The Mystery and Agency of God: Divine Being and Action in the World

5 How Can God Act in the World?

5 How Can God Act in the World? Divine Action and the Infrastructure of the Socio-TemporalMaterial World If God is the primordial agent, then how, in fact, can God act in the world? If Edward Pols is right, then we must start our understanding of divine action with his claims that God’s power “must pervade the inner complexity of the act—must, that is, pervade its infrastructure—if the act is to be capable of producing or necessitating something distinct from itself . . .” The divine act must preside over, ramify in, unify, deploy, pervade, supervene, be superordinate over, and govern all that falls under its sway and exercise of power. God’s act “enframes” all that is unified within it and grounds the powers that act at subordinate level within the structures that are being unified and deployed. This “enframing” power of an act “embraces and carries along in its temporal sweep a host of C-E [cause and effect] connections.”1 The power of the agent “permeates” the infrastructure of the act2 and wields it into a unity. If God is an agent, then God’s action is neither reducible to the infrastructure nor completely independent of it. The infrastructure is the means by which the divine intentions are realized. Any act that ramifies in the sub-acts that it unifies “will stand to each of the sub-acts much as an agent would stand to a set of successive acts we attributed to him as to an entity with an ontological status more fundamental than the acts themselves.”3 1. Edward Pols, Meditation on a Prisoner: Towards Understanding Action and Mind (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 76. 2. Ibid., 90. 109 To put this conception of divine action to work, we can begin with the most vexed and problematic way of thinking about God as acting in the world. This way centers around the notion of divine action “interfering” or “intervening” in the causal structures that constitute the physical world. The problem with this notion of interference, however, is that it suggests that God must somehow “break into,” intrude upon, and in the process, “violate” the natural or causal laws by which we “normally” understand the occurrences in the world. But there is a two-fold problem with attempting to eliminate the notion of interference as applied to action: first, if taken literally and carried to its logical conclusion, then there would no such thing as human action in the world. Second, interference suggests that actions must somehow “fit into” an already closed, fixed, and irreducible nexus of events that is completely and exhaustively understood in causal terms in the absence of actions. But if there are human actions in the world, then it is a logically consistent step to understand divine action in the same way we understand human action (while at the same time not identifying one with the other). In order to make this understanding plausible, it is necessary to challenge the notion that all actions must fit into or be subsumed within the causal nexus. Most discussions of how God acts presuppose a closed causal nexus within which all occurrences take place and the reductive causal explanation by which they are understood. As a result most contemporary approaches (with some notable exceptions) to understanding divine action in the world look desperately and, I would argue, in vain for the “causal joint” that links God’s actions to the effects within the causal nexus that we want to attribute to them. But I believe we are misled from the beginning if we assume that it is contrary to our understanding of actions (whether divine or human) to think of them as unexplainable “interferences” in the causal order, which, by their very nature, conflict with a causal explanation of all that happens in the world. There is a benign notion of interference that is perfectly acceptable, but I will argue that there is an even better way of understanding action that simply bypasses concepts of interference or intervention by utilizing Pols’s notion of the agent’s hierarchical deployment of the causal infrastructure in the realization of his intentions. The History of Interpretations of Divine Acts in History The history of contemporary attempts to address the issue of God’s actions in the world from the point of view of modern science can be traced back to 3. Ibid., 99. 110 | The Mystery and Agency of God [18.226.169.94] Project MUSE...