Plantinga's view and his overall argument for it

In the history of Western Christian theology, there are three main positions on the nature of God's causal activity in the worldFootnote ² and its relation to the causal activity of creatures or ‘secondary causes’.Footnote ³ The most popular view, and the one affirmed by classical theism, is concurrentism, which recognizes both divine and creaturely causation. On this picture, God as creator causes everything in creation, including the effects of created causes. So, for example, when I decide to raise my arm, the rising of my arm is caused both by me (a secondary cause acting on a pre-existing patient) and by God (the primary cause making the rising exist from nothing and supplying me with my power to cause it). God's causal involvement goes beyond merely sustaining secondary causes in being. Both God and secondary agents are immediate causes of every creature's effect, albeit in different ways.Footnote ⁴

According to the second view of divine causation, mere conservationism, God is not the immediate cause of everything in creation. With respect to the effects of creatures, God plays a more remote and indirect role. God merely conserves secondary causes and their causal powers in being at every moment of their existence; the creatures themselves cause their natural effects without further divine action. On this view, my decision to raise my arm causes my arm to go up. God's only role is to keep me in existence long enough for my decision to exercise its natural causal power.

The third position, occasionalism, affirms (like concurrentism) the universality of immediate divine causation, but denies the reality of creaturely causation. As Nicolas Malebranche famously puts it: ‘There is only one true cause because there is only one true God; all natural causes are not true causes but only occasional causes’ (Malebranche (Reference Malebranche, Lennon and Olscamp1997), 448), occasions on which God has chosen to exercise God's causality in a consistent, orderly manner.Footnote ⁵ Plantinga advances a version of occasionalism.

Plantinga distinguishes between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of occasionalism. According to strong occasionalism, ‘all causation is divine causation’ (Plantinga (Reference Plantinga, Bergmann and Brower2016), 138): God alone causes absolutely every substance and event in the world, including mental events such as thoughts, volitions, undertakings, and decisions. On this view, when I choose to raise my hand, it is God (not me) who causes my hand to go up. Furthermore, it is God (not me) who causes my decision to raise my hand.

Plantinga rejects strong occasionalism as incompatible with human agency, freedom, and moral responsibility. This view robs human beings of their status as agents: if God causes every one of our thoughts, volitions, decisions, and actions, then we cannot be said to exercise any meaningful sense of agency; the only real agent is God.Footnote ⁶ Thus, human beings would not be proper subjects of moral evaluation. It would be inappropriate to praise or blame, reward or punish, command or commend anyone in any genuine sense.

More importantly, Plantinga rejects strong occasionalism as inconsistent with God's perfect goodness. If God alone is the cause of absolutely everything that happens, including every human choice and action, then God will be the cause of every evil and the author of sin. This consequence, Plantinga contends, is not compatible with God's perfectly good and loving nature (ibid., 139–40).

Plantinga endorses weak occasionalism, according to which God alone causes everything in the world except for the internal mental events (thoughts, volitions, undertakings, decisions, etc.) for which free agents are responsible. On weak occasionalism, Plantinga clarifies,

On weak occasionalism (unlike strong), free creatures sometimes do real causal work by making decisions.Footnote ⁷ But what we ordinarily call the ‘effects’ of non-free creatures are in reality the effects of God alone.

Because both concurrentism and mere conservationism consider all secondary causes to be true causes, Plantinga lumps them together under the label ‘secondary causalism’, arguing that both are theoretically inferior to weak occasionalism.Footnote ⁸ Plantinga makes his argument by asking, in effect, two questions about secondary causalism and weak occasionalism, respectively. First, how clear or understandable is the view? Second, what are its theological implications? He suggests that weak occasionalism is much clearer (or less obscure) than secondary causalism. It thus has a comparative advantage.

However, on the surface weak occasionalism appears to have the same unsavoury moral implication as strong occasionalism:

This is the moral objection to occasionalism to which Plantinga responds. If he can fully neutralize this objection, then occasionalism will be left with its initial comparative advantage over secondary causalism.

