Before we begin to examine the implications of the failure of so many attempts to articulate the nature of SDA, it may be helpful to summarise briefly the conclusions of the preceding pages. We have seen how central the assertion of SDA is to Christian theology and looked at several alternative approaches to how it may be related to the natural sciences. It was argued in chapter 2 that any coherent account of SDA must contain both intentional and causal modes of description, and that we cannot simply bypass the issue of the ‘causal joint’ in this regard.

We began in chapter 3 to look at the issue of when a particular SDA might be considered as an intervention in the autonomous workings of nature. It became clear that the issue of intervention in natural processes is highly contingent upon which interpretation of the laws of nature one admits, and the extent to which one asserts that the laws of nature are fundamentally statistical. In connection with the latter we also examined the relationship between SDA and determinism in some detail.

We then considered various attempts to elucidate the nature of this causal joint in connection with quantum and chaos theories. It was shown in chapter 6 that the possibilities for SDA in orthodox quantum theory are far more limited than many theologians have presumed, and in chapter 7 that the concept of SDA by information input into chaotic events relies on a fractal intricacy which may not be embodied by natural processes.