Although popular with many medieval and early modern Christian thinkers, occasionalism has, for the past two centuries, most commonly been maligned and dismissed as bizarre and outrageous by both atheists and theists alike. In recent years, however, there has been a renewed interest in occasionalism, and, though many theists continue to treat it as anathema, several influential philosophers have shown sympathy for or even defended the view in some form. In this paper, I will try to demonstrate why occasionalism should be at least a live option for many Christians. I will try to demonstrate that occasionalism follows from the combination of two very well established, orthodox doctrines: the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of divine eternality.

Philip Quinn has taken up the task of working out a detailed formal theory of divine creation and conservation in a series of important articles. In "Divine Conservation, Secondary Causation, and Occasionalism," Quinn addresses the topic of divine conservation with an eye towards defending it against the charge that it leads to occasionalism. Early in the article, he writes,

This axiom amounts to the claim that divine conservation simply is continuous creation. Quinn subsequently examines three prominent views of secondary causality—a regularity theory, a counterfactual theory, and a necessitarian theory—and argues that each is consistent with the doctrine of divine conservation (as he formulates it) and that the combination of any of these theories of causation with the conservation doctrine does not entail occasionalism—or any other untoward propositions, for that matter. Quinn notes that while one might construct a view according to which "…God’s volition brings about not only the existence of every contingent individual whenever it exists but also the occurrence of every contingent natural event," Quinn himself is quick to distance DCC from such a view:

Quinn suggests that to endorse the view that God’s creative act brings about every event that occurs in the world is a commit oneself to occasionalism. (I will argue in section IV that he is right about this.) Quinn stresses that he knows of no good reason to accept this view. What I want to argue is that there is a good reason—for many orthodox Christians, at least—to endorse some version of occasionalism: namely, it follows from the combination of Quinn’s DCC and the very well established, orthodox doctrine of divine eternality. I will argue, even further, that occasionalism follows from the combination of the doctrine of divine eternality and an even weaker claim about creation. But before I can make a case for this, I need to clarify the doctrine of divine eternality.

Many orthodox Christians claim that God is eternal or "outside time." But what does this claim mean? In their essay, "Eternity," Eleanore Stump and Norman Kretzmann explore this question, bringing out several key aspects of the doctrine of divine eternality (henceforth: DDE). At least a few of these points are worth repeating here, as the version of DDE I will be discussing in this paper is largely congruous with the Stump-Kretzmann view.

The first important point is that an eternal being’s existence is "realized all at once"; no part of such a being’s existence "is absent (and hence future) or flowed away (and hence past)." Second, every time is present to God if He is eternal. This is not to say that no time is past or future to God—times obviously are past and/or future with respect to other times within creation, and God certainly recognizes them as such—but rather that no time is inaccessible or absent to God. Every time is present to God because God’s existence is, in some way, simultaneous with every temporal event. Stump and Kretzmann work out the details of this notion of "ET [eternal-temporal] simultaneity," which characterizes objective reality from two irreducibly different reference frames. ET-simultaneity allows one to explain how an eternal God can create a temporal world; it allows one to draw a distinction "between (a) acting in such a way that the action itself can be located in time and (b) acting in such a way that the effect of the action can be located in time." It is also important to note that, although eternality precludes God’s engaging in certain actions that have an essentially temporal aspect (e.g., deliberation), other activities such as willing and knowing could still be characteristic of a God who is "outside time."

III.

With this understanding of DDE in mind, let us now return to Quinn’s theory of creation and conservation. In order to evaluate DCC, it is crucial that we understand what Quinn means by the phrase, "brings about." Quinn admits that he does not "have a firm grasp, amounting to a clear and distinct idea" of this relation, but he does claim that it must be "a rather special relation of metaphysical causation" bearing the characteristics of totality, exclusivity, activity, immediacy, and necessity. By "totality," Quinn means that "what does the bringing about is the total cause of what is brought about; nothing else is required by way of causal contribution in order for the effect to obtain." By "exclusivity," he means that "what does the bringing about is the sole cause of what is brought about; causal overdetermination is also ruled out." Combining totality and exclusivity, we can see that God’s bringing it about that x exists at t entails that God is the sole and sufficient cause of x’s existing at t. But as it stands, DCC does not obviously entail occasionalism, because DCC is a thesis about the existence of created things, and occasionalism is a thesis about the causal powers of created things. It is important to note that in Quinn’s axiom, x is a quantifier that ranges over concrete objects; it does not range over events. As such, it apparently makes no essential reference to causal interactions or causal powers. And if this is so, then it is only by endorsing the combination of DCC and some other proposition that one might be committed to occasionalism.