In order to understand this objection and Plantinga's response to it, it is important to distinguish between two kinds of evil. One is moral evil or sin, which applies to voluntary actions and states of will. Another is suffering: the bad effects of immoral actions on human beings and other sentient creatures. The moral objection to occasionalism targets the evil of suffering, or what Plantinga calls ‘the bad’ (ibid., 142). Weak occasionalists like Plantinga hold that human beings are the cause of sin,Footnote ⁹ but they claim that God alone is an immediate cause of suffering. Although I am the cause of my thoughts, volitions, and decisions, God is the only cause of all of the bad effects associated with my decisions, all of the non-mental events that are necessary in order for evil human volitions to be efficacious. And this raises a serious worry that God is too intimately involved in the bad effects of human choices. On occasionalism, God's causal responsibility for suffering seems to make God morally responsible for suffering in a way that is problematic for God's perfect goodness.Footnote ¹⁰

An example will help bring this unsettling picture into focus. Suppose I decide to murder Jones by stabbing him in the chest. According to occasionalism, it is true that God does not cause me to will to murder Jones and that I alone am responsible for my decision to do so. But after I have formed this volition, I myself am powerless to perform the action of stabbing Jones. What must happen is that, subsequent to my decision, God causes the associated neurological events, causes my body to move toward Jones and my arm to rise, moves my arm and the knife I am holding in a downward stabbing motion, causes a gaping wound in Jones's chest, produces all the excruciating pain that Jones experiences, causes Jones's internal organs to be fatally damaged, and, finally, produces all the biological effects sufficient for his death. A similar causal story can be told for every example of human suffering.

While it remains the case that God does not cause me to will to murder Jones, and that I am morally responsible for Jones's death, this account still seems to make God too intimately involved in suffering. It is one thing to argue that God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting horrible suffering; it is another thing to attempt to justify God's directly and unilaterally causing it. This is the moral difficulty facing occasionalism, and surely it has some intuitive force. As Plantinga puts it: ‘God is not the cause of evil, but he is the cause of the bad, and is that not bad enough?’ (ibid.).Footnote ¹¹

Plantinga defends occasionalism against this objection by offering a moral parity argument. He maintains, in effect, that while ‘the bad’ may pose a problem for occasionalism, it poses just as serious a problem for secondary causalism. Here is the conclusion of his argument:

With his last line, Plantinga suggests that he himself is less than totally convinced by his moral parity argument. Nevertheless, he finds the argument compelling enough to tilt the scales in favour of occasionalism. In light of the parity argument, the moral and theological implications of occasionalism are at most only slightly more problematic than those of secondary causalism; therefore the moral problem for occasionalism is relatively small. But, Plantinga insists, ‘we have no clear conception of causation as accomplished by creatures’ (ibid.), while we do understand what it means for God to cause something. With respect to clarity, then, occasionalism has a relatively large advantage over secondary causalism. The relative pros of occasionalism outweigh its cons, Plantinga judges.

In what follows, we will examine Plantinga's moral parity argument in more detail and show why we do not find it convincing. To be clear, we are not here attempting to take issue with his overall argument for occasionalism. We have nothing to say about his claims regarding clarity, and it could be that the clarity problem for secondary causalism is so great that it would outweigh even a massive moral problem for occasionalism. Rather, our goal is to show that Plantinga's moral parity argument fails, that the moral problem facing occasionalism is worse than Plantinga realizes, and that at least one competing view of divine causality enjoys a significant moral advantage over occasionalism with respect to God's causal responsibility for suffering.

Plantinga's moral parity argument and its problems

Plantinga's argument for moral parity rests on the thought that there is no morally relevant difference between direct and indirect divine causation of suffering (or ‘the bad’). But what exactly does Plantinga mean by ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ causation? Pressing these questions will reveal that Plantinga's argument is guilty of the fallacy of equivocation.

Plantinga unfolds his argument in two stages over four paragraphs. First, he compares what secondary causalism and occasionalism imply about a scenario involving only God and material objects. Then (in the next three paragraphs) he continues the comparison by considering a scenario that adds free intelligent creatures into the mix. It is at the first, simpler stage that Plantinga comes closest to explicitly defining ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ causation, so it is important to look carefully at what he says there.

