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This chapter argues that quantum mechanics (QM) does not prohibit divine providential action and answers to prayer. Many philosophers, theologians, and scientists—thinkers who are wholly aware of the QM revolution—still find a problem with miracles and special divine action generally. It is shown that given contemporary quantum physics, there is no sensible way to say what intervention is, let alone find something in science with which it is incompatible. The chapter concludes by addressing some other allegations of conflict between science and religion.

The people of Cnidus, confronted by Cyrus' general Harpagus, planned to dig a canal across the Isthmus that divided their territory the mainland of Caria (1. 174.4). It is the unreasonable, or at any rate unusual nature of the injuries that convinces the Cnidians to draw the logical deduction that they were of divine origin, and to reach the practical decision to enquire as to the most expedient course of action. The story of the Cnidian ditch provides the clearest illustration of a ‘miracle’: an event deduced to be divine on the grounds that it would otherwise be impossible. The case of the Cnidus might also be seen as an omen, a miracle with a message, the message to stop digging. This chapter does not intend to obscure the grey areas of overlap between the ‘categories’ of divine intervention, but rather to highlight them.

An analysis of the speeches of Aeschines and Lycurgus as well as Lysias' sixth speech shows all the features of religious argumentation, including those that cannot be read without acceptance of the religious notions. Lysias' speech shows the widest range, featuring divine intervention in human affairs and the opponent's pollution, Lycurgus uses only the former type of argument, Aeschines only the latter. However, these two orators are consistent in the arguments they resort to throughout their careers; the choice of religious motifs is not made for one speech alone. An excursus considers the speech Against Aristogiton, which contains religious argumentation of a type Demosthenes does not employ in the undoubtedly genuine speeches; other motifs occur in higher density and intensity. There cannot be a definite conclusion about authenticity, though the interpretation as a genuine logographic speech seems most likely.

It is widely claimed in recent years that science and theology can and do interact harmoniously. This chapter, however, explores some areas of potential conflict. Specifically, it asks whether the relationship between science and metaphysical naturalism is sufficiently close to cause trouble in the marriage of science to theistic religion, trouble that supports a decision to divorce even if it does not logically require it. Several popular positions about “methodological naturalism” are examined. While metaphysical naturalists claim there are no supernatural entities, methodological naturalists claim only that, when scientists attempt to explain natural phenomena, they should do so without appealing to any supernatural entities. One popular position about methodological naturalism is that it cannot be reconciled with the traditional theistic view of divine action in the world. A second position is that God’s power and wisdom or God’s faithfulness or even God’s generosity makes divine intervention in the world unlikely at best and thus supports methodological naturalism. A third position is that methodological naturalism can be justified by an appeal to the nature or goals of science. Powerful objections can be raised to all three of these positions. Of course, if neither the nature of God nor the nature or goals of science support methodological naturalism, then it is tempting to conclude, as many conservative Christian thinkers do, that the commitment of contemporary science to methodological naturalism is grounded in a prior commitment, perhaps even an irrational one, to metaphysical naturalism. The chapter ends by rejecting this conclusion in favor of the view that the past success of both non-scientists and scientists in discovering natural causes for natural phenomena justifies a modest methodological naturalism and at the same time provides significant support for metaphysical naturalism.

Contrary to the growing influence of science and rationalism upon intellectual discourse throughout much of Europe, Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained firmly entrenched in a belief system of unquestioning acceptance of divine intervention in everyday life. This was expressed in the form of miraculous events, visionary experience, judgment and punishment. Within this context, Catholic mystical movements flourished, touching all sectors of society, including the aristocracy, and exerting a strong influence on medicine, industry, economics, and politics. In particular, women mystics were frequently consulted regarding matters of illness and disease, and politicians from all levels of government, including monarchs, developed ongoing communication with these spiritual women.

Looks at the way parishes and pastoral care coped in hard times (Ch. 1) in the interdependent German and Scandinavian churchscape of the Baltic region. Belief in divine intervention and superstition was commonplace. Propagation of the Gospel and teaching the catechism, also as a way of raising standards of literacy, attempted to stamp out parochial ignorance.

