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Theology and Science, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2008

What is ‘‘Intervention’’?

ALVIN PLANTINGA

Abstract I begin by noting that several theologians and others object to special divine action (divine

intervention and action beyond conservation and creation) on the grounds that it is incompatible

with science. These theologians are thinking of classical Newtonian science; I argue that in fact

classical science is in no way incompatible with special divine action, including miracle. What is

incompatible with special divine action is the Laplacean picture, which involves the causal closure of

the universe. I then note that contemporary, quantum mechanical science doesn’t even initially

appear to be incompatible with special divine action. Nevertheless, many who are well aware of the

quantum mechanical revolution (including some members of the Special Divine Action Project) still

ﬁnd a problem with special divine action, hoping to ﬁnd an understanding of it that doesn’t involve

divine intervention. I argue that their objections to intervention are not sound. Furthermore, it isn’t

even possible to say what intervention is, given the quantum mechanical framework. I conclude by

offering an account of special divine action that isn’t open to their objections to intervention.

Key words: Special divine action; Intervention; Creation; Conservation; Science;

Classical science; Special Divine Action Project; Natural law; Newtonian science; Causal

closure; Determinism; Laplace; Miracle; Quantum mechanics; Hands-off theology;

Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber quantum mechanics; Schr¨ dinger equation; Probability

Introduction

Well, I suppose it’s a word. Perhaps the right question, or at any rate a better

question, is: What is intervention? My question more exactly is something like

this: What is meant by this word in the context of discussion of divine action in the

world? Most of those who think about these things apparently disapprove of the

suggestion that God acts in the world in such a way as to intervene in it. 1 But what

exactly, or even approximately, is intervention? What sort of action would

constitute intervention? And why would it be a bad thing? Perhaps my questions

can be put like this: ‘‘What is intervention, that Thou must be mindful of it?’’

We can begin by noting that most Christians and other theists have concurred

with the Heidelberg Catechism:

Providence is the almighty and ever present power of God by which he upholds, as

with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and

blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness,

ISSN 1474-6700 print/ISSN 1474-6719 online/08/040369-33

ª 2008 Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences

DOI: 10.1080/14746700802396106

370 Theology and Science

prosperity and poverty—all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but from his

fatherly hand. (Question 27)

Most Christians have concurred, that is, with the thought that God acts in the

world he has created. According to the classical Christian and theistic view of

God, he is a person . He is thus a being who has knowledge; he also has affections

(he loves some things, hates others); he has ends and aims, and acts on the basis of

his knowledge to achieve his ends. Furthermore, God is all-powerful, and all-

knowing, and wholly good. Still further, God is a necessary being, exists in every

possible world; so he has those properties in every possible world. God is

therefore a necessarily existent concrete being (and the only necessarily existent

concrete being).

Next, God has created our world. He may have done it in many different ways;

he may have employed many different means; he may have done it all at once, or

in stages; he may have done it relatively recently, or, more likely (given current

science), billions of years ago. However he did it, Christians and other theists

believe that he has in fact done it. Furthermore, he has created it ‘‘out of nothing’’.

This is not, of course, the absurd suggestion that ‘‘nothing’’ names a sort of

substance or material or gunk—perhaps extremely thin and gossamer—out of

which God fashioned the world; it is instead simply the denial that there was any

such pre-existing material out of which God made the world.

Still further, God sustains the world in being. Apart from his sustaining hand,

our universe—and if there are other universes, the same goes for them—would

disappear like a candle ﬂame in a high wind. Descartes and Jonathan Edwards,

indeed, thought of this divine sustenance as a matter of re-creation: at every

moment God re-creates his world. Maybe so, maybe not; the present point is only

that God does indeed sustain his world in being, and, apart from that sustaining,

supporting activity, the world would simply fail to exist. Some, including Thomas

Aquinas, go even further: every causal transaction that takes place is such that

God performs a special act of concurring with it; without that divine concurrence,

the transaction could not take place. 2

But (according to classical Christian and theistic belief) God acts in the world

in ways that go beyond creation and sustenance. As the Heidelberg Catechism

puts it (and again, classical theists of all stripes would agree), God so governs

the world that whatever happens is to be thought of as ‘‘coming from his

fatherly hand’’: he either causes or permits whatever does in fact happen; none

of it is to be thought of as a result of mere chance. 3 And this governing—

‘‘ruling,’’ as the Catechism has it—comes in at least two parts. First of all, God

governs the world in such a way that it displays regularity and predictability.