Concerning ‘the [secondary causalist] case of material objects acting as they do by virtue of their being caused to cause whatever they do’, Plantinga says the following:

On this ‘indirect causation’ (secondary causalist) scenario, Plantinga judges, God is no less responsible for the badness of E than on an occasionalist picture.Footnote ¹²

The second italicized line above suggests that for Plantinga, to ‘indirectly cause’ some event E is to set in motion and sustain a train of events (in the limiting case, a single event) that issues in E; God can originate a causal chain in this sense by creating and sustaining substances imbued with certain definite causal powers. ‘Direct’ causation seems to involve the same kind of origination, but without intermediaries between the initial cause and ultimate effect. Notice that being a cause in this sense, whether direct or indirect, involves being the truthmaker for an indicative sentence about what is actually the case. In Plantinga's example, God makes it true to say that a causal chain terminating in E exists.

The first italicized line above drives the plausibility of Plantinga's judgement about the case he discusses. On the face of it, if God knows that E will result from God's actions, then God seems equally responsible for E whether God's actions involve just making E, or first creating some other events that generate E. This point about knowledge will be important below.

Having set his readers’ understanding of direct and indirect causation and their relation to knowledge and responsibility, Plantinga turns next to the more complex case involving not only God and material objects, but also free intelligent agents. Concerning this case, he says:

Perceptive readers will note that here Plantinga does not say anything explicit about God's knowledge, as he did in the first case.

While that will turn out to be important, for now it is more important to notice something else: at the opening of the last quoted sentence, Plantinga refers back to a prior argument for the moral equivalence of direct and indirect causation. No such argument is to be found anywhere up to this point in the three paragraphs dealing with the case of free agents.Footnote ¹³ Therefore, in the opening of the last quoted sentence, Plantinga must be referring back to the reasoning he gave in the first case (about material objects).

Plantinga's full argument, then, draws on his discussions of both cases. He establishes in the first (material object) case the thesis that

Then, in the second (free agent) case he shows that

Together, NRD and GIC entail that on secondary causalism, God's responsibility for the bad is no more or less problematic for God's perfect goodness than it would be on occasionalism (where God directly causes the bad).

However, this argument works only if the meaning of ‘indirectly causing’ remains fixed across both cases, and hence in both NRD and GIC. But this meaning does not remain fixed: it changes when Plantinga discusses the second case. In the first case, ‘indirectly causing’ something involved setting in motion or originating a chain of causes. But in the second case, God is not the original source of the relevant causal chain; instead, a creature sets the chain in motion. It is the free creature, and not God, who makes it true that a certain chain, terminating in the stabbing, actually exists. So in the second case, God is thus not an ‘indirect cause’ in the sense Plantinga originally articulated (in discussing the first case). But in what sense, then, is God an indirect cause?

Plantinga thinks that God is still implicated in the bad because God ‘establishes the causal relations that hold between the brain event and the subsequent members of the chain culminating in the stabbing’ (our emphasis). What does it mean to ‘establish causal relations’ between two created things A and B? Presumably, it means to make it true that A-type things cause B-type things. It is to set up the laws of nature in a certain way, or to imbue creatures with certain definite causal powers (e.g. to give A the power to cause B). God is responsible for the laws that connect the unfortunate brain event to the stabbing; had God set up the laws differently, that brain event might not have led to such a bad result.

While this seems to be a legitimate sense in which God still bears some kind of responsibility for the bad, it remains a very different sense from the first one Plantinga articulated in arguing for NRD. Being an ‘indirect cause’ in this new sense involves being the truthmaker for subjunctive conditional claims, not indicative ones. When God establishes that As cause Bs, God makes it true that if an A were to exist, a B would follow. God does not thereby establish the actual existence of anything or set anything in motion.

Because the key term ‘indirectly causes’ does not mean the same thing in NRD as it does in GIC, these two claims are unrelated and do not entail Plantinga's conclusion. If the notion of indirect causation has changed, then it is no longer safe to assume that in the second case (as in the first one), there is no morally relevant difference between direct and indirect causation. NRD and GIC only appear to fit together because the same word is used. In other words, Plantinga's argument is guilty of an equivocation.

To repair his argument, Plantinga needs to establish more clearly the meaning of ‘indirectly causes’ as he is using it in the second case, and he needs to offer some considerations to motivate the thought that this new type of indirect causation is just as morally problematic as direct causation. Let us consider, then, what Plantinga can most charitably be understood as meaning by ‘indirect causation’ in the second case.

