Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas by Michael Dodds

Abstract

493 BOOK REVIEWS Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas. By MICHAEL DODDS. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Pp. 328. $70.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-81321989 -9. Although no one can deny that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was an unmixed blessing in terms of the advance of technology, medicine, and our more detailed knowledge of the natural world, in terms of natural philosophy and metaphysics its effects have been more ambiguous. An exclusive focus on quantifiable forces has blinded us to many modes of natural causality, modes of long standing among the ancient and medieval philosophers. Furthermore, insofar as theology has often presupposed certain truths of or at least modeled itself on natural science, the scientific revolution likewise handicapped us in our attempts to understand divine causality. In Unlocking Divine Action, Michael Dodds first defends these claims—which have in various ways been canvassed before—but then goes much further: Dodds argues that, in spite of this legacy, there are signs that recent science is returning to the older, broader understanding of causality, and thereby equipping philosophers and theologians observing science to “unlock” divine action. The first two chapters are directed toward the claim that science since around the time of Newton narrowed our understanding of what it is to be a cause. The first chapter covers the prescientific understanding of causality as presented by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. In what amounts to a gloss on books 1 and 2 of the Physics, Dodds lays out carefully, and yet with minimal jargon, the four causes and chance, finding the delicate balance of precision and accessibility. The second chapter discusses the project of Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and others as they decided either to truncate, ignore, or explicitly reject the notions of formal and final causality in favor of a constricted notion of efficient causality, where the only agent worthy of consideration is that of a quantifiable, and therefore measurable, force emanating from and acting on ultimate particles. This part of the book does not break new ground, but its clarity and its manifest relevance as a premise make it worthwhile. In the third chapter Dodds makes a connection often missed: an effect of the success and dominance of Newtonian science was an application of its notion of causality to both natural and sacred theology. God’s causality could only be that of a force acting on atoms; any other consideration was as 494 BOOK REVIEWS obsolete as Aristotle’s substantial forms and geocentric universe. Thinking of God as just another source of forces—in fact, one that interfered with the very order he himself had established—caused perplexity among many scientists, philosophers, and theologians about how God could interact with the cosmos. Likewise, it led many to reject the possibility of miracles because of the apparently incoherent view of nature that divine intervention suggested. The clockmaker God of the Deists, the liberal theologians following Bultmann, and the pantheist-leaning process theologians all agreed, under the influence of the force-paradigm, that God was forbidden miracles. Further, in an effort to uphold the “autonomy of creation” and to avoid imputing a violent coercion of our wills to God, they even felt compelled to reduce or limit divine omnipotence and omniscience. God ended up “locked out” of nature. The remaining four chapters of the book are devoted to picking this lock. In chapters 4 and 5 Dodds shows how many discoveries in contemporary science—that is, science in the last century or later, since the advent of quantum theory—are opening scientists’ minds to other possibilities of the idea of causality. These two chapters are divided according to a crucial distinction about the relation between science and theology. On the one hand, a theologian might import a theory from science, basing theological conclusions on it as on a premise. On the other hand, a theologian might incorporate the ideas hinted at, or even fundamentally presupposed, in a scientific theory. Chapter 4 follows attempts at the former vis-à-vis divine action, as pursued in recent decades by several philosophers, the majority of whom (one quickly notices from the footnotes) are in...