The Hump of the Camel

When I wrote my recent piece on the new theory of divine action called “divine compositionalism” I decided to restrict it to a general defence of the viability of occasionalism, of which it is a variant. I was answering the charge that occasionalism renders causation, and therefore nature, a “sham”, by attempting to show that reality is just as multilayered and “deceptive” without occasionalism as with it. Furthermore, I pointed out that our sense of being deceived if God is the active cause of events is highly enculturated, ancient man (and pre-scientific cultures even now) being happy to attribute even their own deepest actions, ultimately, to God whilst retaining effortlessly their sense of true human personhood. Continue reading →

Deistic and semi-deistic accounts of God’s creation of the natural world still appear to have much appeal for “sciency” types nowadays, and especially for Evolutionary Creationists. Even in “moderate” minds, which judge God capable of determining, or at least foreseeing, the outcomes of evolution in particular and world events in general, there appears the need to retain an unbroken lawlike chain of material causes. In other words, science must be able to give a more or less complete account of God’s works, at least in the “natural creation”. For God to “interfere” with that chain must be considered at best rare, but in reality a rather distasteful concept altogether. Continue reading →