Suppose that indirect causation involves the following: God (1) creates and conserves everything that exists; and (2) establishes the laws of nature and the normal patterns of cause and effect. In this way God indirectly causes everything that happens as a result of these causal regularities. God has set up the whole system so that secondary causes operate with their own causal powers in orderly, predictable ways. For example, God has set up the laws in such a way that when a normally functioning adult human chooses to initiate a stabbing (in the right sort of circumstances), various bad events will follow. It is in virtue of the fact that God conserves in being creatures and their causal powers, originally decided which natural laws will govern the world, and now maintains the normal causal framework, that God is said to be the indirect cause of every effect produced by creatures. With this definition of indirect causation in mind, now we will formulate several versions of Plantinga's moral parity argument to see if any of them are convincing.

One way to interpret Plantinga's argument is that all views of divine causality face a similar problem involving counterfactual causation. If we understand causation as counterfactual dependence, then every theistic account faces a problem of evil in the sense that if God had not created and conserved agents and all of their effects (or had not created anything at all), then suffering never would have occurred. It is true that this kind of difficulty afflicts all theistic views equally: all of them have to say that God is counterfactually responsible for suffering. But we do not think this is how we should interpret Plantinga's argument. The issue in question is not counterfactual dependence but efficient causation: God's production of the bad in being.Footnote ¹⁵ It is this kind of causal role for God that occasionalism affirms, and this is the claim that is targeted by the moral objection. Even though all theists will have to give some defence of God's counterfactual relation to bad events in the world, the more threatening problem that we are focusing on is God's efficient causal contribution to suffering, which is a stronger, more intimate kind of involvement than counterfactual dependence.Footnote ¹⁶ Hence, establishing the moral parity of occasionalism and secondary causalism with respect to God's counterfactual causation is beside the point and does nothing to show their moral equivalence with respect to the central issue in question.

Another way to formulate Plantinga's argument, which we think reflects his actual line of reasoning and is the most promising, is in terms of God's knowledge. Given the standard and widely held theistic assumption that God knows what free agents will choose to do,Footnote ¹⁷ both occasionalism and secondary causalism affirm that God knows what suffering will occur as a result of immoral human choices. And, according to this version of the argument, for the purposes of morally evaluating God's causal involvement in suffering, God's knowledge plays a decisive role. If God – presumably with good reason – permits me to freely choose to kill Jones, and God knows about all of the suffering that will result from my choice, then it does not really matter how this suffering is brought about; the fact that God's knowledge is identical on the occasionalist and secondary causalist pictures is enough to show that these views are on a moral par. NRD rests on the thought that the divine epistemological equivalence of the direct causation and indirect causation models implies their moral equivalence as well.Footnote ¹⁸ This version of the moral parity argument can be formulated as follows:

1. (1) The Principle of Known Consequences (KC): If you act (or refrain from acting) knowing in advance that a certain consequence will result from your action (or inaction), then you are responsible for that consequence.

2. (2) Whether directly or indirectly causing the bad, God knows in advance that the bad will result from God's action.

   So God is responsible for the bad whether God causes it directly or indirectly.

There are two problems with this version of the argument. First, it assumes a crucial implicit premise, namely that as long as God's knowledge of suffering is the same on both views, then it makes no moral difference what kind of causal contribution God makes to the production of suffering. In other words, God's knowledge of suffering justifies any kind of causal involvement in that suffering. More precisely, the implicit premise might be something like this: God is responsible for a situation S if and only if S results from God's activity (or inactivity) X, and when engaging in X, God knew that S would result. This principle implies that any two situations with the same divine knowledge and the same result will yield the same divine responsibility, whether the connection between X and S is direct or indirect. It does not matter whether God's activity is a direct causing of S or a causing of something else that will in turn cause S. The problem is that this implicit premise is precisely what needs to be proved in order to show that there is moral parity between occasionalism and secondary causalism, since God's role as an efficient cause of suffering is an important point of difference between them and is the focus of the moral objection.Footnote ¹⁹

Second, this version of the argument creates an insuperable dilemma for Plantinga's position. On the one hand, if we assume a Molinist account of divine foreknowledge (as Plantinga does), then (2) is true but (1) generates an internal inconsistency in Plantinga's position. On the other hand, if we assume a non-Molinist account of foreknowledge, then (2) is false. Either way, the argument is unsound.