This chapter discusses the role of the gods, with emphasis on divine intervention as a compositional device. Of the cyclic epics, the Cypria shows the greatest divine activity, with many parallels to the Iliad in the range and function of divine interventions, though the notion of a controlling “will of Zeus” added much irony to the basic scheme. However, it is the Aethiopis that shows a clearer parallel to the Iliad in its mixture of divine aid and divine conflict. The other poems of the Cycle show a much closer affinity to the Odyssey. Divine intervention is used sparingly, with relatively few gods being involved; divine conflict is less emphasized; and gods mainly serve to inspire, advise, or hinder heroes to provide direction to the narrative. Also included is a discussion of the much freer use of prophecies and omens in the Cycle as compared with Homer.

This chapter argues in defence of traditional Christology against criticism of Incarnation as involving an impossible breach in the divine life, particularly divine intervention in history. The main difficulties with such a view are that there are strong reasons for believing it to be false and that there probably could be no reasons for believing it to be true. The chapter also discusses the issues of discontinuity, consciousness, and revelation in relation to divine intervention.

Divination is often seen in modern discussions as primarily a political matter, as a source of guidance for human action, a focus for decision-making, rather than a simple exercise in fortune telling. Such practical uses as divination undeniably had, however, rested upon a conviction that divination was a form of divine intervention: the means through which divinity indicated morals or the shape of future events to men. Rather than being concerned with the historical authenticity of particular oracles and prophecies, or with questions of the procedure for consulting an oracle such as Delphi—Herodotus appears to take for granted knowledge of Delphic procedure. This chapter focuses on the areas where Herodotus provides the richest evidence: attitudes to oracles and divination, the distinction drawn between different types of divination and the mechanisms by which belief in divination was sustained and reinforced.

Discusses the relation between miracles and the laws of nature and the question of whether we could have a good reason to believe in miracles—i.e. to believe that God directly intervenes in the world. I argue that such divine intervention would not be necessary, since God could achieve his purposes through his original act of creation, but that it might, nonetheless, be good that he should respond to his creatures. I also note that, on the abstract conception of God proposed, God will constantly affect the workings of the world through our perception of his will.

This chapter takes up the question of the distinction in Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” between “law-instating” and “law-preserving” violence, as well as the relationship between them. It reassesses the political and politics at a moment of a redefining of the rulings and jurisdiction of legal courts, an increase in the intermediary role of “the police”, and an increasing role of the military in matters of national and international security and intelligence (with the checks and balances between them rapidly—and disturbingly—fading). It offers an alternative trajectory, one that lies in a further unfolding of a now seemingly theological, then again political perspective, epitomized by what Benjamin calls “divine intervention” and “the general strike”. Benjamin appears to be exploring the possibility of another form of violence or authoritative force that would be non-coercive, or a violence that can be invoked and waged against the coercive force of law, and that hence, in a sense, would be fundamentally non-violent. Benjamin's term for this alternative, non-violent violence is that of a messianic-Judaic “divine violence”.

This chapter explores the second great vernacular epic of the Italian cinquecento, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. It also investigates the question of whether and how Liberata is a tragic poem. An examination of Tasso's argument for a Christian supernatural in his early poetic treatise, the Discorsi dell'arte poetica, is presented. It then reviews the various instances of divine intervention in the Liberata. In the early Discorsi, Tasso proposes Christian divine action as the solution to a thorny narrative problem. Gerusalemme liberata contains a range of divine action, nearly all of it of classical in origin. Tasso's Satan, whose name is classicized as Plutone, gives voice to a striking discourse of resistance that accuses God of imperialism and describes Christianity as merely the version of the winning side. Tasso's poem exemplifies the narrative tensions intrinsic to Christian epic. In Gerusalemme liberata, the rhetoric of divine partisanship becomes the truth of the poem.

When Livy in his preface referred to ‘traditions more appropriate to the stories of poets than to the uncorrupted records of history’, his criterion was evidently divine intervention in human affairs. But other authors took a quite different view about it, as can be seen from Varro, Quintus Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Valerius Maximus and Plutarch, all of whom were prepared to accept miracle stories and divine epiphanies in Roman history. It was a question not of genre (poetry v. prose) but of piety (belief v. scepticism), and Livy was a sceptic. The majority view was probably belief that the gods involved themselves in human life, as documented by the pontifices in their chronicle (annales), by prophets and poets, and by historians too. The 80-volume edition of the pontifical chronicle, no doubt prompted by Augustus as pontifex maximus, attests the continuing need to understand the true relationship between gods and men.

