Direct Divine Acts
One might object, however, that a God who acts indirectly but who, with the exception of
an initial act of creation, never acts directly is a quasi-deistic God, not the God of any
robust theistic religion. For the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a God of
miracles and answered prayer, of special rather than merely general providence and
revelation, and divine activity of this sort is possible only if God bypasses the natural
order and brings about an effect simply by willing that it be so. Thus, it is this sort of
direct divine activity that involves the violation of laws of nature and so brings theistic
religions into conflict with a scientific understanding of the world. But even if direct
divine action is essential to theistic religions (which is by no means obvious), the
assumption that it would violate established laws of nature—that its occurrence would
entail that a nomic regularity established by science does not actually hold—has been
challenged. Some of the most popular of these challenges appeal to quantum mechanics
(e.g., Pollard 1958) or chaos theory (e.g., Polkinghorne 1989, 26–35) or both (e.g.,
Murphy 1995) in an attempt to find room for a law-abiding God to be actively and
directly involved in the world.
end p.282
A much more fundamental challenge, however, a challenge that, if successful, makes
such attempts to exploit the “openness” of post–nineteenth-century science unnecessary,
is made by C. S. Lewis (1947) and more recently by Alston (1985, 209–10). Alston
presents the challenge as follows. He points out that whether God's direct action in the
world is a violation of the laws of nature depends on the form those laws take. If those
laws specify unqualified sufficient conditions, then direct divine action will involve a
violation. If, on the other hand, they specify only what will (or must) occur in the absence
of relevant conditions not specified in the law, then direct divine action will not involve a
violation. Laws that specify what will happen in a closed system are not violated if the
system turns out not to be closed. Alston's next premise is that, in fact, we never are
justified in accepting laws of the first sort. He concludes that the only laws supported by
science are of the second sort and hence that direct divine acts need not violate any laws
of nature supported by science.
Divine Action and Methodological Naturalism
Even if Alston is correct, however, that does not settle the question of whether or not a
belief in divine action conflicts with a belief in methodological naturalism. Indeed, it
would seem that a scientist who believes in direct divine action in the world must also
believe that some natural phenomena cannot be correctly explained without appealing to
supernatural entities. And even a scientist who believes that God's actions in the world