René Descartes introduced the modern notion of a “law of nature.” The Medieval Scholastic notion of “natural law” was more of a teleological notion; and in particular with respect to human beings, “natural law” described not how we in fact behave but how we ought to behave—the “unnatural” was, in effect, the deviant. The Cartesian…

Michael Dodds’s Unlocking Divine Action is an impressive and deeply learned attempt to deepen conversation about the relationship between divine action and scientific understanding of the natural world. Dodds claims, quite reasonably, (1) that important ways of understanding action and causation were lost in the transition from Aristotelian/Thomistic thought to what he calls “Newtonian science,”…