Divine Action and the Emergence of Four Kinds of Randomness

Abstract

If the microphysical domain is deterministic, this would seem to leave God with only two ways of influencing events: setting initial conditions or law-breaking intervention. Arthur Peacocke and Philip Clayton argue there is a third possibility, if there is strong emergence. We will examine four candidates for emergence: of intentionality from computational animal behavior, of sentience from biology, of biology from chemistry, and of chemistry from finite quantum mechanics. In all four cases, a kind of finite-to-infinite transition in modeling is required, and in each case a kind of randomness is involved, potentially opening up a third avenue for divine action.