Knowra Occasionalism Occasionalism Occasionalism is the view that God alone causes events, while apparent interactions among created things are occasions for divine action. It denies that created things exercise genuine causal power.
Divine concurrence : The view that God cooperates with created causes in producing their effects. Unlike occasionalism, it preserves genuine causal contributions by created things.
Islamic occasionalism : The theological view that God directly creates events, associated especially with Ash'arite thought. It provides an earlier and distinct tradition of denying independent created causation.
Aristotelian four causes : Aristotle's classification of causes into material, formal, efficient, and final kinds. Its account of efficient causes contrasts with occasionalism's denial of created causal power.
Free will : The capacity of agents to make choices that are not wholly determined by prior conditions. Occasionalism raises the question of how human agency remains meaningful if God causes every act.
Mind–body problem : The problem of explaining how mental states and bodily events interact. Occasionalism explains apparent mental influence by making God the direct cause of bodily effects.
Ash'arism : A school of Sunni Islamic theology founded by Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari. Ash'arite accounts of divine action formed a major historical precedent for occasionalist themes.
Scholasticism : A medieval philosophical tradition that developed through commentary, disputation, and synthesis of authoritative texts. Many scholastics treated created substances as genuine causes, unlike occasionalists.
Problem of evil : The challenge of reconciling evil with an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God. Assigning every event to God sharpens questions about divine responsibility for evil.
Causal closure : The principle that physical effects have sufficient physical causes. Occasionalism challenges accounts that assign causal work to created bodies.
Nicolas Malebranche : A seventeenth-century French philosopher and priest who developed a systematic Christian occasionalism. His writings made occasionalism a central early modern theory of causation.
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