This book discusses various aspects of God’s causal activity. Traditional theology has long held that God acts in the world and interrupts the normal course of events by performing special acts. Although the tradition is unified in affirming that God does create, conserve, and act, there is much disagreement about the details of divine activity. The chapters in this book fruitfully explore these disagreements about divine causation.
The chapters are divided into two sections. The first explores historical views of divine causal activity from the Pre-Socratics to Hume. The second section addresses a variety of contemporary issues related to God’s causal activity. These chapters include defenses of the possibility of special acts of God, proposals of models of divine causation, and analyses of divine conservation.
Philosophical Essays on Divine Causation will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working in philosophy of religion, philosophical theology, and metaphysics.
Introduction
Gregory E. Ganssle
1. Divine Causal Agency in Classical Greek Philosophy
Donald J. Zeyl
2. Divine Causality according to Neo-Platonism
Phillip S. Cary
3. Aquinas on Divine Causality
W. Matthews Grant
4. Three Competing Views of God’s Causation of Creaturely Actions: Aquinas, Scotus and Olivi
Gloria Frost
5. Durand and Suarez on Divine Causation
Jacob Tuttle
6. Descartes on Voluntary Action and Universal Conservation
Joel Archer and C. P. Ragland
7. Leibniz on Divine Causation: Continuous Creation and Concurrence Without Occasionalism
Julia Jorati
8. Berkeley on Divine Human Agency: A Teleological Reconstrual
James S. Spiegel
9. What Hume didn’t Notice about Divine Causation
Timothy Yenter
10. Defending Special Divine Acts
Robert A. Larmer
11. Divine Sustaining Causes and the Mind-Body Problem
Angus J. L. Menuge
12. Neo-Aristotelian Accounts of Divine Creation
Paul M. Gould
13. Theistic Conferralism: Consolidating Divine sustenance and Trope Theory
Robert K. Garcia
14. The Timing of Divine Conservation: Pushes, Nudges, and Merry-go-rounds
David Vander Laan
15. Divine Causation and the Pairing Problem
Gregory E. Ganssle
Biography
Gregory E. Ganssle is Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology – Biola University. He works in the philosophy of religion and the history of philosophy. He has edited two books and written three. His most recent is Our Deepest Desires: How the Christian Story Fulfills Human Aspiration.
"Divine causation and divine agency are crucially important topics in theology and philosophy of religion, and Ganssle’s collection provides both excellent discussions of key historical views and some important proposals on contemporary controversies. Highly recommended for both philosophers of religion and theologians." – William Hasker, Huntington University, USA
