God's General Concurrence With Secondary Causes: Why Conservation Is Not Enough

Abstract

The sacred writings of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity proclaim with full voice that God is the transcendent and provident Lord of nature; as the First or Primary Cause, He has created the physical universe, sustains it in being, and is always and everywhere active in it by His power. Prompted by this basic conviction, theistic philosophers have through the centuries fashioned deep and subtle metaphysical accounts of God's causal activity in nature. Significantly, these accounts do not limit such activity to the miraculous. On the contrary, the dominant presumption has been that the metaphysics of miracles can be coherently expounded only against the backdrop of a philosophically and theologically adequate account of God's constant causal involvement in the ordinary course of nature. It is this more general component of a theistic philosophy of nature which will be the focus of my attention here. To set the stage for what follows, I will first describe briefly and informally what have emerged from the historical debate as the three principal theistic accounts of God's causal influence in the ordinary course of nature. a. Occasionalism. According to occasionalism, which was espoused by several important medieval and early modern thinkers, God alone causes effects in nature; natural substances, contrary to common opinion, make no genuine causal contribution at all to any such effect. In short, there is no creaturely or secondary causation in nature;