Special Divine Action and How to Do Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

Any notion of a god that is of relevance to us must show how it makes a difference in the world. But this idea of an interventionist god doesn’t make sense for a secular and scientific mentality such as ours. I take Brenda de Wet’s five sticking points for any religious believer that seem to fail to make the grade of intellectual integrity (2008), and argue that starting from creedal and popular formulations of the notion of a god, as she does along with most standard textbooks in the philosophy of religion, reveals an oversight of self-knowledge characteristic of much modern philosophy. Uncovering similar inadequacies in the secularized Deist account of god (which has given rise to the problem of the relevance of the god) opens up questions to do with the contingent intersubjective conditions of possibility for the development of the power of knowing and acting in the sense implied in the notion of intellectual integrity. But, I argue, free self-determination, and the contingency of its actualization, suggests the reality of a non-finite source of this freedom, and indeed this being manifest in an unavoidably historical, particularistic way. Along these lines I argue for an intellectually coherent notion of particular divine action but in a non-interventionist model.