Occasionalism

Occasionalism suggests God doesn't just wind up the universe and let it run—He's actively causing every single event, moment by moment. When a billiard ball strikes another, it's not the first ball causing the second to move; God uses the first ball as an "occasion" to directly cause the second ball's motion. This makes the universe less like a clockwork mechanism and more like a perpetual puppet show with an infinitely attentive puppeteer.

The 11th-century Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali deployed occasionalism to defend the possibility of miracles against philosophers who believed in necessary natural laws. If fire doesn't actually cause cotton to burn—if God simply chooses to burn cotton on the occasion of fire touching it—then God could just as easily choose not to burn it, as when Abraham was cast into Nimrod's flames. This wasn't just theology; it was a direct challenge to the Greek rationalist tradition that had dominated Islamic philosophy.

When Descartes divided reality into thinking mind-stuff and extended matter-stuff, he created a puzzle: how can your immaterial thoughts cause your material arm to move? Occasionalists like Malebranche offered a startling solution: they don't. When you "will" your arm to rise, God uses that mental occasion to directly cause your physical arm to move. Your mind and body never actually interact—they're just synchronized by divine intervention billions of times per second.

Occasionalism reveals something unsettling: we have no direct evidence that things cause each other at all. You've never actually seen causation—only one event following another. David Hume later weaponized this occasionalist insight into his famous critique of causation, arguing that what we call "cause and effect" is just habitual expectation. The occasionalists were right about the problem; they just offered God where Hume offered skepticism.

Quantum mechanics presents a strangely occasionalist picture: particles don't have definite properties until measured, and events at the quantum level appear fundamentally probabilistic rather than deterministically caused. While physicists don't invoke God, the breakdown of classical causation at the smallest scales suggests the occasionalists weren't entirely crazy—the universe may not be the cause-and-effect machine we intuitively assume. Some philosophers argue that quantum indeterminacy is a vindication, however strange, of the occasionalist suspicion that nature alone doesn't determine what happens next.

Occasionalism is philosophically extreme but psychologically familiar: it's the theological version of "not my problem." Can't explain how mind affects matter, or how one thing causes another? Outsource all causal heavy-lifting to an omnipotent being. This move reveals something important about explanation itself—sometimes postulating a mystery (God's constant intervention) feels more satisfying than admitting ignorance, even when it replaces many small mysteries with one enormous one.