I contend that the doctrine of divine eternality expresses just such a proposition. To see why, we must consider what creation is like if this doctrine is true. The first thing to note is that there is a close relation between the doctrines of divine eternality and immutability. Eternality entails immutability, although, depending on how one construes the latter, immutability might not entail eternality. The reason God must be immutable if He is eternal is fairly obvious: the very notion of mutability involves change over time. A bit more carefully, God is mutable iff God changes, and God changes iff there is some property f such that it is true of God, in some way, both that He possesses f and the complement of f . But of course, the only way that the latter can be true of God is if He displays these properties at different times. So if God changes, He must occupy successive states of time, and thus He must be temporal. But if God’s being mutable implies His being temporal, then it follows, by transposition, that if God is eternal, He is immutable.

God’s immutability has important consequences for creation. If God does not change, then, assuming God creates the world, it is eternally true of God that He is creating the world. Thus, the traditional Christian understanding of God’s creating the world at some time and then ceasing to create at some later time (say, six days later) cannot literally be true, given divine eternality. If God is timeless, then, given that He is creator, God must be engaged eternally in one single, creative act of willing—an act of willing that produces all of creation at every time at which it (the creation) exists.

However, if this is the right conception of creation, then we cannot separate God’s bringing about the existence of objects from God’s bringing about the existence of events—a separation that, as we have seen, is crucial for Quinn’s project of keeping conservation apart from occasionalism. It is generally agreed among theists that, in creating the world, God weakly actualizes some maximal state of affairs. But if God is eternal, then the state of affairs He actualizes cannot be a temporally-indexed one; it cannot be that God merely brings about the state of the world at some initial time. Rather, the state of affairs He actualizes must be "totally maximal": i.e., God must actualize a state of affairs that includes the world’s being a certain way at every time t at which the world exists. This follows from the fact that, if eternal, God brings about all of the creation—past, present, and future—in a single act of will. Actualizing a state of affairs that includes the world’s being a certain way at every time t entails bringing about each event that occurs in the world. So if God is eternal, then, in creating the world, He brings about the existence of events as well as objects.

A word about the nature of events is in order here. I do not have in mind an especially refined view of what constitutes an event, but I take it that paradigm instances of events would be properly expressed by such locutions as x’s being f at t or x’s f -ing at t or x’s f -ing from t to t*. Some instances of f will be properties that involve some kind of change (e.g., rolling, speaking, raising a hand, etc.). Events containing instances of these properties prove especially problematic for Quinn’s analysis when it is combined with DDE. In the case of such events, f involves some change of state of x. f is, then, a property of changing with respect to some other property. I take it that some events occur over a period of time—i.e., that they are "temporally extended." Presumably, x’s changing from having some property f to having the complement of f entails x’s having f at some time t and having the complement of f at some later time t*. Even stronger, I would contend that x’s changing from having f to having the complement of f just is x’s having f at some time t and the complement of f at some later time t*. Suppose we let S1 be the set of properties possessed by x at t and let S2 be the set of properties possessed by x at t*. Suppose an object’s f -ing involves an object’s changing from possessing S1 to possessing S2: more carefully, that an object f ’s if (but not only if) an object occupies the states of possessing S1 and S2 successively. If God actualizes the state of affairs of x’s being S1 at t and the state of affairs of x’s being S2 at t*, then God de facto brings about the event of x’s f -ing at t (or x’s f -ing from t to t*, depending on how we word things).

