In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

These first words of Genesis tell us two fundamental things about God: God is and God acts. If we believe in a God who acts, we can talk about God only if we speak about action, and to do that we need a language of causality. What we think about causality influences our understanding of how God acts and so also of who God is. Before the advent of modern Newtonian science, theologians found a rich doctrine of causality in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas who developed the thought...

Today’s theoretical physicists look for a “theory of everything” to explain all that is. The earliest Greek philosophers asked a similar question: What is everything, really? They decided everything must be composed of four basic elements, earth, air, fire, and water. But which is the most basic, the most fundamental cause of all? Thales (620–550 b.c.) was for water. He thought that, down deep, everything must be water in one form or another. Anaximines (570–500 b.c.) argued for air, while Heraclitus (fl. 500 b.c.) favored fire. Anaximander (610–525 b.c.), rather remarkably, chose “none of the above.” He...

Empirical science has had an inestimable influence on society, evidenced perhaps most visibly in the technology of contemporary culture. It deeply affects the way we see and think about the world.¹ Of course, broader modes of human thought have also influenced science and the way it interprets its empirical findings.² E. A. Burtt traced the metaphysical assumptions of modern science to see their influence on contemporary philosophical conundrums.³ Thomas Kuhn has famously analyzed how the paradigms that guide scientific research also influence the way scientists see the world.⁴ Among other things, science has profoundly influenced our understanding of causality. The...

Now that we have seen how the idea of causality, locked in by modern science, has been unlocked and expanded in contemporary science, we need to explore how this locking and unlocking has affected our understanding of divine causality. We will find, not surprisingly, that as the notion of causality became limited, so did our ability to speak of God’s action. In this chapter, we will look at how divine action became locked with the advent of modern science. In the next two chapters, we will consider how theology might best employ the developments of contemporary science to unlock it....

The developments of contemporary science suggest novel and sometimes strange ways of viewing the natural world. These provide theologians with two fundamentally new options for speaking about divine action. One is to use the developments themselves (or certain interpretations of the theories associated with them). The other is to employ not the interpretations but the expanded notion of causality that they imply. We will explore both options—the first in this chapter and the second in the next.

In the first option, theologians use the new openness in nature that appears in certain interpretations of contemporary science to model divine...

We have seen that contemporary science suggests understandings of causality beyond the constricted notions of Newtonian science. At the same time, we have noticed how our ability to speak of divine action is linked to our understanding of causality—shrinking or expanding as our notion of causality grows narrower or broader. We have also discovered that the new and broader understandings of causality in contemporary science are reminiscent of aspects of causality as understood in the philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Our present task will be to exploit those new (and old) understandings of causality to speak of divine...

We have seen how science is breaking out of the confines of causality as understood by Newtonian physics. We have also described how theology, following its example, might engage this broader understanding of contemporary science. Newtonian causality was univocal, the force that moved the atoms. Contemporary causality is analogous, expressed in many different ways in the various sciences.

Analogy is also essential on our language about God. If we speak of God univocally, we reduce God to the level of a creature. By speaking analogously, we preserve both the reality of God and the integrity of the creature. Our task...

We have shown how an expanded notion of causality, suggested by developments in contemporary science and retrieving consonant elements of the understanding of causality in the thought of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, can be applied to the question of divine action in a way that preserves both the integrity of divine action and the proper causality of creatures. We will now use this understanding of causality to address three central issues in the theology of divine action: providence, prayer, and miracles.

In many ways, our entire discussion of divine action thus far has been a meditation on divine providence, since...

Our discussion has been concerned fundamentally with two approaches to divine action that have become possible, in some way, through contemporary science. One directly employs certain interpretations of the theories of contemporary science. The other uses not so much those interpretations as the understanding of causality that arises from them.

We have seen that our idea of divine action is closely tied to our notion of causality and that the ways we think about causality affect the ways we can talk about God’s action. Our idea of causality, however, has been profoundly influenced by empirical science. Before the Scientific Revolution,...