Occasionalism

Occasionalism centers on causality and that God is the only genuine cause driving all natural-world events. Occasionalists claim that nature and the bodies that inhabit it are incapable of initiating movement or change - that is, nature is entirely passive, and every natural substance and event are simply correlations, occasions onto which Divinity acts. To illustrate occasionalism, we may imagine an individual desiring to lift a pencil off a known surface. This desire is made a reality in his mind, but the mind itself does not drive the person’s body to reach for the pencil - God acts on the occasion of this desire and makes his hand close around the pencil. We can then say that when the individual touches the pencil, the new occasion is this physical contact, onto which God acts by giving the idea of how the pencil feels - rough, smooth, etc. Occasionalists reject the concept of matter, bodies of geometry, having the force of causality. The unknown element of such forces aligns with the epistemic “no knowledge” argument wherein that which we do not understand cannot be causal. This position effectively dispels how the non-physical mind, the human will, can direct the body to cause physical objects to move. With “no knowledge,” the mind and event have no initial relationship - God is the driving overarching power moving the natural world. Occassionalists argue that we cannot tie “cause” to “effect” because these things are distinct epistemologically - no necessary connection exists between them, as the (non)existence of one does not necessitate the (non)existence of the other. Thus, since the relationship between the cause and the effect is not necessary, such a relationship, the occasionalist claims, can only become through Divinity and His production. The occasionalist notion of continual creation and divine preservation argues that God’s will maintains ontological permanence in the natural world. Concluded from divine preservation, motion as we know it exists in fragments, in a frame-by-frame manner, where each frame has no connection to the one before or after - that is, God does not annihilate and recreate the substance over and over for movement but conserves it in different places. Thus, according to occasionalism, self-preserving existence is not a property of the substance itself. Ultimately, occasionalism’s historical significance is as follows: challenging Aristotelian ideas of the Middle Ages (which denied Divinity’s existence) by emphasizing our lack of certainty about the natural world and its causal connections.