Contemporary debates on divine action tend to focus on finding a space in nature where there would be no natural causes, where nature offers indeterminacy, openness, and potentiality, to place God’s action. These places are found through the natural sciences, in particular quantum mechanics. God’s action is then located in those ontological ”causal-gaps’ offered by certain interpretations of quantum mechanics. In this view, God would determine what is left underdetermined in nature without disrupting the laws of nature. These contemporary proposals (...) evidence at least two unexamined assumptions, which frame the discussion in such a way that they portray God as acting as a secondary cause or a ”cause among causes’. God is somewhat required to act within these ”gaps’, binding God to the laws of nature, and placing God’s action at the level of secondary causes. I suggest that understanding God’s action, following Thomas Aquinas, in terms of primary and secondary causation could help dissolve this difficulty. Aquinas moves away from this objection by suggesting to speak of an analogical notion of cause, allowing for an analogical understanding of God’s causality in nature. With a radically different understanding of the interplay between secondary causes and God, Aquinas manages to avoid conceiving God as a cause among causes, keeping the distinctive transcendent character of God’s causality safe from objections. (shrink)

Extending the approach to a ‘theology of science’ developed in Faith and Wisdom in Science, I expand its theme of the tension between chaos and emergent order, within the arc of the Biblical story of creation, towards a theology of evolutionary science. In addition to the material in Job, the book of Wisdom provides a remarkable account of transmutation of species, within a recapitulation of the Exodus theme, that I juxtapose with a modern genotype-phenotype theory of evolutionary dynamics, exploiting analogies (...) with statistical mechanics. The dual and connected structures of microscopic and macroscopic provide a locus for the Joban tensions of chaos and emergent order, and provide an interpretative narrative for the emergent directionality of evolution, and a theology that situates within a creation of freedom to explore the potential of the created order. (shrink)

Stephen Law’s evil-god challenge is the argument that since an evil god is just as likely as the God of theism, there is no reason to believe that theism is true over believing there is a god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnimalevolent. There have been several attempts to answer the challenge, but recently John Collins has defended the evil-god challenge and also extended the argument past Law’s original formulation. In this article, I defend the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas (...) against the evil-god challenge. In particular, I explain how Aquinas’s theodicy involving God’s goodness and Aquinas’s privation view of evil avoid the challenge. (shrink)

The article presents the question of understanding divine causality and its analogical character in the context of Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on Divine Providence. Analyzing Aquinas’s texts concerning the relation of God’s action towards nature and its activities it is necessary to emphasize the proper understanding of mutual relations between secondary causes and the primary cause which are not on the same level. Influenced by the reflection of M. Dodds and I Silva, the author of the article refers to Aquinas’s biblical (...) commentaries which have not been discussed so far from the perspective of the character of God’s action. In the final part of the article, metaphors used by Thomas in reference to the relation of God towards the world will be presented. (shrink)

In a document penned under the direction of its then-president Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission observed that many neo-Darwinian materialists and their Christian critics share a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. This article explores the thought of Joseph Ratzinger in view of proposing the features of a path that seeks to eschew these faulty understandings of how God causes evolutionary change within our world, thus providing an alternative to the Intelligent Design movement’s approach to creation.. (...) Ratzinger has a deep respect for the integrity of nature, rejecting the notion that God is a “craftsman” who “tinkers” with the world. According to Ratzinger, evolutionary change occurs “precisely in the processes of a living being” even as human beings are “not the mere product of development.” Finally, the emeritus pontiff insists that creation is an ever-present act that unfolds “in the manner in which thought is creative,” a dynamic that he describes variously as a story, drama, melody, and symphony. Wedding these and other key insights, this article submits that Ratzinger’s thought on evolution should lead us to conceive of creation less along the lines of an intelligently designed machine and more as a masterpiece story that is continually being told as its plot unfolds naturally over the course of time. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to illustrate how we can understand that what the Christian tradition calls the peccatum naturae neither consists in a mere privation nor in the total corruption of nature. There is a widespread understanding that for Catholics the sin of nature consists in the privation of the gift of original justice –the complete order of the natural tendencies and their subjection to reason as a result of the elevation of our first parents to a state (...) of grace–, whereas Protestant denominations would in general terms understand that after the fall human nature was abandoned to a complete corruption. The two stances are sometimes seen as an either-or dichotomy. My intention is not theological, since I do not want to discuss or decide what Christians should believe in this matter, but I try to dig into the conceptual conditions under which we can coherently understand that our present condition is characterized by a twisted inclination of the will, which without destroying or totally corrupting human nature, still runs contrary to its proper good and cannot be considered as belonging or being inherent to it. I first present Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of the peccatum naturae as a moral defect. Then, I take recourse mostly to Rosmini’s work in order to better understand how there could be a moral weakness, which could be rightly called corruption, without implying that our moral condition is completely irrecoverable. (shrink)