Views on divine action were influenced by developments in physics and their philosophical interpretation. In the seventeenth century, natural philosophers, such as Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, developed a mechanistic view of the world as governed by orderly and lawlike processes. Laws, understood as immutable and stable, created difficulties for the concept of special divine action Pannenberg How could God act in a world that was determined by laws?
One way to regard miracles and other forms of special divine action is to see them as actions that somehow suspend or ignore the laws of nature. This concept of divine action is commonly labeled interventionist. Interventionism regards the world as causally deterministic, so God has to create room for special divine actions. By contrast, non-interventionist forms of divine action e. In the seventeenth century, the explanation of the workings of nature in terms of elegant physical laws suggested the ingenuity of a divine designer.
Another conclusion that the new laws-based physics suggested was that the universe was able to run smoothly without requiring an intervening God. The increasingly deterministic understanding of the universe, ruled by deterministic causal laws as, for example, outlined by Pierre-Simon Laplace — , seemed to leave no room for special divine action, which is a key element of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation. Alston argued, contra authors such as Polkinghorne , that mechanistic, pre-twentieth century physics is compatible with divine action and divine free will.
In such a mechanistic world, every event is an indirect divine act. Advances in twentieth-century physics, including the theories of general and special relativity, chaos theory, and quantum theory, overturned the mechanical clockwork view of creation. In the latter half of the twentieth century, chaos theory and quantum physics have been explored as possible avenues to reinterpret divine action.
One difficulty with this model is that it moves from our knowledge of the world to assumptions about how the world is: does chaos theory mean that outcomes are genuinely undetermined, or that we as limited humans cannot predict them? Robert Russell proposed that God acts in quantum events. This would allow God to directly act in nature without having to contravene the laws of nature, and is therefore a non-interventionist model.
Since, under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are no natural efficient causes at the quantum level, God is not reduced to a natural cause.
Murphy outlined a similar bottom-up model where God acts in the space provided by quantum indeterminacy. After all, it is not even clear whether quantum theory would allow for free human action, let alone divine action, which we do not know much about Jaeger a. Next to this, William Carroll , building on Thomistic philosophy, argues that authors such as Murphy and Polkinghorne are making a category mistake: God is not a cause in a way creatures are causes, competing with natural causes, and God does not need indeterminacy in order to act in the world.
Rather, as primary cause God supports and grounds secondary causes. While this solution is compatible with determinism indeed, on this view, the precise details of physics do not matter much , it blurs the distinction between general and special divine action. Moreover, the Incarnation suggests that the idea of God as a cause among natural causes is not an alien idea in theology, and that God at least sometimes acts as a natural cause Sollereder There has been a debate on the question to what extent randomness is a genuine feature of creation, and how divine action and chance interrelate.
Chance and stochasticity are important features of evolutionary theory the non-random retention of random variations. In a famous thought experiment, Gould imagined that we could rewind the tape of life back to the time of the Burgess Shale million years ago ; the chance we would end up with anything like the present-day life forms is vanishingly small.
However, Simon Conway Morris has argued species very similar to the ones we know now including human-like intelligent species would evolve under a broad range of conditions. Under a theist interpretation, randomness could either be a merely apparent aspect of creation, or a genuine feature. Plantinga suggests that randomness is a physicalist interpretation of the evidence.
God may have guided every mutation along the evolutionary process. In this way, God could. By contrast, some authors see stochasticity as a genuine design feature, and not just as a physicalist gloss. Their challenge is to explain how divine providence is compatible with genuine randomness. Under a deistic view, one could simply say that God started the universe off and did not interfere with how it went, but that option is not open to the theist, and most authors in the field of science and religion are theists, rather than deists.
Elizabeth Johnson , using a Thomistic view of divine action, argues that divine providence and true randomness are compatible: God gives creatures true causal powers, thus making creation more excellent than if they lacked such powers, and random occurrences are also secondary causes; chance is a form of divine creativity that creates novelty, variety, and freedom.
One implication of this view is that God may be a risk taker—although, if God has a providential plan for possible outcomes, there is unpredictability but not risk. Johnson uses metaphors of risk taking that, on the whole, leave the creator in a position of control creation, then, is like jazz improvisation , but it is, to her, a risk nonetheless.
