Supernaturalism vs. science: What’s at stake?

Turning water into wine, helping the blind to see and yes even the resurrection—these are some of the basic storylines of the Christian faith. Yet in today’s science-infused society, it stands to reason that some of these events are hard to understand as historical.

Pew Research over the last two decades has collected figures suggesting that religion is on the decline, and many have speculated that it is part of a larger feud that goes back to the beginning of science and its naturalist commitment. Still other theologians would trace it back to more socio-political upheaval in the Enlightenment or more recently to a disillusioned world following World War I.

On the contrary, some theologians have speculated though that without supernaturalism – one’s faith is even stronger.

For American theologian Chad Bahl, whose most recent book is The Death of Supernaturalism: The Case for Process Naturalism, these questions of history, science and faith loom large.   Science, he wrote, is often seen as discordant with belief in God within a supernaturalistic worldview.

“As long as a dichotomy is drawn between faith and science, one discipline will always be diminished as the other develops,” he wrote in his book published this year.

Tracing a path from philosopher Immanuel Kant’s moral theism (i.e. belief in God is based in morality) and Scottish philosopher David Hume’s focus on mathematics and logic as sources of truth, Bahl’s premise leads straight through to German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s idea of ‘gefuhl’ or feeling to describe the reality of God. He then dips his toe into the heady waters of process theology.

The insights make for an interesting read and outline how leading thinkers over the centuries came to view religion broadly – a belief that action outside of the material world that cannot be readily seen, heard or felt cannot be a source of truth and is akin to a modern fairytale.

Amid a collection of insights from the process theologian, philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, the answers seem even more opaque and twisted. Whitehead’s process philosophy centers on the idea of change and becoming rather than the idea of static being. How that change happens, however, in a non-supernatural way is a bit murkier as the semantics of everyday words can take on multiple new meanings for the uninitiated.

Whitehead is often quoted in his describing God as providing initial aims that arise from the ‘primordial nature’ of God. This nature is represented by God’s potentialities and possibilities, as Bahl describes well in his book. Still for readers there seems to be lacking sufficient explanation beyond the sense that God is in it with us rather than outside of creation.

We then come to another philosopher’s work on ‘theistic naturalism,’ which is defined as an idea of a divine being who could occasionally interrupt the world’s most fundamental causal processes. David Ray Griffin, like Schleiermacher before him, sees religious experience as part of non-sensory perception. This is important in that ‘sensationalist’ scientific naturalism is viewed as being unable to bridge the gap between science and religion.

Ultimately, Griffin gives up in that he fails to resolve the conflict between scientific materialism and supernaturalism. It’s not without looking carefully at many options. Still, he embraces naturalism, which adopts Whitehead’s philosophy. Griffin’s naturalism considers naturalism to be prehensive, panentheistic and panexperientialist, according to Bahl.

This means that naturalism contains objective and subjective senses, such as what is found in our subconscious, for example. Naturalism is panentheistic, which means it includes references to a divine being but is not a divine being in its own right. And lastly, a naturalism that is panexperientialist is needed. That is to say a naturalism that encompasses the idea that ‘actual entities’ have at least some experience of reality.

But what about miracles?

Catholic theologian Joseph Bracken looks at the issue of miracles.

Using Whitehead’s idea of “society,” that is, society means an enduring corporate process which is an objective reality constituted by actual entities, Bracken has shown another way of viewing this moment of time.

He says there is a different order of events that can encompass those operations of actual entities (defined by Whitehead as elements of reality) or even us. As an actual entity in its own right, society has agency proper to change an objective reality with a fixed pattern or structure of existence, according to Bracken.

In an article in the Zygon Journal of Religion and Science (2013), he explored this idea further writing of the classic miracle of Jesus giving sight to the blind man. For those reading this story in the Bible, it is a miraculous story, but for a scientist it is simply an anomaly.

For Bracken there is a larger process-oriented metaphysical question. That is whether the natural order of events can be incorporated into a higher/supernatural order of events and still retain its own integrity and mode of operation. He says yes.

“Nature as a subsystem within this nonempirical divine process could then at least in principle involve the existence and activity of supernatural as well as natural agents,” Bracken wrote.

While I happen to agree with Bahl that the embrace of supernaturalism can be problematic within the religion and science dialogue, to be fair, over the previous decades this discussion topic has come up in a myriad of ways and never quite feels settled to anyone’s liking.

There are some key concepts that Bahl brought up that are intriguing such as moving on from a “God of the gaps” type of theory where whatever science can’t explain is action by God. Bahl also boldly tackled creation ex-nihilo (creation out of nothing). He pointed to the “millions of years of creaturely pain and death” it took for humanity to come into form.

But where is God?

Quoting Griffin, Bahl wrote that the process is persuasive rather than coercive. This is done to coax creatures to overcome long entrenched habits and to embody new forms of experience. Is it God doing the coaxing?

To be clear, there is a lot working against supernaturalism. Including the idea of God’s hiddenness. If God chooses to be known, how is that done other than supernatural activity?  Here Bahl returns to Schleiermacher’s argument that man is born with the capacity for religion. And for him God is not to be found upwards or outwards, but by looking inward.

Bahl also leans on theologian Thomas Oord’s description of God’s non-omnipotent activity and that it is amipotence, which loosely can be described as “loving persuasion.”

Yet Bahl turns to process naturalism as a way to answer why so many human seekers have different answers for life’s biggest questions. Bahl doesn’t provide one definition, leaving it up to the reader to come up with potential examples of where looking at relationships between creation, humanity and God can give us a glimpse of God’s true nature and how that impacts us here and now.

Here I will provide a description of that interplay that I like.

Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner called his view of nature and naturalism a “God-intoxicated” concept. Rather than adhering to theistic naturalism, Hefner shied away from depicting God as an entity that is remote and outside of nature.

“I believe that nature is God’s greatest work—at least the greatest that we know about,” he wrote in an article for Covalence in 2012.

I agree, but rather than viewing this work as a bunch of “hocus pocus” I see a God at work within the creation even today, but yet leaving us with the ability as part of the creation to have our own say (for better or ill) about how things progress. This may be informed by science and/or even the Holy Spirit.

To me this is a much more cohesive picture of how interactions may happen with a God that is at work within ourselves, our world and even in our universe at its most minute detail and in the farthest reaches of the known solar system. This cosmic view may be hidden from my immediate purview but is no less real and very much still allows religion and science to work together to provide greater insight into our shared reality where God may have an intention that we need to discover for ourselves.

This idea also makes room for Oord’s “amipotence” in that God is always persuading us, perhaps through our own innate curiosity to something more than what we simply know to be the case today.