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…

Does God break the laws of nature? Having ordained the laws in the first place, God clearly has the ability to do so. And Scripture seems to reveal God breaking such laws in the past, from axe heads that float (2 Kgs 6) to the parting of the Red Sea (Exod 14). Many answers to…

The first instinct of many would be to answer “Yes” to this question. For God to “act in the world,” they suppose, would be for God to “intervene” in the natural course of events. Such divine intervention would be an external supernatural cause that interrupts natural cause-and-effect relations and therefore contravenes the laws that govern…

You may have heard the claim that God cannot answer prayers because that would violate the laws of nature, which determine everything that happens. This view reflects an outdated, but still popular interpretation of the laws of nature. It dates back to the time when people were deeply impressed by the success of Newton’s laws…

“Complex question” is the label that logicians give to a particular kind of fallacy in which the answer to a question is already implicit in the way in which it is framed. The classic example is: “when did you stop beating your wife?” The issue that we are considering here is not quite a complex…

A protégé of Elisha witnessed an axe head floating in water (2 Kgs 6:1–7). On Mount Carmel, Elijah trounced the prophets of Baal in a breathtaking display of Yahweh’s omnipotence (1 Kgs 18). God fed the nomadic Israelites with manna at dawn, quail at dusk. “Then you will know that I am the LORD your…

In Chapter Seven on “Natural Selection and Divine Providence,” van den Brink faces head-on the challenge that Darwinian evolution poses for a Reformed account of providence. For the sake of the argument, he accepts the neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural selection and genetic mutation. Focusing on the alleged randomness of the latter, he explores its compatibility…

One of the joys of inhabiting an explicitly interdisciplinary space is that one is constantly challenged and stimulated by ideas, critiques, and voices that collectively defy easy conceptual or disciplinary categorization. I consider myself extremely fortunate to exist in such a space, addressing theological questions by drawing upon scholarship not only from specific faith traditions,…

Sarah Lane Ritchie’s Divine Action and the Human Mind is a well-written treatise advocating for a robust theistic naturalism that affirms God’s active presence not only in the human mind, but throughout the natural world. Let’s clarify her terminology since, on the surface, it would seem that “theistic naturalism” is an oxymoron. The standard philosophical…

This volume is an exceptionally valuable contribution to the debate on the relation between theology and science. In what follows I want to take up three major issues that deserve further attention. First, whether her arguments about the success of science are sufficient to trump intuitions driven by such phenomena as consciousness are successful. Second,…

As reflected in the two parts of her book, Sarah Lane Ritchie’s project is twofold. She first critiques the “standard divine action model,” which she grounds in the Divine Action Project (p. 7). According to such models: God doesn’t intervene, and so doesn’t go against natural processes or the laws of nature. Rather, God acts…

There is a tension between scientific accounts of nature and theological accounts of God’s action in nature. On the one hand, the more we learn from science, the more difficult it becomes to find a place for God to act in the natural world. On the other hand, a robust theology of the relational and…