First, let us assume that Molinism is true, since this is Plantinga's own view. The key premise is (1) – KC – the idea that if one knows in advance what consequences will result from one's action or inaction, then one is responsible for those consequences. On the basis of this assumption, Plantinga argues that there is no special moral problem for weak occasionalism. However, a strong occasionalist can adopt the same argument to show that there is no special moral problem for strong occasionalism, either.

Assuming the truth of Molinism, God's knowledge is identical on strong occasionalism, weak occasionalism, and secondary causalism, and therefore all three views are on a moral par. Molinists, including Plantinga, hold that God knows what any possible free creature would choose in whatever situation it might be placed. This means that God has providential foreknowledge of moral evil, the evil volitions that human beings will form if created. If a certain creature would choose to do evil in situation S, and God creates the creature in S, then KC implies that God is responsible for the creature's evil volition in exactly the same way that God is responsible for the bad in Plantinga's stabbing scenario.

As we have seen, Plantinga rejects strong occasionalism because it makes God the direct cause of moral evil or sin, and he thinks that this is incompatible with God's perfect goodness. He then argues that weak occasionalism is not morally problematic because it holds that God foreknows but does not directly cause evil human volitions. But if the argument in the previous paragraph – based on Plantinga's assumptions about knowledge and responsibility (i.e. KC) – is correct, then strong and weak occasionalism are in the same boat.

The same line of reasoning that Plantinga uses to defend the weak occasionalist's claim that God directly causes suffering without moral compromise can be used to justify the strong occasionalist's claim that God directly causes evil human volitions without moral compromise. Or, conversely, the same reasons that Plantinga gives for thinking that God's direct production of moral evil is incompatible with God's perfect goodness will also show that God's direct production of suffering is incompatible with God's perfect goodness. Hence, the knowledge-based version of the moral parity argument creates a tension within Plantinga's position that can be overcome only by either embracing strong occasionalism – a view that most theists, including Plantinga, find totally unacceptable – or by admitting that the moral objection to weak occasionalism is sound. So if Molinism is true, then this version of the moral parity argument fails.

If we assume that Molinism is false, then we run into the other horn of the dilemma. In order for (2) to be true, it must be the case that on both the direct causation model (occasionalism) and the indirect causation model (secondary causalism), God knows in advance what suffering will result from God's action. But given a non-Molinist account of divine foreknowledge, on the indirect causation model God does not possess this knowledge. God does not know that if I were created (in certain circumstances) I would choose to stab my victim, and so God could not know – prior to creating me – that doing so would result in the victim's suffering and death.Footnote ²⁰ Therefore, premise 2 of the moral parity argument is false.

To this, Plantinga could well object as follows. On a secondary causalist, non-Molinist picture, once I have formed the volition to stab Jones and caused the relevant brain event, God does know that sustaining the normal causal laws from that point on will result in my stabbing Jones, so God does know about the suffering in advance. However, it seems plausible that (miracles aside, which involve special divine revelatory motives) God's decision about what laws of nature to sustain is a ‘once and for all’ initial decision about creation. God asks, ‘What kind of laws will govern my world in every case of such-and-such brain events and stabbing events (miracles aside)?’ The nature of this question, together with divine self-consistency, seems to force that God hold to the established order after I have willed to stab Jones. But on a non-Molinist view, God's initial-creation decision does not involve knowledge of all the specific consequences of the causal laws. God knows that the world is such that certain brain events would lead to stabbings, but God does not know in advance of creating me that I would choose to cause that certain brain event. So, on a non-Molinist view, on the indirect causation model God does not know in advance about the suffering that will result from God's action because God's action is simply the creating and sustaining of me and the laws of nature; and God does not know what I would choose and what suffering would result from my choice. The most God can know is that suffering might result from God's action if creatures choose in certain ways. By contrast, on a non-Molinist direct causation model, God does know in advance about the suffering that will result from God's action because God's action just is the direct causation of suffering. Since God's knowledge is not the same according to secondary causalism and occasionalism, (2) is false.

