DESCARTES ON GOD, CREATION, AND CONSERVATION

摘要

Tad Schmaltz's Descartes on Causation provides an extensive account of Descartes's answer to this question, specifically, what is "the precise nature of the creaturely contribution to causality in nature"?1 The moderate and consensus position among scholastics is that, while God is the universal and primary cause of being and change in the universe, the natures of created things provide a realm of secondary causes - Aristotelian forms, for example - open to study by unaided reason. Natural substances are ultimately instruments of divine providence (Aquinas) and are able to possess their own causal efficacy only as subject to the divine concursus (Suárez), but they are genuine efficient causes of change in another.2 A less moderate, potentially theologically radical position is occasionalism, originally Islamic but most notably proclaimed in the early modern period by the Christian Cartesian, Malebranche: [N]atural causes are not true causes; they are only occasional causes that act only through the [immediate] force and efficacy of the will of God.