I’ve been reading side-by-side Arthur Peacocke’s Theology for a Scientific Age and Keith Ward’s Divine Action. While they construct similar positions, they have some important differences. Peacocke, for instance, argues that God acts on the universe in a “top-down” fashion that sets the parameters of what happens in the world, even while at the same time natural laws describable by science can provide a full account of what happens in the world.

In differentiating his position from Peacocke’s account, Ward suggests that we live in an “open and emergent” universe that leaves room for God to act. The indeterminacies of quantum mechanics and complex systems theory show that the Laplacian universe of strict, mechanistic determinism is an unwarranted extrapolation from the success of Newtonian physics. The universe has a “loose,” probabilistic structure–or at least it looks that way, and this means that divine action in the universe can’t be ruled out.

Is this a return to the much-maligned “god of the gaps”? Ward argues that it’s not. The point isn’t that there are causal nooks and crannies where God can intervene. It’s that science is, by its very nature, an abstraction from the fullness of reality. Physics, for example, takes as its subject matter one slice of reality–that aspect of it which is describable in quantifiable, law-like terms. But, logically, this can’t show that all of reality has this character. An exhaustive account of reality would have to include all the non-quantifiable, qualitative aspects too. To the extent that physics (and other natural sciences) abstracts from the totality of reality, there is something it doesn’t capture. Thus, in principle, God’s acting in the universe can’t be ruled out.

This isn’t to say that science can positively show that God acts in the universe; on the contrary, given the limitations of its method it couldn’t pick up on divine action. This is because God’s action couldn’t be subject to repeatable, controlled experiment. As the ultimate subject, God’s activity can’t be captured in any kind of regular, law-like conceptual scheme. It would be missed by any natural science acting according to its own prescribed methodology. Evidence for God’s activity comes instead from historical and personal religious experience.