The Occasionalist Proselytizer: A Modified Catechism

Abstract

On what is perhaps the most popular conception among believers, God created the world the beginning, and it has existed on its own ever since. No direct activity on God's part is needed to explain the world's persistence, and although the unfolding of its history is a matter of great concern to Him, it would take an extraordinary act of intervention on God's part for anything that occurs to count as a direct manifestation of His power. We have argued elsewhere that on the first score at least, this conception is mistaken.1 The mere fact that there is a universe offers no guarantee, logical or scientific, that it will persist for another instant; rather, it is the direct activity of the Creator which conserves the world in existence at each moment. In this paper, we want to reflect on the second.part of the popular conception. We think there are good reasons for rejecting also the view that God is only indirectly involved in what occurs in the world. Some are based on the doctrine of conservation itself, while others arise from the concept of divine providence. To make the whole of universal history a direct manifestation of the power of God is, however, to court accusations of occasionalism-the view that nothing that occurs is owing to natural causes or the operation of scientific laws, and that apparent causal relations between events consist in nothing but the occurrence of certain sorts of events prompting God to see to it that others will follow. Such a view appears to deny the explanatory force of scientific laws, not to mention what seems obvious to experience: that the things in the world interact with one another, and that at least sometimes those interactions