Indeterminism and Divine Activity From the Standpoint of David Bartholomew

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Department of Islamic Theology and Philosophy, Faculty of Theology, Tehran University

Abstract

Contemporary scientific developments have gradually replaced the simplistic mechanical view of our world based on unchanging Newtonian laws with something more sophisticated, namely a belief in presence of a sort of irreducible indeterminism. If the belief in a deterministic world had once rendered the explanation necessary as to denial of God’s restriction in interacting with the creatures, then the issue would have been arisen on the other hand as the effort by religious philosophers and theologians has to be focused on expressing God’s agency and purposeful action in a world where causal necessity and relevance is apparently challenged by empirical sciences.
Given the premise that scientific belief validates intrinsic indeterminism, the present paper aims at introducing and evaluating David Bartholomew’s approach as an indeterminist philosopher towards the topic, trying to defend the purposefulness of creation and rule of divine will over the creatures by denying the possibility of intrinsic chaos and showing the effect of nonmaterial causes.

Keywords

References

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