Why would God take risks? There are several solutions to this question. The free will theodicy says that a creation that exhibits stochasticity can be truly free and autonomous:. Authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation. Such freedom is best supplied by the open contingency of evolution, and not by strings of divine direction attached to every living creature. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have similar creation stories, which ultimately go back to the first book of the Hebrew Bible Genesis.
According to Genesis, humans are the result of a special act of creation. Genesis 1 offers an account of the creation of the world in six days, with the creation of human beings on the sixth day. Islam has a creation narrative similar to Genesis 2, with Adam being fashioned out of clay. These handcrafted humans are regarded as the ancestors of all living humans today. Humans occupy a privileged position in these creation accounts. In Christianity, Judaism, and some strands of Islam, humans are created in the image of God imago Dei.
There are at least three different ways in which image-bearing is understood Cortez According to the functionalist account, humans are in the image of God by virtue of things they do, such as having dominion over nature.
The structuralist account emphasizes characteristics that humans uniquely possess, such as reason. The relational interpretation sees the image as a special relationship between God and humanity. Humans also occupy a special place in creation as a result of the fall. By eating from the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil they fell from this state, and death, manual labor, as well as pain in childbirth were introduced. The Augustinian interpretation of original sin also emphasizes the distorting effects of sin on our reasoning capacities the so-called noetic effects of sin.
As a result of sin, our original perceptual and reasoning capacities have been marred. Whereas Augustine believed that the prelapsarian state was one of perfection, Irenaeus second century saw Adam and Eve prior to the fall as innocent, like children still in development.
Scientific findings and theories relevant to human origins come from a range of disciplines, in particular geology, paleoanthropology the study of ancestral hominins, using fossils and other evidence , archaeology, and evolutionary biology. These findings challenge traditional religious accounts of humanity, including the special creation of humanity, the imago Dei , the historical Adam and Eve, and original sin.
In natural philosophy, the dethroning of humanity from its position as a specially created species predates Darwin and can already be found in early transmutationist publications. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed chimpanzees as the ancestors to humans in his Philosophie Zoologique He proposed that the first organisms arose through spontaneous generation, and that all subsequent organisms evolved from them.
Darwin was initially reluctant to publish on human origins. In the twentieth century, paleoanthropologists debated whether humans separated from the other great apes at the time wrongly classified into the paraphyletic group Pongidae long ago, about 15 million years ago, or relatively recently, about 5 million years ago. Molecular clocks—first immune responses e. The discovery of many hominin fossils, including Ardipithecus ramidus 4. These finds are now also supplemented by detailed analysis of ancient DNA extracted from fossil remains, bringing to light a previously unknown species of hominin the Denisovans who lived in Siberia up to about 40, years ago.
Taken together, this evidence indicates that humans did not evolve in a simple linear fashion, but that human evolution resembles an intricate branching tree with many dead ends, in line with the evolution of other species. In the light of these scientific findings, contemporary science and religion authors have reconsidered the questions of human uniqueness and imago Dei , the Incarnation, and the historicity of original sin. Some authors have attempted to reinterpret human uniqueness as a number of species-specific cognitive and behavioral adaptations.
For example, van Huyssteen considers the ability of humans to engage in cultural and symbolic behavior, which became prevalent in the Upper Paleolithic, as a key feature of uniquely human behavior. Other theologians have opted to broaden the notion of imago Dei.
Given what we know about the capacities for morality and reason in non-human animals, Celia Deane-Drummond and Oliver Putz reject an ontological distinction between humans and non-human animals, and argue for a reconceptualization of the imago Dei to include at least some nonhuman animals. Joshua Moritz raises the question of whether extinct hominin species, such as Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis , which co-existed with Homo sapiens for some part of prehistory, partook in the divine image.
There is also discussion of how we can understand the Incarnation the belief that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, became incarnate with the evidence we have of human evolution.
For instance, Peacocke regarded Jesus as the point where humanity is perfect for the first time. Teilhard de Chardin had a teleological, progressivist interpretation of evolution, according to which Christ is the progression and culmination of what evolution has been working toward even though the historical Jesus lived years ago.
According to Teilhard, evil is still horrible but no longer incomprehensible; it becomes a natural feature of creation—since God chose evolution as his mode of creation, evil arises as an inevitable byproduct. Deane-Drummond , however, points out that this interpretation is problematic: Teilhard worked within a Spencerian progressivist model of evolution, and he was anthropocentric, seeing humanity as the culmination of evolution. Current evolutionary theory has repudiated the Spencerian progressivist view, and adheres to a stricter Darwinian model.