Day follows night and night follows day; when there is rain and sun, plants

grow; bread is good to eat, but mud is not; if you drop a rock from the top of a

cliff, it will fall down, not up. It is only because of this regularity that we can

build a house, design and manufacture automobiles and aircraft, cure diseases,

raise crops, or pursue scientiﬁc projects. Indeed, it is only because of this

regularity that we can act in any way at all. Further, most classical Christians

would endorse something like John Calvin’s ‘‘Internal Witness of the Holy

What is ‘‘Intervention’’? 371

Spirit’’ and Thomas Aquinas’ ‘‘Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit.’’ 4 ‘‘The

believer,’’ says Aquinas, ‘‘has sufﬁcient motive for believing, for he is moved by

the authority of divine teaching conﬁrmed by miracles and, what is more, by the

inward instigation of the divine invitation.’’ 5 So Aquinas and Calvin concur in the

thought that it is by way of special divine action—action on the part of the Holy

Spirit, the third person of the Trinity—that Christians come to see the truth of

the central teachings of the gospel; the Holy Spirit gets them to see the ‘‘great

truths of the gospel,’’ as Jonathan Edwards calls them.

There is still another kind of divine action. According to classical Christian

belief, God sometimes does things differently, in such a way as to abrogate the

usual regularities; he sometimes diverges from the way in which he ordinarily

treats the stuff he has made. For example, there are miracles: in the Old Testament,

the parting of the Red Sea and many others; in the New Testament, Jesus’

changing water into wine, walking on water, restoring a blind man’s sight, raising

Lazarus, and, towering above all, Jesus himself rising from the dead. In short, God

regularly and often causes events in the world—events that go beyond creation

and conservation. We can think of divine action that goes beyond creation and

conservation as special divine action.

The problem

In 1961, Langdon Gilkey wrote a widely inﬂuential article lamenting the condition

of Biblical theology. The problem, he said, is that theologians speak the language

of divine action in the world, the language of miracle and divine intervention. God

has done wonderful things, so they say: he brought plagues upon the Egyptians

(this one isn’t always emphasized by the theologians), he parted the Red Sea so

that the children of Israel could walk through on dry ground, he fed them manna

in the wilderness, he made the sun stand still. Jesus turned water into wine, fed a

multitude with just ﬁve loaves and two ﬁsh, raised Lazarus from the dead, and

was himself raised from the dead.

So far so good: where exactly is the problem? The problem, says Gilkey, is that

modern theologians (he apparently includes himself) don’t really believe that God

did any of those things—or, indeed, that he did anything at all:

Thus contemporary theology does not expect, nor does it speak of, wondrous

divine events on the surface of natural and historical life. The causal nexus in

space and time which the Enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into

the Western mind . . . is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars; since

they participate in the modern world of science both intellectually and

existentially, they can scarcely do anything else. Now this assumption of a

causal order among phenomenal events, and therefore of the authority of the

scientiﬁc interpretation of observable events, makes a great difference. Suddenly

a vast panoply of divine deeds and events recorded in scripture are no longer

regarded as having actually happened . . . Whatever the Hebrews believed, we

believe that the biblical people lived in the same causal continuum of space and

time in which we live, and so one in which no divine wonders transpired and

no divine voices were heard. 6

372 Theology and Science

These theologians, says Gilkey, speak the language of divine action, but they

don’t actually believe that God has acted: a lamentable hiatus between what they

say (at least straightforwardly construed) and what they believe.

I reported Gilkey as saying that the theologians of whom he speaks don’t

believe that God does anything at all in the world; this isn’t quite accurate. The

theologians of whom Gilkey speaks didn’t object to the idea that God has created

and sustains the world. Their view is therefore quite compatible with God’s acting

in such a way as to preserve it in being. Where they have difﬁculty is with the

thought that God does or has done anything in addition to creating the world and

sustaining it in existence; creation and preservation, they think (or fear, or

suspect), exhaust the divine activity. They have no objection to the thought that

God has created the world, and works in it at a general level to preserve and

sustain it; their objection is to the idea that God sometimes does something special,

something beyond creation and preservation (and concurrence), something like

guiding the course of history, or changing water into wine, or feeding ﬁve

thousand with a few loaves and ﬁshes. It is that special divine action that,

from their point of view, is the problem. And when they speak of special divine

action, they are thinking, among other things, of what are commonly called

miracles (those ‘‘mighty acts’’), and of divine intervention in the world. The

thought is that God couldn’t or wouldn’t do a thing like that.