In short, if God creates the world in a single act of will such that He actualizes a temporally-maximal state of affairs at each time t that the world exists, then it seems that He also thereby brings about every event that occurs in the world at any time. But if so, then Quinn’s claim that there is no good reason to endorse occasionalism is false, for Quinn himself identifies the view that God brings about every event that occurs in the world as a kind of occasionalism. We arrived at this view simply by combining Quinn’s own thesis of conservation with the orthodox doctrine of divine eternality. I conclude, then, contra Quinn, that there is good reason to endorse occasionalism if one is an orthodox Christian.

So far, I have argued that the combination of DCC and DDE entails

(1) God brings about every event that occurs at any time in the actual world.

However, one might question the claim that (1) entails occasionalism (a claim Quinn allows). In order to determine whether it does, we will need to know exactly what thesis occasionalism is—an issue we have not addressed up to this point.

Not surprisingly, there are a number of different versions of occasionalism. One of the most helpful essays on the varieties of occasionalism is by Alfred Freddoso, who defines and distinguishes several versions in terms of whether, and to what degree, substances have active and/or passive causal powers. According to Freddoso, what is essential to all versions of occasionalism is a commitment to the following thesis:

Freddoso goes on to explain that "according to occasionalism, God is the sole efficient cause of every state of affairs that is brought about in ‘pure’ nature, i.e., in that segment of the universe not subject to the causal influence of creatures who are acting freely."

Freddoso’s claim that OCC captures what is essential to all versions of occasionalism seems quite plausible to me; at any rate, I will not challenge this claim here. Rather, my intention will be to determine whether OCC follows from (1). In order to determine this, we need to examine what Freddoso means by a "strong active cause." To discuss the causal powers of things, Freddoso employs the undefined causal locution Substance S causally contributes to state of affairs p’s obtaining at time t. To say that some substance S is a strong active cause of some state of affairs p’s obtaining at t is to say that S is an efficient cause of p’s obtaining at t and that there is no substance distinct from S that is an efficient cause of p’s obtaining at t.

Since Freddoso discusses causality in terms of states of affairs and Quinn discusses it in terms of events, we need to know what the relation is between a state of affairs and an event in order to determine whether (1) entails OCC. For the purposes of this project, I will assume that an event is a kind of "concrete state of affairs." More precisely, I will assume that an event occurs only if some state of affairs obtains. If this is the case, then it follows from (1) that

(2) serves as a bridge between (1) and OCC. Its antecedent is given in terms of events’ occurring, but its consequent—having the form of Freddoso’s primitive causal locution—is given in terms of states of affairs’ obtaining. OCC uses the language of God’s being a "strong active cause," but this appears to be a weaker notion than that of Quinn’s "bringing about"; it seems clear that S is a strong cause of P if S brings about P. The final important difference between (2) and OCC is that the latter, but not the former, makes an explicit reference to free causes in its clause (ii). However, since (ii) introduces a qualification that weakens the claim OCC makes, (2) seems to be a stronger claim than OCC. In short, it seems clear that (2) entails OCC. But if (2) entails OCC, and the combination of DCC and DDE entails (2), then the combination of DCC and DDE clearly commits one to some form of occasionalism. Thus, Quinn is right in thinking that a commitment to (1) entails occasionalism. His error, I contend, is simply in overlooking the fact that (1) follows from the combination of DDE and his own theory of creation and causation.

Throughout this paper, I have discussed the implications of the combination of DCC and DDE. But in fact, there is good reason to think that DCC itself follows from the combination of DDE and the very general claim,

Divine eternality entails that if (3) is true, then it is eternally true that God is bringing about the existence of the world. Thus, it follows that

But God cannot will the whole without willing each of its parts. Therefore, it follows for all material objects x in the world that

But (5) is just Quinn’s DCC. Thus, Quinn’s axiom of creation and conservation follows simply from DDE and the doctrine that God is the creator of the world. And thus occasionalism—and the other propositions that have been argued to follow from the combination of DCC and DDE—follow from the combination of DDE and this more general doctrine, as well. I conclude that occasionalism should, at the very least, be taken seriously by orthodox Christians, for anyone who accepts both the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of divine eternality seems to be committed to some version of it.

R. ZACHARY MANIS