Deane-Drummond, who regards human morality as lying on a continuum with the social behavior of other animals, conceptualizes the fall as a mythical, rather than a historical event. She regards Christ as incarnate wisdom, situated in a theodrama that plays against the backdrop of an evolving creation.
As a human being, Christ is connected to the rest of creation, as we all are, through common descent. By saving us, he saves the whole of creation. Debates on the fall and the historical Adam have centered on how these narratives can be understood in the light of contemporary science. On the face of it, limitations of our cognitive capacities can be naturalistically explained as a result of biological constraints, so there seems little explanatory gain to appeal to the narrative of the fall.
Some have attempted to interpret the concepts of sin and fall in ways that are compatible with paleoanthropology. Peter van Inwagen , for example, holds that God could have providentially guided hominin evolution until there was a tightly-knit community of primates, endowed with reason, language, and free will, and this community was in close union with God. At some point in history, these hominins somehow abused their free will to distance themselves from God. For van Inwagen, the fall was a fall from perfection, following the Augustinian tradition.
John Schneider , on the other hand, argues that there is no genetic or paleoanthropological evidence for such a community of superhuman beings. Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt favor an Irenaean, rather than an Augustinian interpretation of the fall narrative, which does not involve a historical Adam, and emphasizes original innocence as the state that humans had prior to sinning. This final section will look at two examples of work in science and religion that have received attention in the recent literature, and that probably will be important in the coming years: evolutionary ethics and implications of the cognitive science of religion.
Other areas of increasing interest include the theistic multiverse, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism. Even before Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection, Victorian authors fretted over the implications of evolutionary theory for morality and religion. Evolutionary theorists from Darwin onward argued that human morality is continuous with social behaviors in nonhuman animals, and that we can explain moral sentiments as the result of natural selection.
Michael Ruse e. This capacity has evolutionary precursors in the ability of nonhuman animals to empathize, cooperate, reconcile, and engage in fair play e. Some philosophers e. Since we can explain ethical beliefs and behaviors as a result of their long-term fitness consequences, we do not need to invoke ethical realism as an explanation.
Some ask whether evolutionary challenges to moral beliefs apply in an analogous way to religious beliefs see Bergmann and Kain , especially part III. Others have examined whether evolutionary ethics makes appeals to God in ethical matters redundant. John Hare , for example, has argued that this is not the case, because evolutionary ethics can only explain why we do things that ultimately benefit us, even if indirectly e. According to Hare , evolutionary ethics does not explain our sense of moral obligation that goes beyond biological self-interest, as evolutionary theory predicts that we would always rank biological self-interest over moral obligations.
Therefore, theism provides a more coherent explanation of why we feel we have to follow up on moral obligations.
Intriguingly, theologians and scientists have begun to collaborate in the field of evolutionary ethics. For example, the theologian Sarah Coakley has cooperated with the mathematician and biologist Martin Nowak to understand altruism and game theory in a broader theological and scientific context Nowak and Coakley The cognitive science of religion examines the cognitive basis of religious beliefs.
Recent work in the field of science and religion has examined the implications of this research for the justification of religious beliefs. De Cruz and De Smedt propose that arguments in natural theology are also influenced by evolved cognitive dispositions. For example, the design argument may derive its intuitive appeal from an evolved, early-developed propensity in humans to ascribe purpose and design to objects in their environment. This complicates natural theological projects, which rely on a distinction between the origins of a religious belief and their justification through reasoned argument.
Kelly Clark and Justin L. Barrett argue that the cognitive science of religion offers the prospect of an empirically-informed Reidian defense of religious belief. Thomas Reid proposed that we are justified in holding beliefs that arise from cognitive faculties universally present in humans which give rise to spontaneous, non-inferential beliefs.
If cognitive scientists are right in proposing that belief in God arises naturally from the workings of our minds, we are prima facie justified in believing in God Clark and Barrett Others e. John Wilkins and Paul Griffiths argue that the evolved origins of religious beliefs can figure in an evolutionary debunking argument against religious belief, which they formulate along the lines of Guy Kahane :.
Epistemic Premise : The evolutionary process X does not track the truth of propositions like p. Wilkins and Griffiths hold that the epistemic premise can sometimes be resisted: evolutionary processes do track truth, for instance, in the case of commonsense beliefs and, by extension, scientific beliefs.
