” we mean entering the created order from the outside. Rather, the omnipresent God is already present to all, and so God doesn’t need to intervene from outside. God acts as a necessary and efficient cause in every entity’s coming to exist.

I also believe we can affirm miracles, so long as we deny that miracles require God acting as a sufficient cause. We should define miracles as extraordinary events in which creatures or creation cooperates with God’s endeavors to promote overall well-being.

We call some events miraculous and others mundane, however, because God’s causal activity varies. God’s varied activity takes into account the creatures involved and what is possible given the environment. This variance isn’t a matter of God arbitrarily choosing to be more or less effective. It’s a matter of the kinds of ways God can act in situations and the degree of cooperation creatures express with God’s empowering and inspiring activity.

Some of God’s actions are rightly deemed miraculous, therefore, in the sense of dramatic events that express God’s goodness. Yet God never intervenes, in the sense of God entirely controlling any creature or situation. To put it another way, God never entirely determines creatures, and yet God’s diverse activity and oscillating influence allows us to deem some events as miraculous, others as mundane, and still others as evil. Those we rightly deem evil are events in which creatures did not cooperate well with God’s calling.

Sum

I think my alternative proposal adequately addresses the concerns of the Divine Action Project participants – e.g., problem of evil and explanatory consistency. But it also handles Plantinga’s concern to talk about special divine action and the miraculous. It does so by rejecting some of Plantinga’s explicit and implicit views of God’s power and activity. It proposes a different view of God’s power that rejects the notion that God acts as a sufficient cause.

I believe I avoid unnecessarily appealing to mystery on those issues central to the science and theology conversation.