We could call this claim—the claim that God never intervenes in the world—

‘‘hands-off theology’’: God creates and sustains the world; as for the rest, he leaves

it alone. Gilkey, of course, is not alone in proclaiming hands-off theology. Twenty

years earlier, Rudolf Bultmann endorsed the ‘‘presupposition’’ that ‘‘history is a

unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are

connected by the succession of cause and effect.’’ This continuum, furthermore,

‘‘cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers.’’ 7

(Bultmann apparently thought of the laws of nature as like the laws of the Medes

and Persians (Daniel 6:8): once promulgated, not even the King can abrogate

them; he also thought, apparently, that if God engaged in special divine action, he

would be, not merely intervening, but actually (improperly?) interfering in the

world.) John Macquarrie agrees:

The way of understanding miracle that appeals to breaks in the natural order and to

supernatural interventions belongs to the mythological outlook and cannot

commend itself in a post-mythological climate of thought . . . The traditional

conception of miracle is irreconcilable with our modern understanding of both

science and history. Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever events occur

in the world can be accounted for in terms of other events that also belong within

the world; and if on some occasions we are unable to give a complete account of

some happening . . . the scientiﬁc conviction is that further research will bring to

light further factors in the situation, but factors that will turn out to be just as

immanent and this-worldly as those already known. 8

The objection, then, is to special divine action, including in particular miracles; it

would apparently also apply, however, to divine providence, and to the ‘‘internal

instigation of the Holy Spirit’’ and ‘‘internal witness of the Holy Spirit’’ endorsed

by Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. 9

What is ‘‘Intervention’’? 373

Now why do these theologians object to special divine action? Why do they

think that the causal continuum ‘‘cannot be rent by the interference of

supernatural, transcendent powers,’’ that appeal to supernatural interventions

‘‘cannot commend itself in a post-mythological climate of thought’’, and that ‘‘no

wondrous divine events occur on the surface of natural and historical life’’? Gilkey

seems to believe that it is because they really can’t help themselves: ‘‘The causal

nexus in space and time which Enlightenment science and philosophy introduced

into the Western mind . . . is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars;

since they participate in the modern world of science both intellectually and

existentially, they can scarcely do anything else.’’ The thought seems to be that one

who participates in the modern world of science both intellectually and

existentially cannot help believing that God never acts specially or intervenes in

the world. And, according to Bultmann, someone who avails herself of modern

medicine and the wireless (not to mention, I suppose, television, computers, and

cell phones that do email and double as cameras) can’t also believe in the spirit

and wonder world of the New Testament.

Clearly, both of these claims deserve to be taken with a grain or two of salt.

First, I personally have met people—physicists, for example—who participate in

the modern world of science intellectually and existentially (if I understand what it

is to participate in a world ‘‘existentially’’) but nevertheless believe that God

raised Jesus from the dead; that Jesus fed the ﬁve thousand and changed water

into wine; that there are miraculous healings; that angels, and even Satan and his

minions, are active in the world; and so on. (Furthermore, it is likely that many of

these physicists have a rather better grasp of the physics of radio transmission—

not to mention subsequent developments—than did Bultmann and his theological

allies.) Indeed, if the relevant polls are to be trusted, some 40% of contemporary

American scientists believe that God answers prayers—a percentage that has

remained stable since 1915. At the least, Bultmann and Gilkey seem a bit unduly

optimistic about the extent to which their beliefs are shared—could it be that they

are generalizing on the basis of an unrepresentative sample, themselves and their

friends, perhaps? 10 And second, one suspects they also underestimate their own

powers. My guess is, if they really tried hard, they could stop just assuming the

existence of an unbroken causal nexus in the world, a nexus that precludes special

divine action, and instead ask themselves whether there is really any reason to

think this assumption true .

The old picture

Still, there is of course some connection between modern science and acceptance of

hands-off theology. First, what sort of science is it that is relevant here? Gilkey

mentions eighteenth-century science and philosophy. And indeed, the inspiration

for views like those of Gilkey and others does come from eighteenth-century

Enlightenment science—the classical science initiated by Sir Isaac Newton, so

fateful for modern thought. 11 This is the physics of Newton’s laws of motion and

gravity, and the later physics of electricity and magnetism represented by

Plantinga - What is Intervention.pdf

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