However, they hold that this move does not work for religious and moral beliefs, because such beliefs are assumed not to be the result of truth-tracking cognitive processes. This research was supported by a small book and research grant of the Special Divine Action Project, specialdivineaction.
Religion and Science First published Tue Jan 17, What are science and religion, and how do they interrelate? Science and religion in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism 2. Contemporary connections between science and religion 3. Future directions in science and religion 4.
Science and religion in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism As noted, most studies on the relationship between science and religion have focused on science and Christianity, with only a small number of publications devoted to other religious traditions e. For example, Clark writes, Exclude God from the definition of science and, in one fell definitional swoop, you exclude the greatest natural philosophers of the so-called scientific revolution—Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle, and Newton to name just a few.
Contemporary connections between science and religion Current work in the field of science and religion encompasses a wealth of topics, including free will, ethics, human nature, and consciousness. In this way, God could guide the course of evolutionary history by causing the right mutations to arise at the right time and preserving the forms of life that lead to the results he intends.
The free will theodicy says that a creation that exhibits stochasticity can be truly free and autonomous: Authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation. Future directions in science and religion This final section will look at two examples of work in science and religion that have received attention in the recent literature, and that probably will be important in the coming years: evolutionary ethics and implications of the cognitive science of religion.
Allport, Gordon W. Alston, William P. Rotelle ed. Hill and M. Barrett, Justin L. Bergmann, Michael, and Patrick Kain eds. Bering, Jesse M. Bowler, Peter J. Brooke, John Hedley and Ronald L. Numbers eds. Brown, C. Clark, Kelly, J. Clark, Kelly J. Moreland eds.
Corey, Michael A. Moser eds. Pinard, pp. Dembski, William A. Fengren ed. Ecklund, Elaine H. Forrest, Barbara and Paul R. Gervais, Will M. Gould, Stephen J. Pennock ed. Eerdmans, pp. Harris, Mark, , The Nature of Creation. Examining the Bible and Science , Durham: Acumen. Harris, Paul L. Pasquini, Suzanne Duke, Jessica J. Haught, John F. A Critical Edition , T.
Beauchamp ed. Huxley, Thomas H. Johnson, Elisabeth A. Lamoureux, Denis O. Legare, Cristine H. Margaret Evans, Karl S. Rosengren, and Paul L. Masci, David and Gregory A. McCauley, Robert N. McGrath, Alister E. Miller, Kenneth R. And there are people of faith who can justify their views with powerful arguments.
Life is too brief; there is too much to know and not enough time. We need epistemological shortcuts. I believe that global warming is a serious problem and that vaccines do not cause autism, but this is not because I have studied these issues myself.
Like me, they defer, just to different authorities. This equivalence might lead to a relativist conclusion—you have your faith; I have mine. But there is a critical difference. Some sorts of deference are better than others. These preferences are not ideological. They are rational, because the methods of science are demonstrably superior at getting at truths about the natural world.
Sociologists and philosophers deserve a lot of credit in reminding us that scientific practice is permeated by groupthink, bias, and financial, political, and personal motivations. But science as an institution behaves differently than particular scientists. Science establishes conditions where rational argument is able to flourish, where ideas can be tested against the world, and where individuals can work together to surpass their individual limitations.
It has earned its epistemological stripes. And when the stakes are high, as they are with climate change and vaccines, we should appreciate its special status. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Religious faith, in contrast, does not depend only on empirical evidence, is not necessarily modified in the face of conflicting evidence, and typically involves supernatural forces or entities.
Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways.
Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist. Many religious denominations and individual religious leaders have issued statements acknowledging the occurrence of evolution and pointing out that evolution and faith do not conflict. Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis.
In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies — which was neither planned nor sought — constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests.
To reject this truth or to treat it as 'one theory among others' is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator…. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge.
We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth. Scientists, like people in other professions, hold a wide range of positions about religion and the role of supernatural forces or entities in the universe.
Some adhere to a position known as scientism, which holds that the methods of science alone are sufficient for discovering everything there is to know about the universe. Others ascribe to an idea known as deism, which posits that God created all things and set the universe in motion but no longer actively directs physical phenomena. Others are theists, who believe that God actively intervenes in the world. Many scientists who believe in God, either as a prime mover or as an active force in the universe, have written eloquently about their beliefs.
