Separation by Immaterial Causation

Some theists to whom I've presented the No Interaction Argument have found it the troubling because, they realize, it raises questions about the interaction of divine, as well as human, minds with the physical world. After all, if a nonphysical human mind cannot cause changes in the body it somehow inhabits, how can a purely spiritual, nonphysical being - for example the God of the main Western religious traditions - cause changes in the physical universe? Could such a being even create a physical universe? But what is unsettling in one context might help settle matters in another. Perhaps it is characteristic of religion to suppose that this kind of causation actually takes place. Let's return briefly to the topic of separation.

Unlike Separation by Explanation, this proposal does not imply an essential religious reliance on noncausal explanation; instead the difference between religion and science depends on a difference between two sorts of causal explanation. Science does talk about nonphysical objects, most obviously mathematical objects, such as numbers (and, perhaps, mere possibilities), and such objects are apparently essential ingredients in causal explanations of changes in physical things ("the mass decreased from 200 to 100 grams because the temperature rose from 50 to 800 degrees"), but science does not seem to suppose that changes in the nonphysical objects themselves cause changes in physical things. (Numbers and numerals - number names, which are physical objects - are, of course different: one number may have many names, and names can be erased while the number remains.)

The analogy about imagining round squares still ought to worry us. Is Separation by Immaterial Causation even intelligible? What does it mean to say that changes take place in a nonphysical object? Among the clearest examples of nonphysical objects are numbers, and they seem to lack dynamic qualities. This proposal might then be claiming that there's an impossibility at the heart of religion (-the same impossibility in all possible religions).

Until we know more about the nature of mathematical (and other nonphysical) objects and their role in causal explanations, it will be difficult fully to evaluate Separation by Immaterial Causation.

Apart from the independent value such knowledge would have, there is good reason to reject Separation by Immaterial Causation. Its plausibility comes from a focus on the main Western religious traditions (and, perhaps, from a conflation of purpose-directed explanation with a kind of nonphysical causal explanation). In those traditions, the distinction between spiritual and non-spiritual tracks pretty well with the distinction between physical and nonphysical. But there are other religious traditions that have no obvious use for the latter. It is not just that they hold that the spiritual is essentially embodied, although, no doubt, there are some such religions; rather, they do not suppose that there are nonphysical things to be embodied, or they say that there are no physical things at all, though we often suffer from the illusion that they exist.

One of the most interesting ways in which the world's religions are diverse is in their fundamental, metaphysical presuppositions. It is this aspect of their diversity that weighs against Separation by Immaterial Causation.

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2000 David F. Austin