An Assessment of Michael Dodds’ View of Divine Action in Nature in light of Quantum Mechanics

This paper assesses Michael Dodds’ Thomistic perspective on divine action in nature as articulated in his 2012 book, Unlocking Divine Action. While appreciating Dodds’ call to restore Aristotelian formal and final causes to philosophical discourse about natural science, an alternative “interactionist” methodology is proposed to directly engage theology with contemporary quantum mechanics (QM). It defends “QM-NIODA” (Quantum Mechanics-Based Non-Interventionist Objective Divine Action) against critical objections regarding divine transcendence and causal determinism. Furthermore, it argues that classical, Aristotelian-based notions of chance—characterized by intersecting lines of causality—fail to fully accommodate revolutionary quantum phenomena such as superposition, non-locality, and entanglement. Ultimately, the paper calls for both Thomistic metaphysics and interactionist methodology to fully integrate the ontological indeterminism proposed by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics as well as the revolutionary quantum phenomena listed above.