Most scientists who are religious look for God in what science does understand and has explained. Quote is excerpted from an interview available here. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul. Advocates of the ideas collectively known as "creationism" and, recently, "intelligent design creationism" hold a wide variety of views.
Most broadly, a "creationist" is someone who rejects natural scientific explanations of the known universe in favor of special creation by a supernatural entity. Creationism in its various forms is not the same thing as belief in God because, as was discussed earlier, many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution.
Nor is creationism necessarily tied to Christians who interpret the Bible literally. Some non-Christian religious believers also want to replace scientific explanations with their own religion's supernatural accounts of physical phenomena.
In the United States, various views of creationism typically have been promoted by small groups of politically active religious fundamentalists who believe that only a supernatural entity could account for the physical changes in the universe and for the biological diversity of life on Earth.
But even these creationists hold very different views. Some, known as "young Earth" creationists, believe the biblical account that the universe and the Earth were created just a few thousand years ago. Proponents of this form of creationism also believe that all living things, including humans, were created in a very short period of time in essentially the forms in which they exist today. Other creationists, known as "old Earth" creationists, accept that the Earth may be very old but reject other scientific findings regarding the evolution of living things.
No scientific evidence supports these viewpoints. On the contrary, as discussed earlier, several independent lines of evidence indicate that the Earth is about 4.
Rejecting the evidence for these age estimates would mean rejecting not just biological evolution but also fundamental discoveries of modern physics, chemistry, astrophysics, and geology. Some creationists believe that Earth's present form and the distribution of fossils can be explained by a worldwide flood. But this claim also is at odds with observations and evidence understood scientifically.
The belief that Earth's sediments, with their fossils, were deposited in a short period does not accord either with the known processes of sedimentation or with the estimated volume of water needed to deposit sediments on the top of some of Earth's highest mountains.
Creationists sometimes cite what they claim to be an incomplete fossil record as evidence that living things were created in their modern forms.
But this argument ignores the rich and extremely detailed record of evolutionary history that paleontologists and other biologists have constructed over the past two centuries and are continuing to construct. Paleontological research has filled in many of the parts of the fossil record that were incomplete in Charles Darwin's time.
The claim that the fossil record is "full of gaps" that undermine evolution is simply false. Indeed, paleontologists now know enough about the ages of sediments to predict where they will be able to find particularly significant transitional fossils, as happened with Tiktaalik and the ancestors of modern humans. Researchers also are using new techniques, such as computed axial tomography CT , to learn even more about the internal structures and composition of delicate bones of fossils.
Exciting new discoveries of fossils continue to be reported in both the scientific literature and popular media. Another compelling feature of the fossil record is its consistency. Nowhere on Earth are fossils from dinosaurs, which went extinct 65 million years ago, found together with fossils from humans, who evolved in just the last few million years.
Nowhere are the fossils of mammals found in sediments that are more than about million years old. Whenever creationists point to sediments where these relationships appear to be altered or even reversed, scientists have clearly demonstrated that this reversal has resulted from the folding of geological strata over or under others.
Sediments containing the fossils of only unicellular organisms appear earlier in the fossil record than do sediments containing the remains of both unicellular and multicellular organisms. The sequence of fossils across Earth's sediments points unambiguously toward the occurrence of evolution. Creationists sometimes argue that the idea of evolution must remain hypothetical because "no one has ever seen evolution occur.
Scientific conclusions are not limited to direct observation but often depend on inferences that are made by applying reason to observations. Even with the launch of Earth-orbiting spacecraft, scientists could not directly see the Earth going around the Sun.
But they inferred from a wealth of independent measurements that the Sun is at the center of the solar system. Until the recent development of extremely powerful microscopes, scientists could not observe atoms, but the behavior of physical objects left no doubt about the atomic nature of matter.
Scientists hypothesized the existence of viruses for many years before microscopes became powerful enough to see them.
Thus, for many areas of science, scientists have not directly observed the objects such as genes and atoms or the phenomena such as the Earth going around the Sun that are now well-established facts. Instead, they have confirmed them indirectly by observational and experimental evidence. Evolution is no different.
Indeed, for the reasons described in this booklet, evolutionary science provides one of the best examples of a deep understanding based on scientific reasoning. This contention that nobody has seen evolution occurring further ignores the overwhelming evidence that evolution has taken place and is continuing to occur.
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