A common (though contested 46) distinction in the divine-action debate is between general divine action, God ’ s creating and sustaining of systems, and special divine action, God ’ s particular response to particular situations.
God ’ s individual care for, love for, presence to, each individual creature in its individuality seems to fall into the latter category, and I would criticize my recent work for not giving suffi cient emphasis to special divine action.
Th e theodicy questions thrown up by the natural sciences tend to draw
45 Rolston, Science and Religion , p. 144.
46 See C. Knight, Th e God of Nature: Incarnation and Contemporary Science (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2007).
answers at the level of the system, of general divine action in creation, and there is a danger of giving only a systemic answer, indeed a deistic answer.
Attfi eld ’ s skilful and painstaking analysis in Creation, Evolution and Meaning is an example. 47
So it is important to pose the question ‘ What diff erence does God ’ s care make? ’ How does God act in the experience of the individual creature in a way that makes a diff erence? I noted above that the divine action debate is shift ing now back into the territory of theodicy – can God ’ s action, morally, be anything more than ‘ encouragement ’ – a question that Philip Clayton has posed with particular force in relation to human minds, though as yet with no indication as to how his model would apply to species without humans ’ level of mentality. Indeed ‘ encouragement ’ – the instilling of courage – might be one way of expressing the impact of God ’ s care. Another would be my suggestion in Th e Groaning of Creation that the creature, in whatever state of extremis – knows, to whatever extent it can know – that it is not alone. 48 Knows, perhaps, at some level or other, that the universe is not that place of ‘ unfeeling immensity ’ of which Jacques Monod spoke, 49 or yet that place of fast-receding hope Matthew Arnold captured in ‘ Dover Beach ’ .
How can we speak of, characterize, that knowledge in a non-human creature? I agree it is profoundly problematic. Yet I suggest we would want to speak of that knowledge in a very young baby, or a dementia suff erer.
So I think the extrapolation has some theological plausibility to it, hemmed around as it must be by caveats about our lack of knowledge of other creatures, and indeed the constraints of what we do know about sentience and complexity, and their lack in some organisms.
We have little enough to go from Scripture, and most of what we have seems to speak of the system – the young lions seeking their prey from God in Ps. 104, the divine economy as depicted in Job 38 – 41. But the motif of creaturely praise, which I mentioned earlier, can I think help us here. Praise, like suff ering, is essentially an individual experience. Of course we can know little of the character of other creatures ’ praise, though we do get hints in the Psalms (especially at Ps. 19.1 – 4, Ps. 148). We are also told, at least in the better
47 Attfi eld, Creation, Evolution and Meaning , chapters 6 – 7.
48 Southgate, Groaning of Creation , p. 52.
49 J. Monod, Chance and Necessity (trans. A. Wainhouse; London: Collins, 1972), p. 172.
translations of Ps. 19.3 – 4, that this is a music we can never properly hear. In a remarkable passage in his Church Dogmatics Karl Barth suggests that perhaps creation praises God most intensely in what he called its ‘ shadowy side ’ . He writes:
. . . creation and creature are good even in the fact that all that is exists in this contrast and antithesis. In all this, far from being null, it praises its Creator even on its shadowy side, even in the negative aspect in which it is so near to nothingness . . . For all we can tell, may not His creatures praise Him more mightily in humiliation than in exaltation, in need than in plenty, in fear than in joy, on the frontier of nothingness than when wholly orientated on God. 50
To praise, in whatever sense, must be to be aware, in whatever sense, of divine presence, and Barth ’ s suggestion is intriguing, implying as it does that that awareness, in whatever sense, may be at its most intense in times of fear and suff ering. It is in harmony with my sense that the creature is not alone at these moments, and, in whatever sense, knows this, and that the awareness makes a diff erence. Th is picture is also a way of restating the conviction that divine immanence, which is as it were a property of general divine action, God ’ s will to be present to every creature, nearer, as the Muslims would say, than our own jugular vein, is a particularly willed immanence in respect of every creature, and therefore a manifestation also of special divine action.
I do not suppose that God routinely saves creatures from predation or disease – we see so much of both to make such a suggestion bizarre. I do think it conceivable that God has acted to protect possibilities within the system as a whole 51 – perhaps it is the case that God would not have allowed any of the great extinction events to prevent the possibility of complex life continuing.
Th at, in turn, poses the fascinating question as to whether God will allow us indefi nitely to go on as we are, precipitating in the sixth great extinction event, or whether God would rather start again from a world without us.
50 K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume Th ree, Part Th ree: Th e Doctrine of Creation (trans. G. W.
Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich; eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), p. 297.
51 C. Southgate, ‘ A Test Case – Divine Action ’ , in C. Southgate (ed.), God, Humanity and the Cosmos: A
Textbook in Science and Religion (London: T&T Clark, 2011), pp. 274 – 312.