To sum up, the knowledge-based formulation of the moral parity argument faces a crippling dilemma. If Molinism is true, then Plantinga should hold that (1) is false on pain of inconsistency. If Molinism is false, then (2) is false. Either way, the argument does not succeed.

In this section we have argued that Plantinga's moral parity argument fails. We have raised a concern that Plantinga is unclear about the meaning of indirect causation and that this leads to a fallacy of equivocation. We have also tried to reconstruct his argument in the most faithful and compelling way we can, but in the end we are unable to come up with any persuasive argument for the claim that there is no morally relevant difference between occasionalism and secondary causalism. In other words, Plantinga does not provide a good reason to think that NRD is true. In the next section, we will present a positive argument for the claim that there is a significant moral difference between occasionalism and secondary causalism, i.e. a reason to think that NRD is false.

Occasionalism, mere conservationism, and the doctrine of doing and allowing

Although earlier in his paper Plantinga recognizes the distinction between two different varieties of secondary causalism (mere conservationism and concurrentism),Footnote ²¹ this distinction is absent from his discussion of the moral objection and the moral parity argument. He lumps these two doctrines together under the heading of ‘secondary causalism’. Since Plantinga's indirect causation model corresponds most closely to mere conservationism,Footnote ²² we will focus on this view when arguing against Plantinga's claim that occasionalism and secondary causalism are on a moral par. We leave aside concurrentism because establishing that there is a morally relevant difference between occasionalism and mere conservationism is all that is needed to show that NRD is false.

Our argument for the moral disparity of occasionalism and mere conservationism is based on the familiar doing versus allowing distinction, which we employ to argue that there is a significant difference between these two views when it comes to God's causal responsibility for suffering. The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA)Footnote ²³ centres on the moral difference between acts and omissions. A simple, rough formulation of the doctrine can be put in terms of action and inaction: with respect to the moral evaluation of harm, it matters whether the harm comes from action or from inaction. For example, it seems plausible to say that there is a morally relevant difference between killing a terminally ill patient who wishes to die versus letting such a patient die from natural causes, all other things being equal. As Warren Quinn puts it, ‘the DDA discriminates between two kinds of agency in which harm comes to somebody’ (Quinn (Reference Quinn1989), 291). It discriminates in favour of negative agency (usually what an agent does not do), and against positive agency (usually what an agent does).Footnote ²⁴ As Quinn points out, the DDA, if true, should be compatible with any plausible analysis of causation and so is not tied to one conception of causation in particular. Various theoretical accounts have been offered to clarify and explain the acts/omissions distinction, and various arguments have been offered in its favour, but we will not examine these specific attempts here.Footnote ²⁵ The general idea of the DDA is clear enough for our purposes, and the important point is that its central claim – that there is a morally relevant, intrinsic difference between doing and allowing evil – is both intuitive in its own right and consonant with Christian ethics.

The DDA has an important implication for Plantinga's account. On occasionalism, since God is the sole direct cause of all the suffering in the world, it is impossible to say that God allows any of these events to occur; instead, God is always doing the bad.Footnote ²⁶ The occasionalist is unable to claim that God truly permits suffering for morally sufficient reasons, which is the standard theistic response to the argument from evil. Instead, God immediately produces suffering, a position that is much harder to reconcile with God's perfect goodness. Michael Murray and Michael Rea explain the problem as follows:

On mere conservationism, we can say that God truly permits suffering because God does not directly cause it, but rather allows us to cause it. This opens up the possibility that God has a morally sufficient reason to allow these events to occur. But if God directly produces suffering, as on occasionalism, then it seems unavoidable to conclude that God is the ‘author of evil’, a claim that virtually all theists, Plantinga included, want to deny.Footnote ²⁷ In light of this difference between mere conservationism and occasionalism, we maintain that the two views are not on a moral par. God's indirect causation qua permission of suffering is much easier to reconcile with divine goodness than is God's unilateral, direct production of suffering. Due to this important disparity, it is plausible to conclude that NRD is false.

