Nature, Supernature, Science

John Walton argues in The Lost World of Genesis 1 (114) that the Bible attributes to God things that we explain in “natural” terms. He concludes that attempting to divide causation between “divine” and “natural” causation is “essentially unbiblical.”

But then he proposes what amounts to a slight variation of that model. Instead of a “pie” where one slice represents divine and another slice represents natural causation, Walton proposes a “layer cake.” The lower layer is “the realm of scientific investigation,” and the “top layer represents the work of God,” and especially God’s purposeful direction of natural processes to their proper ends (114). The top layer covers the whole bottom layer; there’s no slicing between God and nature; every slice is a God-and-nature slice.

He admits that the analogy is imperfect since “it risks suggesting too distinct a divide between the two layers where no such divide truly exists.” In place of a layer cake, he suggests that it might be more “a marble cake” (183, fn 3). 

But a marble cake isn’t a variation of the model. It’s a different model, since the whole point of the model is to preserve a realm for science that is separated by a layer of icing from the top layer of theology: “Science, by current definition, cannot explore the top layer. By definition is concerns itself with only that which is physical and material. . . . Though scientists have their beliefs, those must be seen as distinct from their scientific work” (114). God does direct things toward ends, but “the scientific observations and theories that compose the lower layer of the cake do not in and of themselves carry teleological conclusions. . . . They cannot do so, because the presence of a purpose cannot be falsified. So some scientists might believe that the lower layer is all there is. For them the naturalistic causes are all that can be affirmed” (115-6).

In practice, this leaves the “pie” model entirely intact. Walton even begins to speak of God as “ultimate” cause, thus appearing to reinstate the view the distinction “between primary and secondary causation” that he earlier rejected as “essentially unbiblical.”

More basically, on Walton’s description science is loaded with unacknowledged metaphysical assumptions. He never probes, for example, what scientists might mean by “cause” or how the presence of such an “unscientific” and “non-material” notion in science might interfere with his model.  He never asks what sort of theology is implied by a science that restricts itself to “material” reality without giving an account of what matter is. He never considers, in short, the ways that the “top layer” so thoroughly penetrates the “bottom layer” that the notion of “layers” prejudices and skews the picture from the outset.