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u lar individuals— saints—as a sign of their greater sharing in the life of
God. Th e Incarnation, the virginal birth of Christ, and the resurrection
of the body (beginning with the resurrection of the body of Christ) are
all instances, within Christianity, of such supernaturalism. Th ey are
opposed to the rationalist or deist conception of a God who remains
silently and passively apart from the workings of his created nature.
If we suppose that God is outside time, and that for him all mo-
ments in what we experience as time are an eternal now, there may
be, from the standpoint of his higher intelligence, no such suspension
of causality or of the laws of nature. For us, however, the effi cacy of
God’s presence in the world outreaches, disturbs, or changes the rela-
tion of causes to eff ects in nature. Th is change is the distinctive feature of
supernaturalism.
Th is lesser, more tangible supernaturalism of disturbance is envel-
oped within a greater supernaturalism: that which has to do with the
existence of God, with the inner life of a triune God, and with the
creative and salvifi c activity of this threefold divinity. For all these
ultimate realities surpass not only our natural understanding but
also the regular workings of nature such as we are able to observe
them from our perspective as dying organisms, with limited sensory
equipment.
We can go up to a point in giving a natural account of supernatural-
ism. Change changes. Th at the modes of change, as well as the types of
being, change is a basic feature of nature, and one to which our conven-
tional ideas about causality and the laws of nature fail to do justice. Far
from being a tenet of scientifi c realism, the conception of a framework
of immutable laws of nature underwriting our causal judgments is in
fact a metaphysical superstition.
Over the expanse of the history of the universe, change changes dis-
continuously. New types of being emerge, and new regularities or laws
develop coevally with them. In the early history of the present universe,
nature may not have been manifest in the form of a diff erentiated
structure, of distinct phenomena such as have come to be described by
particle physics. It may have been impossible to distinguish between
laws of nature and the states of aff airs that they govern. Th ere may even
have been causality without laws: causal connection between the before