This chapter focuses on the academically neglected area of miracles and their sustainability, not just because they characterize the effervescent qualities of Pentecostal conviction, but also because they illustrate its fragility. Using the research done on Kyrgyzstan's largest Pentecostal church, the Church of Jesus Christ, this chapter identifies the attractiveness of the Pentecostal message to those struggling with the vagaries of life in a former Soviet state. Miracles are central to this process, circulating through sermons and informal settings and allowing congregants to actively engage with questions of divine intervention and life transformation. However, they need to gain social and semiotic recognition as miracles first. Furthermore, the truth of miracles runs the risk of failure in those contexts where the miraculous is needed the most.

Chapter Four considers the natural theology of yellow fever. Convinced that yellow fever appeared as a punishment for sins and that the disease arose from natural processes, the investigators sought to interpret the purpose of yellow fever from the evidence of design. The localists found an elegant compromise. By negligently and carelessly allowing filth to accumulate, they argued, city-dwellers of afflicted cities violated both scriptural and common-sense prohibitions against uncleanliness, setting in motion a chain of events that naturally produced yellow fever. Localists embarked on a vigorous public health campaign, through which they stressed the duties of all Americans, as citizens of the republic and subjects of God, to abide by sanitary regulations. Considering the natural theology of yellow fever, however, reinforced republican fears of cities and further disillusioned early republicans about the direction of the American nation.

This chapter examines how the truth of miracles becomes simultaneously more pertinent and less stable as we move into the frontier. Miracles occupy a central place in Pentecostal churches, but they have been seldom addressed as an analytical theme in studies of Pentecostalism due in part to the awkwardness of the truth question. With its emphasis on prayer and divine intervention, Pentecostalism gained a significant foothold in Kyrgyzstan. This chapter first provides an overview of Pentecostal frontier in the post-Soviet era before discussing the effervescent as well as fragile qualities of the Pentecostal conviction. It argues that a focus on miracles is intellectually productive because their mysterious and unstable qualities resonate with the unstable nature of conviction. This resonance can be illustrated with reference to the term “charisma.”

This chapter traces the triumph of the Kantian perspective. From the time of the Scientific Revolution to the present, vocal representatives are characterized as the Platonic approach or tradition and of the Aristotelian approach or tradition. Before the Origin, there were those like William Whewell and Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge, who simply put down the origins of new species to divine intervention. The fossil record shows that there has been a turnover of forms, and extinction is almost certainly due to natural causes. But when it comes to new forms, God intervenes miraculously. After the Origin, there were those who felt the same way. Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born ichthyologist and professor at Harvard, could never accept evolution, even though his students stepped over the line pretty sharpishly. The preferred option though, for those who were Christians believing in a Creator God, was some form of guided evolution. God puts direction into new variations and hence natural selection has at most a kind of garbage disposal function—it gets rid of the bad forms but does little or nothing to create new, good forms.

This chapter examines colonial modes of prediction, especially astrology and popular forms of divination. While most people in New Spain believed that heavenly objects could influence conditions on earth, there was great disagreement on the relative strength and importance of such forces and whether or not humans could or should discern them. Colonial consumers of prediction understood the twin notions of free will and divine intervention and used a vernacular theology to evaluate diviners and their accuracy. As a result, by the eighteenth century, many subjects in New Spain had adopted a more critical attitude toward the information produced by astrology and divination. As colonial subjects employed these tools of tradition, often in conversation with the Inquisition and its investigations, they helped to create a new culture of knowledge that championed a more precise and empirically grounded telling of the future.

This chapter considers how film can remind viewers of the demarcation and management of the system of borders. It examines three films—The Terminal (2004), Traffic (2000), and Yadon Ilaheyya (Divine Intervention, 2002). Borders demarcate notions of the “national” and “international” and other distinctions between the “citizen” and the “alien” in a nation-state. The film The Terminal deals with border management. It suggests that borders can be constraining when granted by excessive sovereign power. The second film, Divine Intervention, reflects on one material manifestation of border management—the checkpoint. The checkpoint, alongside the Israeli border guards, is critical in managing mobilities in and around the border zone. The third film, Traffic, addresses the border entanglements of demarcation and management. Traffic considers how drugs, people, and the border connect to the relationship between the United States and Mexico, the nuclear family, and the drug-dependent nature of American society.