Divine Action and a Juggler Metaphor

Divine Action and a Juggler Metaphor

by Steve Petermann

Now an interesting thing about this view is that what is usually called supernaturalism is unnecessary.  There is no need to override intransigent natural law because everything is continuously intentional.  God uses “the habits” to create enough stability so that life can exist and flourish.  But these are just habits and within certain constraints change and novelty can occur without destroying the life-giving regularities that are present.
To illustrate this I’ll use a metaphor, the juggler.  Say a juggler is juggling 8 balls in the air.  The juggler intentionally controls the flights of the balls and their pattern.  There is an orderliness and structure to it that the juggler maintains, probably without much thought.  But the juggler can also make intentional adjustments to create something slightly different, or something new.  I say slightly because if the juggler changes things too much the juggle fails and the balls fall.  There are limits to how much can be changed and still have enough stability.  Now, everything here is intentional.  Both the stability of the juggle and innovative changes occur by intention.  If this rough metaphor illustrates God’s divine action, what it means is that God can add novelty, change and purpose but only such that the whole system can still have an integrity.  God honors the life-giving regularities in reality and guides it within constraints.

What this means for science is that while the regularities found in nature can be discovered and characterized, it also means that there may be very subtle “adjustments” to those regularities that may not be evident within the measurement accuracy particularly for complex systems.  A couple of areas that may also play a role are in chaos theory and emergence.  In chaos theory, a very small change in a system can be greatly magnified (the butterfly effect) and change the system dramatically.  One possible area where this might occur is in the ion channels of the brain where quantum effects could be possible.  This might be a part of free will.   Another area where reductionist science has great difficulty is in the field of emergence.  In emergence certain properties and tendencies only arise in the collective, where there are many components.  Nobel Laureate physicist Robert Laughlin wrote a wonderful book on this called “A Different Universe”.  In his book, he gives some examples, one of which is the rigidity of metals.  This property cannot be deduced from the properties of individual metal atoms. Rigidity emerges only when there are enough metal atoms together.

For the believer, the implication is that drastic changes to the orderliness of the universe are probably not realistic.

I'm wary of emergence arguments, as it isn't clear to me what it means to say something was unknown to our deduction vs something exists at least in potentiality but only comes about under the right conditions.


However I do like Juggler analogy, it fits well in explaining an event-based ontology at a base level. See also:


On Free Will

Perhaps there is no such thing as chance and necessity in how reality is constituted. Perhaps every event is intentional.  What this would mean is that there is intentionality inherent in everything that happens.  It also means that this intent operates within certain constraints, as indicated by the statistical nature of what happens. This fundamental intent creates regularities that can be characterized, to some extent, by science.  But it could also mean that there is no such thing as intransigent law.  Things happen within constraints that make life possible but it also leaves open the possibility for a purposeful shaping of reality within those constraints.  This does not mean some sort of “violation” of natural law (such as in “miracles”) because there is no law to be violated.  It does, however, mean that whatever purposeful shaping of reality that occurs, occurs within the life-giving constraints. An important point to make here is that none of this overrides what empirical science can characterize.  This intentionality occurs within the valid statistical models that have been shown to work.  However, while statistical models offer some explanations, they might be limited.  Even if, in the aggregate, there is a stability and probabilistic predictability, what about specific events within the aggregate?  Might they have some profound effect that alludes reductionist science?  Events have effects.  Just because in the aggregate there is a distribution, that doesn’t mean that specific events can’t have dramatic effects.  Those effects could then ripple through reality, still fitting within subsequent statistical models.  Scientific characterizations work at some level, but as things get much more complicated reductionist science may not find a simplistic footing to evaluate what is happen.

Laws or Habits?

Now, I think it is important here to emphasize that “habits” are not something discontinuous with the purposeful events in the world.  It might be tempting because of our acculturation to the law paradigm to think of habits as something to be overridden for some purpose. Not so.  The regularities we see are not something that needs to be overridden from time to time for some goal.  They are inherent in teleology.    Here let me offer a metaphor. The Juggler.  There is a stability of the juggle so that the balls will not fall.  But the juggler can also make slight changes to create novelty and interest.  It’s all intentional.  It might be said that included in the “habits” are the habits of teleology.  If we think of God continuously creating the universe in every second, then God does that by creating both the stabilities (regularities) that science is able to characterize and the novelties that also serve the underlying goals of God.

So, how would this fit in with science?  At the fundamental level of physics, all we have are probabilities.  Over a large sample, these probabilities are very accurate. But what about individual events?  The aggregate results of probabilities show a life-giving regularity that is necessary. But individual events can also have powerful effects.  In the aggregate as single quantum event might seem trivial but that event might result in something much more profound.  The fundamental science will remain the same and the mathematics will remain accurate in the aggregate. But single events or a multitude of particular similar events could create something that cannot be captured within reductionist science.

Then on top of this, there is the area of emergence where properties occur when there is a large enough collective but that cannot be deduced from the fundamental principals.  For those who are interested, check out Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin’s work in this area.