Occasionalism (Ash'arite atomism)

The core

Occasionalism is the philosophical position that there are no genuine causes in nature. Created things — fire, water, stones, human bodies — possess no inherent causal powers. Every event in the universe is caused directly and immediately by God. What we call “natural laws” are merely the regularity of God’s actions: God habitually creates burning when fire contacts cotton, but there is no necessary connection between the fire and the burning. God could, at any moment, create contact without burning, or burning without contact. A miracle is simply God departing from habit.

The position is startling to modern ears, but its logic is rigorous once you accept its premise: that divine omnipotence must be absolute. If God is the only being whose power is unlimited and unconditioned, then to attribute genuine causal power to anything other than God is to limit God’s sovereignty. Fire that canburn — that possesses burning as an inherent power — is fire that operates independently of God’s will, at least in that respect. For the occasionalist, this is theologically intolerable. Only God acts; everything else is acted upon.

The Ash’arite framework

Occasionalism found its fullest development within Ash’arite Kalam, the dominant theological school of Sunni Islam from the tenth century onward. The Ash’arites combined occasionalism with a distinctive atomism: the physical world is composed of indivisible atoms and indivisible moments of time, and God creates the entire configuration of atoms afresh at each instant. There is no enduring substance that persists through time; there is only God’s continuous act of creation, moment by moment. What looks like a stone sitting on a table is, in this view, God creating the stone-atoms and the table-atoms in the same spatial configuration at each successive instant.

This has a radical implication for human action. If God is the only true cause, then human beings do not genuinely doanything. The Ash’arites addressed this through the doctrine of kasb(acquisition): God creates the act, but the human being “acquires” it — meaning it is attributed to them for purposes of moral and legal responsibility, even though God is its real author. Whether this preserves genuine moral agency or merely preserves the language of moral agency while emptying it of content has been debated for a thousand years.

The counter-tradition

Occasionalism was never unopposed within Islamic thought. The falāsifa — particularly Ibn Rushd— argued that denying natural causation makes the natural world unintelligible: if fire has no inherent power to burn, there is no reason to study fire’s properties, and science becomes impossible in principle. The Mu’tazilah and Maturidites granted created things genuine causal powers, arguing that this does not diminish God’s sovereignty but reflects God’s wisdom in creating an ordered, intelligible universe. Even al-Ghazali, often cited as occasionalism’s champion, held a more nuanced position than is usually attributed to him: he argued that the connection between cause and effect is not logically necessary, but he did not deny that God typically acts through regular patterns that human beings can study and rely upon.