Objections to the doing-allowing argument

There are two options for responding to our argument. The first is to reject the DDA. This would be a difficult task for any philosopher because the DDA is plausible in its own right and denying it can lead to very counterintuitive implications.Footnote ²⁸ But rejecting the DDA would be especially difficult for any Christian philosopher such as Plantinga. Because the DDA is so deeply entrenched in the Christian moral and theological tradition (especially in discussions about evil), rejecting it involves a degree of revisionism that should itself be considered a high cost of embracing weak occasionalism.Footnote ²⁹

The second option is to deny that the DDA can be applied to the case of God. Although Plantinga does not discuss this response in his paper,Footnote ³⁰ the occasionalist can argue that there is a crucial disanalogy between God and human beings which blocks the straightforward application of the DDA to the situation involving God and suffering. Our intuitions about human cases of acts and omissions do not transfer to God because God's causal involvement in worldly events is significantly different from our own. When humans allow suffering, they make no positive causal contribution to the chain of events, and they also have limited knowledge of the circumstances and consequences involved. But according to all four views of divine causality – strong occasionalism, weak occasionalism, mere conservationism, and concurrentism – God is always causally involved in some way in everything that happens in the world,Footnote ³¹ and God's knowledge of the consequences (or possible consequences) of God's actions far outstrips our own. Although the four doctrines of divine causality will spell out the nature of God's involvement in different ways, all are agreed that God is always, strictly speaking, doing something, and that God is more intimately involved in the causal chains leading to suffering than are the human beings who merely permit it. Someone might think that because of this difference between the human and divine cases, we should be sceptical about transferring our moral intuitions from the one to the other.Footnote ³²

We do not believe that these differences between God and creatures are sufficient to show that occasionalism and mere conservationism are on a moral par. For one thing, denying that the DDA applies to God might lead us to think of God as a consequentialist, a description that most theists will not want to endorse.Footnote ³³ More importantly, the DDA does not claim that the morally significant difference is between causing something directly versus having no causal involvement whatsoever (i.e. doing absolutely nothing with respect to the chain of events that terminates in suffering), even though the doctrine is couched in terms of inaction or omission. Instead, it is meant to highlight the difference between alternative kinds of causal participation. Even in a case where I allow suffering to befall another person, I am still doing something, namely, making a choice to allow the suffering to occur and refraining from intervening directly in the chain of events that will produce it, despite my having the power to prevent it. This distinction between different kinds of causal participation surely can be applied to God, since God's input in such events is very different on the competing views of divine causality – specifically, the difference between conservation/indirect causation on the one hand and direct production on the other.

Although there is something unsettling about God knowing ahead of time about all the suffering that will occur (if we assume the truth of Molinism),Footnote ³⁴ creating and sustaining the causal regularities needed to produce it, and choosing to allow it to happen, this problem does not seem nearly as bad as God directly and unilaterally producing all of the suffering himself. It is true that given divine foreknowledge, God's initial act of creation amounts to a willing, in some sense, of all the subsequent evils that occur in the world. But even if this initial act of will is the same for all four views of divine causality, what God does after this is not: although God is doing something on every view, what God is doing is very different. And with respect to mere conservationism and weak occasionalism, in particular, there is a moral gulf separating conservation/indirect causation from direct production.

Plantinga admits at the end of his paper that there is something unsettling about God's causal contribution to the horrific effects of human choices on an occasionalist picture. He says, ‘I have to admit that there remains a sort of intuitive pull toward the thought that God's directly causing the bad involves him more intimately with the bad than does his indirectly causing it’ (Plantinga (Reference Plantinga, Bergmann and Brower2016), 143). As he appears to recognize, there is a significant moral difference between God directly producing all the suffering in the world and God indirectly causing it via conservation. Although the acts/omissions distinction is not exactly parallel in the case of God and human beings, it is applicable enough to pose a problem for occasionalism, which is unable to hold that God truly permits suffering (as opposed to directly producing it). We conclude that there is a significant disparity between God's causal role in suffering according to occasionalism and mere conservationism, one that is illuminated by the doctrine of doing and allowing. Thus, NRD is false. What is more, in light of the DDA, the moral problem for occasionalism becomes more acute because the occasionalist must say that God produces rather than permits suffering, and this position is much harder to reconcile with God's perfect goodness.