The “Primary” and “Secondary” Causes of Ordinary Providence

Even God’s ordinary providence, which manifests itself to us as the uniformity of nature, has both “ultimate” (primary) and “proximate” (secondary) causality.  These are not two competing answers to the same question, but rather two different answers to two different questions about the same event or phenomenon.  One answers the question of transcendent purpose (teleology) and the other answers the question of material causality (science).  Let’s look at some easy examples of this from Scripture:

Most Christians will agree that there is no inherent contradiction between these biblical and scientific accounts.  We use these same categories in our everyday speech without thinking twice about it.  If I make the statement that “President Roosevelt built the atomic bomb” that does not mean he literally assembled it himself.  But it does mean that he was the responsible agent that caused it.  Likewise, if I say that “President Truman dropped the atomic bomb on Japan” that does not mean he literally pulled the lever or flew the Enola Gay.  But he gave the order, and those bound to follow his command made it so.  When Scripture speaks of God’s mighty acts in creation, we should not assume that such effects lacked material causality — just because the bible does not mention them.

The struggle that many Christians have with the natural sciences is that they fail to adust their spiritual expectations when asking questions about the cosmos.  Quite frankly, if you ask a scientific question, you should expect to get a scientific answer.  That is, an answer based only material causality.  If science does not yet have such an answer, as is often the case, then we should be satisfied with a non-answer.  But to answer simply that “God did it” not only trivializes the profound, but it unnecessarily blurs the line between ultimate and proximate causes.

Many Christians also have difficulty thinking of truth as tentative.  We want all truth to be ultimate truth handed down from on high, but science never pretends to offer this kind of absolutism.  Science is useful specifically because of its flexibility to adapt and adjust itself to man’s ever-increasing ability to gather knowledge about the created order.  The working models provided by the scientific method only attempt to explain the available data, as it is known at the time, with as few unfounded assumptions as possible.  As soon as new data are discovered that don’t fit the existing paradigm, the scientific community begins to make the appropriate adjustments.

There are many examples of this.  Consider the geocentric model of the middle ages.  With all of its many epicycles operating like a Rube-Goldberg machine, this model could clumsily but accurately predict most astronomical phenomena and it provided a fairly logical explanation of the observed motions of the known heavenly bodies as perceived from the reference frame of Earth.  In summary, geocentricism was as “true” as anything else known during the middle ages.  It sufficiently explained the data as it was known at the time.  But when Galileo turned his telescope towards the heavens in 1610, he began to collect new data that challenged the old model.  What was once a sufficient explanation of observed astronomical phenomena would forever and after fall woefully short.  Over the next two hundred years, heliocentricism would replace geocentricism as the new scientific paradigm for understanding our solar system.  Even so, none of our haggling over the technical details changed the fact that “by the Word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6).

In the table I provided above, few Christians have a problem with the explanations given in the “How it was done” column.  The only exception I can think of are those few believers who think treating physical ailments with modern medicine is a betrayal of our faith in God’s ability to heal us.  What’s interesting is that even though Gravitation doesn’t yet have a discernable material mechanism, few Christians feel the need to blur the line between teleology and science by arguing for theistic or intelligent gravity.  Even though the Scripture says that “not even a sparrow falls to the ground apart from your Father” - most Christians are perfectly ok with whatever material mechanism will eventually be discovered to cause the observed effects of gravitation. 

The reason for this is simple: there is nothing particularly theologically or exegetically unsettling about gravity working through a material mechanism (ordinary means or proximate causes).  But such indifference to science isn’t always the case.  Sometimes the cosmos doesn’t behave as we think it should, and the scientific model that is best able to explain the available data set is not the quite the one we would have chosen (if it were up to us).  Since many Christians are uncomfortable with any cognitive dissonance between our study of Nature and our study of God’s Word, we tend to reject any scientific consensus that paints a theologically challenging portrait of creation and replace with an ad-hoc scientific model that is more theologically acceptable. 

This might make us feel better about what we believe, and it might allow Christian educators to avoid difficult questions in the classroom, but this is not science.  Once we turn science into dogma, it loses it’s ability to adjust, react and correct itself to keep pace with our increasing ability to gather data; and instead becomes conscripted into the service of Christian apologetics.  Rather than treat the natural science as means to humbly learn about the infinite wonders of God’s creation in all of its peculiarities, we instead use them as a tools to reinforce our worldview assumptions.  Welcome to the world of Christian “folk” science.

In our next post, we’ll look more closely at what is Christian “folk” science and how it differs from mainstream secular science.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under Christian Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.