Divine Action and God's Immutability: A Historical Case Study On How To Resist Occasionalism

Abstract

Today’s debates present ‘occasionalism’ as the position that any satisfying account of divine action must avoid. In this paper I discuss how a leading Cartesian author of the end of the seventeenth century, Pierre-Sylvain Régis, attempted to avoid occasionalism. Régis’s case is illuminating because it stresses both the difficulties connected with the traditional alternatives to occasionalism (so-called ‘concurrentism’ and ‘mere-conservationism’) and also those aspects embedded in the occasionalist position that should be taken into due account. The paper focuses on Régis’s own account of secondary causation in order to show how the challenge of avoiding occasionalism can lead to the development of new accounts of divine action.