It has been commonly accepted in the reflection on the history of the Western thought that since the origin of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, religion and theology began to lose their importance for the common effort of an explanation of the phenomena occurring in nature. We are told that it was the growing secularization of the West that gave an autonomy to scientific endeavors, thus enabling scientists to develop a novel method of an adversarial discourse in which new theories about the physical world could be tested, demonstrated, and verified, to be eventually accepted across the world. In this context, theology is oftentimes perceived as taking a defensive position. Striving to face the challenges of mechanicism and physicalism, as well as the reductionist notions of stability, change, and causal dependencies in nature, it seems to be forced to gradually give up its territory to science. The God of the gaps, i.e., God working in/through the phenomena that remain unexplained by proper divisions of natural science, tends to become ever smaller with the growing success of the latter.
Even if this picture is oversimplified and falls short in describing the complexity of the actual situation of theology in the age of science, we must acknowledge that the revival of the atomism and the reduction of the rich Aristotelian notion of causal dependencies in nature to the realm of physical interactions—the effects of which are quantifiable and can be expressed in the language of mathematics—could not but had a significant influence on theology, and on our understanding of divine action in particular. This change was so dramatic that it is noticed and described not only by theologians, but also by many philosophers. Edwin A. Burt says at one point that:
With final causality gone, God as Aristotelianism had conceived him was quite lost. (…) The only way to keep him in the universe was to invert the Aristotelian metaphysics and regard him as the First Efficient Cause or Creator of the atoms. (…) God thus ceases to be the Supreme Good in any important sense; he is a huge mechanical inventor, whose power is appealed to merely to account for the first appearance of the atoms, the tendency becoming more and more irresistible as time goes on to lodge all further causality for whatever effects in the atoms themselves.
Gradual departure from the explanation involving the notion of teleology and formal causation resulted, in turn, in the dismissal of the Thomistic concept of the God-world relationship with its categories of God being the first formal, efficient, and final cause, and a source of primary matter, as well as its distinctions between principal/instrumental, and primary/secondary causation, with Aquinas’ emphasis on the importance of analogical predication in theology. These changes led to the idea of God’s action conceived univocally as a physical agent, interfering (instead of concurring) with other physical forces.
While some of the prophets of the new science would gradually exclude divine action thus defined as disruptive for the determined patterns of scientific laws—embracing deistic, agnostic, or even atheistic stance—many theologians strived to find the so-called “causal joint” between the causality of God and of creatures (the category of “causal joint” is present today, e.g., in the writings of Austin Farrer, John Polkinghorne, Philip Clayton, or Arthur Peacocke). Another group of theologians chose to follow the suggestion of Schleiermacher who claims that “we should abandon the idea of the absolutely supernatural because no single instance of it can be known by us, and we are nowhere required to recognize it.” Applying this general rule to the question of the nature of divine action, they seem to agree with Rudolf Bultmann and his opinion that God’s action in the universe is in fact limited to the realm of a personal, existential encounter, and—just as other aspects of God talk—our notion of it has to be “demythologized.”
In this context, the fact of the current paradigm shift taking place in the life sciences and other branches of science studying complex phenomena becomes an important factor that radically changes the framework of our philosophical analysis and predication. The acceptance of the irreducible character of numerous properties and phenomena taking place in living organisms and nonliving dynamical systems is accompanied by the advancement of the systems approach in biology and new research strategies in studying dynamical aspects of structures and arrangements of mereological wholes. This new approach in science leads to the rediscovery and a new explication of the theory of emergence (EM) and downward causation (DC), as a necessary philosophical background for the new approach to complexity. It also proves to question the reductionist agenda, predominant in natural science over the last three centuries.
Moreover, moving to yet another level of explanation, the new framework of the scientific and philosophical analysis of complexity in nature provides a fresh inspiration for theology, which by definition shows a nonreductionist approach to reality. Taking on account the fact that nature reveals divine action of the Creator, theologians working in the theology-science dialogue find in the theory of EM and DC an inspiration for better and deeper understanding of God’s presence and causal action in the universe.
One of the most robust and thorough models of divine action—developed in reference to DC-based EM theory and grounded in panentheistic understanding of the God-world relationship—has been offered by Arthur Peacocke and supported by Philip Clayton. Defining emergentist panentheism, Peacocke speaks about the top-down causal influence of God on the totality of the world, understood as a flow of information, that is, a pattern-forming influence. He claims that this approach enables him to reconcile God’s action with the current paradigms of physical, biological, human, and social sciences. According to his proposition, God’s action on the world-as-a-whole does not abrogate the natural regularities of its processes, which are described by nonlinear non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the theory of chaos, relativity, and quantum mechanics.
