Lower Wisdom

Years ago, I read a couple of Muslim theologians who argued strenuously that God’s “hand” in the Bible was truly a physical hand. At the time, I found the debate to be ridiculous and absurdly literalist. But I’m reconsidering that opinion. Christianity believes in a God incarnate, and Judaism initially believed in a physical God. In fact, “dualism” was originally associated with the Gnostic heresies. So why is dualism so popular with theists these days?

I’m not ready to reject dualism wholesale yet, and I’m not sure I even know what that would look like. However, I don’t think it makes sense to say that God’s interaction with the world is “supernatural”, in the sense that people today use the word.

People today use the word “supernatural” to mean “impossible through natural means”. This makes no sense to me, since the moment you observe something, it has obviously been proven to be possible. If we say that something is “supernatural” simply because we don’t have an explanation for how it could’ve arisen through natural means, we’re engaging in “God of the gaps”, and I don’t think that God would want that.

Worse, when we insist that God’s hand is, by definition, only that which can’t be explained by physical means, we’re essentially banishing God from the physical universe. I can understand why atheist materialists would want to promote this view, but it’s astonishing to me that any Christian would support this view. Christian orthodoxy for 2,000 years has insisted on God incarnate, bodily resurrection, opposition to Gnostic dualism, and belief in any number of other materialist-compatible positions.

The word “miracle” is perhaps slightly better. We could use the word “miracle” to describe something completely unexpected, rare, or inexplicably coincidental — yet physically possible. Used this way, the moment a “miracle” happens, it is incontrovertible proof of physical possibility. If a miracle were miraculous primarily due to physical impossibility, the idea of miracle, and thus the “hand of God” would be self-refuting. But has this ever been the standard view of miracles? It seems to me that the linkage between “miracle” and “physical impossibility” is a very modern view (and incoherent, as we see). In scriptural usage, miracles seem to be things which are physically possible (and in the case of Moses’s staff and the court magicians, even repeatable by others), but very unpredictable and coincidental. When coincidental, the coincidence generally centers around a moral context where someone has been granted some insight about what is going to happen.

For the committed materialist, ability to predict the future requires no supernatural pixie dust, since everything is predetermined anyway. And even for someone who believes in libertarian free will (by definition, not a materialist), the ability to look ahead over a certain window of time is not problematic. Therefore, we do not need dualism or the colloquial “supernatural” to explain miracles in any Biblical sense of the word. Of course, we don’t have a materialist explanation for future prediction any more than we have a materialist explanation of intentionality, but neither fact ought to give the committed materialist much grief. Materialists will agree, no doubt, that we don’t yet have a solution, but “we can taste it”.

Postulating some exorbitant privilege for God, where His hand escapes or negates the laws of physics, seems to me to be an act of little faith. Is God that impotent, that He cannot reconcile physics to Himself? Therefore, I don’t see why we would insist that God’s hand is immaterial or anti-material. It may be true that His fingers are not clad in animal skin like ours, but He has a “hand” that is physical, and which manipulates the physical. I still think that the attempts to measure God’s finger length or calculate the size of God’s arm are stupidly literalist, and even idolatrous. But the staunch insistence on the physicality of God’s hand can be seen as a rejection of an unnecessary and counterproductive dualism. And to the Muslim theologians, I am thankful for that.