by Jonathan B. Edelmann, Vol. 10

C. Mackenzie Brown

How can an informed devotee conceptualise God’s interaction with the world in the context of contemporary science? In his article, ‘God and Science: Christian and Vaisnava Perspectives’, Jonathan Edelmann provides a twofold answer. In the inanimate domain, God acts only through mediating powers, avoiding personal involvement. With sentient beings, God acts directly to foster spiritual development, responding to prayers, even incarnating himself. This provocative approach allows Edelmann to endorse the methodological naturalism fundamental to modern scientific investigation when applied to what he calls the ‘cosmic management’ of the universe, while exempting from such a methodological stricture the actions of both God and human beings.

Edelmann develops his thesis with particular reference to the theistic Sankhya of the Bhagavata Purana. Theistic Sankhya does not fit readily into the four major models of the religion-science relationship proposed by Ian Barbour: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. Edelmann makes no explicit reference to these models, but they are heuristically useful in analysing his essay, specifically his positioning of theistic Sankhya vis-à-vis selected Christian theological viewpoints.

Theistic Sankhya as Edelmann presents it eschews the independence model, while at times embracing modes of dialogue or integration, but at other times courting conflict. Edelmann’s problem with the independence model is that it too readily reduces God and non-physical consciousness to ‘unneeded hypotheses that make no difference to our understanding of the world’ (p. 52). As for the ambivalence between conflict and harmony or integration manifested in the Bhagavata’s Sankhya, this tension is also reflected in various Christian positions regarding God’s activity in the world.

Regarding conflict, Edelmann notes Alvin Platinga’s rejection of methodological naturalism, a rejection necessitated in order to make room for the possibility of God’s special creation of worldly phenomena without recourse to mediated action through secondary causes. This view of God as cosmic magician, Edelmann suggests, has often fostered the historical conflict between science and religion when supposedly divine interventions are later understood in terms of purely natural causes.

Edelmann next considers Arthur Peacocke’s cosmic musician. Peacocke views God as bestowing on matter the capacity to evolve life out of itself through the interplay of chance and law. Such improvisational creativity is like composing a fugue: general themes may be indicated, but specific notes are left undetermined. This view of God’s agency, constraining the world system as a whole but in a way that does not contravene natural laws, harmonises with methodological naturalism. But it does so, from Edelmann’s perspective, at the expense of, among other things, a God who alters the world in response to prayer and of a non-material soul.

The Bhagavata’s Sankhya, Edelmann suggests, avoids the shortcomings of both Christian conceptions of the cosmic magician and musician. Theistic Sankhya regards the (inanimate) world as a fully closed and self-contained system that is consilient with methodological naturalism, while leaving room for the non-physical agency of both God and the soul, by positing a radical dualism between spirit/life/consciousness (purusa) and matter/energy/nature (prakrti).

This Sankhyan dichotomy only loosely corresponds to western distinctions between mind and body, and the supernatural and natural. In the Sankhyan view, prakrti incorporates not only potential material energies and Platonic-like templates for material forms, but also the material elements (subtle and gross) that evolve into the physical universe, including mind, intellect, and ego. These latter, in themselves unconscious, reflect the light of the conscious purusa. Spirit/consciousness encompasses God and jivas, or the individual souls of all beings, including humans and devas (lesser gods). Jivas are not material, yet are intertwined with material properties like mind, ego, as well as body. Thus souls/devas may be considered both as spirit (‘the jiva is considered ontologically distinct from prakrti’ (p. 56)) and as a ‘product of prakrti’ (p. 58).

Differences between Sankhyan and Western views allow Edelmann to problematise Western understandings of the natural/supernatural distinction and the body/soul relation. But from a contemporary scientific perspective, the differences seem minimal: any radical disjunction of consciousness and matter, whatever the terminology, is problematic. While scientists (as scientists) have long abandoned delving into the mind of God, they are increasingly probing into the nature of human consciousness.

At this point I would like to ask Edelmann for clarification on two basic issues. First, how is the distinction between natural and supernatural causation to be understood? Second, and closely related, how does spirit interact with matter? Let me clarify each of these questions.

Regarding the first, Edelmann proposes that God creates the universe through intermediary agents. These include time and various material energies wielded by devas like Brahma who order the elements evolved out of nature by time according to the templates in prakrti. Edelmann then argues that Brahma, as a product of prakrti and controlled by material forces (gunas), is a natural, not a supernatural agency—who may appear supernatural because of his superhuman powers.

I regard this conclusion as problematic. If, on one hand, Brahma is completely controlled by material energies, then he becomes superfluous and God may as well be said to act directly in the world, personally imposing on matter the eternal and ‘most general form of the universe, as well as the general forms of organisms’ (p. 58). On the other hand, if Brahma exercises, in any meaningful way, his free will (an inherent property of jivas, according to Edelmann) in deciding how exactly to unfold the universe, then it seems he is a ‘hyper-natural’ if not supernatural cause—a non-physical, conscious agent responsible, in however subtle a manner, for manufacturing aspects of the empirical universe. If this is the case, then Brahma seems to become a minor magician, similar to Platinga’s cosmic magician on a reduced scale, and equally capable of frustrating methodological naturalism.

Parallel to the problem of the natural/supernatural distinction is Sankhya’s radical disjunction of body and soul, which brings me to my second question. Sankhya is faced with the same dilemma as those Christian Cartesian philosophies that have proposed a body/mind (body/soul) dualism: how does a non-physical agent activate material elements or forces? What is the precise mode of this interaction? Whatever mode is posited, would such activation be empirically detectable? This leads to the question: is human consciousness truly non-physical? Recent research in cognitive psychology and brain neurology suggest other possibilities.

Edelmann himself poses a related question in his conclusion: ‘If God reciprocates with our free will [...], then does God’s action interrupt [...] the normal ebb and flow of nature’s mechanisms?’ (p. 59) Edelmann leaves the question unanswered as not essential to his goal of legitimating a theistic conception of the inanimate universe compatible with methodological naturalism, yet an answer is mandatory. And it seems the answer for Edelmann must be yes, given that God’s reciprocating actions involve not just subtle influences in human consciousness but also physical effects in the world, as in the case of avataras who visibly interact with physical entities and impact natural events. This makes suspect not only the viability of methodological naturalism in dealing with ‘how the actions of free, non-physical agents affect the world’ (p. 59), but also calls into question the adequacy of methodological naturalism in dealing with nature’s mechanisms in themselves—which Edelmann wishes to maintain. For the distinction between ‘cosmic management’—a concern Edelmann somewhat humorously considers too mundane for God—and spiritual aid to living entities seems artificial, and the boundary between indirect cosmic action and direct spiritual intervention porous.

In conclusion, let me say that I agree with Edelmann regarding the ‘highly theoretical’ model of the world proposed by theistic Sankhya. He mentions specifically the need for ‘a stronger empirical basis’ for explaining ‘the relationship between the gunas and the laws of nature’ (p. 58). Perhaps a stronger empirical basis for the relation of body and consciousness would also prove beneficial, allowing Edelmann to appropriate more fully Peacocke’s notion of God as improvising musician—an apt enough metaphor in ISKCON’s case given the fame of Krishna as flute-player—thereby allowing for a more robust acceptance of methodological naturalism. The qualified theistic methodological naturalism proposed in Edelmann’s essay, intriguing as it may be, seems destined to exacerbate, rather than lessen, conflict with contemporary science.