@AndyWalsh and everyone else, sorry for coming into this late, as I have been very busy these last two weeks. But I just read this chapter and found it to be surprisingly touching. Your idea that God’s will, human free will, and uncertainty in nature can be reconciled through the metaphor of a strange attractor, something with unpredictable yet constrained behavior, really resonated with me.
In fact, I think there is potential to see if it is possible to develop this into more than just an illustration or metaphor, but into an actual theory of how divine action might be reconciled with science. I wonder whether you were thinking at all when writing this chapter about some ideas to reconcile divine action with science via chaos theory, as John Polkinghorne has proposed? What’s interesting about chaos theory is that most people don’t think it’s not deterministic - rather, it has a predictability problem. This brings into mind the interesting discussions we had in, e.g. Predictability Problems in Physics. But surely God can transcend beyond the relatively crude equations we try to box nature into. So, I take it that even if chaos theory plays a role in understanding how God’s sovereignty works, ultimately God is still knowledgeable and in control every step in the way, only that it doesn’t seem so from a human viewpoint. This is a way to reconcile sovereignty with free will.
So my question is, how far would you take this metaphor? Do you believe that God still knows the outcomes of chaotic systems at every point? Does God, for example, govern every random event that happens?