Ignacio Silva

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyThe volume that Kelly James Clark and Raymond J. VanArragon have put together is excellent. The question about evidence for religious belief has been raised in recent times particularly within Reformed epistemology, and the authors writing in this volume face these issues with vigorous and persuasive arguments. The book includes eleven essays, and is divided into three parts. The first part is devoted to exploring whether religious belief needs to be based on evidence. The second explores different factors and circumstances which may influence our acquisition of evidence. The final part presents arguments considering actual evidence for and against religious belief.The first part includes four essays. James Ross kicks off by arguing that the rationality of Christian faith is an issue of reliance rather than of evidence. Christian faith as a form of life,...

Contemporary debates on divine action tend to focus on finding a space in nature where there would be no natural causes, where nature offers indeterminacy, openness, and potentiality, to place God’s action. These places are found through the natural sciences, in particular quantum mechanics. God’s action is then located in those ontological ”causal-gaps’ offered by certain interpretations of quantum mechanics. In this view, God would determine what is left underdetermined in nature without disrupting the laws of nature. These contemporary proposals evidence at least two unexamined assumptions, which frame the discussion in such a way that they portray God as acting as a secondary cause or a ”cause among causes’. God is somewhat required to act within these ”gaps’, binding God to the laws of nature, and placing God’s action at the level of secondary causes. I suggest that understanding God’s action, following Thomas Aquinas, in terms of primary and secondary causation could help dissolve this difficulty. Aquinas moves away from this objection by suggesting to speak of an analogical notion of cause, allowing for an analogical understanding of God’s causality in nature. With a radically different understanding of the interplay between secondary causes and God, Aquinas manages to avoid conceiving God as a cause among causes, keeping the distinctive transcendent character of God’s causality safe from objections.