I've been fascinated by the discussion that has been taking place over the past decade about the mechanism(s) by which God interacts with the world. A recent featured piece in The Guardian got me thinking again.
Some people, I suppose, may think of prayer as a peculiar way of making things happen in the world. And it would indeed be a quite a fringe benefit to religious belief if it granted believers the ability to change the course of the universe simply by closing their eyes, squeezing their hands together, and submitting a request to the divine omnipotence that things be otherwise. Yes, it is easy to be sarcastic at the philosophical naivety of this view. But is this really what people do?
The great Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury throughout the 1960s, was once asked how to pray. "I just get down on my knees and hope for the best," he replied. In other words, there is not much that you have to do other than make time for it. For Ramsey, prayer was not the heaping up of pious chatter. It was not a peculiar way of getting things done in the world. Rather, it was about listening and waiting – being attentive to that which is beyond oneself, a form of concentration on that which is other.
The experts in prayer are therefore often strange misfits, otherworldly in so far that they eschew any practical calculation of utility. Prayer is like art, or rather prayer demands the sort of attention that art demands. It takes time. It requires silence. From "Prayer is Not Pious" -- by Giles Frazer
I'm not sure if those who believe in an "interventionist" God would disagree. This is just one of several ways to pray; what is typically called petitionary. As the article points out, it is only this way of praying that is met with incredulity. Really, it isn't even petitionary prayer as such, but a subset that expects an answer in the non-human physical world. Something like praying for rain. Hume, of course, is cited as the beginning of skepticism about the miraculous, but in an age where claims proliferated and were used as a type of evidence or authentication for belief, his response was certainly needed. In our modern, scientific age, any kind of claim that god has acted in the world is a just as hard to sell . Gone are the days when miracles could be appealed to unproblematically.
A number of thinkers that have an interest in the religion and science dialogue have taken on the subject. Part of the explanation has to do with viewing god as a causal agent analogously to the way we as human causal agents effect the transition from the mental to the physical. Certain kinds of divine action can be explained in this way, but the explanations stop short of what I will call a purely physical miracle such as the turning of water into wine. This is an important reason why Ian Barbour, Philip Clayton, and the late Arthur Peacocke, for example, all reject in one way or another various physical miracles in the Christian tradition such as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection.
Clayton speaks for the concensus in stating that information theory in biology is a useful way to understand what might be going on when god interacts with us. Any effects in the physical world would necessarily be indirectly mediated through human beings.
...understood within the context of emergence theory, it [the information model] allows for divine causal constraints on the aspirations of persons in a way that does not abrogate the functioning of natural law. No physical laws are broken if there is an exchange of information between a divine source and conscious human agents. The type of influence is at least formally analogous to the chemical effects produced when an agent shifts her attention from one object to another--an everyday occurence. By contrast, a direct divine intervention to change the chemistry of a cell would be a troubling miracle.
Clayton, Philip. "Natural Law and Divine Action: The Search for an Expanded Theory of Causation" Zygon, vol. 39, no. 3, September 2004
By contrast, John Polkinghorne, former professor of mathematical physics and now a priest in the Anglican church, takes the view that conservative religious instincts are correct and that an open universe could allow for the kind of purely physical miracle. Polkinghorne builds on the work of Thomas Torrance, a Scottish theologian who was at the forefront of early science-religion dialogue, and he has been in conversation with the above thinkers. Like Torrance, he believes that the transition from the closed, mechanistic universe of Newton to the open, dynamic picture of the universe that science presents since Einstein has not been fully taken into account. Polkinghorne favors the view that radically "unnatural" events can occur on theological grounds because the biblical tradition sees them as "signs" pointing to the ultimate nature and purposes of God, but he also believes that these events can be consonant with known principles of science. The difficulty, however, has been in adequately explaining the method in which God interacts. Polkinghorne's mature views see the value of information theory, mathematically chaos, and kenosis (God condescending to act as a cause among causes) as thought experiments "to take us beyond simple fideistic assertion that God acts providentially, without assuming to claim that the mode of divine action is fully understood." ("Divine Action--Some Comments" Science and Christian Belief, Vol 24, No. 1, 2012)
Great questions, and ones that I won't attempt to answer. I look forward to more discussions in this area. The practical and theological (are they ever really separate?) implications are significant, but not overwhelmingly significant. The vast majority of people who pray on a regular basis derive much more from the practice than they may even be aware of.
