Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism by Alvin Plantinga

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. 10
     
    I reported Gilkey as saying that the theologians of whom he speaks don’t believe that God does anything at all in the world; but this isn’t quite accurate. These theologians don’t object to the idea that God creates and sustains the world. Their view is therefore entirely compatible with God’s acting in such a way as to preserve it in being. Where they have difficulty is with the claim 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 changing water into wine, or feeding five thousand with a few loaves and fishes, or raising someone from the dead. It is
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. Their idea is that God couldn’t or wouldn’t do a thing like that. According to Bultmann, a divinely caused miracle or any other special divine action would constitute God’s “interfering” in the world; and that, he says, can’t happen. Bultmann’s idea, shared by the others I mentioned and many others, is what we might call “hand-off theology”: God creates the world and upholds it, but for the rest can’t or at least doesn’t act in it; he steps aside and lets it evolve according to the laws he has set for it.
    But what’s the problem with special divine action? Why should anyone object to it? Why do these theologians think that the causal continuum “cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers,” that appeal to supernatural activity “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”? In a word (or two): incompatibility with modern science.Modern science, they think, shows, or perhaps assumes, or presupposes, that God does not act in that way. As Gilkey puts it, “modern theologians and scholars participate in the world of science,” and because they do, they can’t help but think of creation as a closed continuum of cause and effect, closed to intervention or interference on the part of beings outside that continuum, including God himself. As he says, “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.” 11 The thought seems to be that one who participates in the modern world of science both intellectually and existentially cannot help believing that God (if there is such a person) 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,