Divine Action and Creation

Classical theism holds not only that God exists but that God creates and acts — that the world depends on God for its being at every moment, and that God does particular things within it (answers prayer, works miracles, guides history, becomes incarnate). This raises a cluster of metaphysical questions distinct from God's existence and nature: What is creation — making something from nothing? How does an immaterial, eternal God sustain and act in a physical, temporal world? And can God act specially — do this rather than that — without violating the laws of nature science describes? The last question, special divine action, is the live frontier where philosophy of religion meets physics, and where quantum indeterminism has been proposed as the "causal joint" through which God acts.

This page treats creation ex nihilo, conservation and concurrence, the primary/secondary causation distinction and occasionalism, and the problem of special divine action including the NIODA program.

Creation ex nihilo

The classical doctrine is that God created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) — not by shaping pre-existing matter (as a craftsman, the demiurge of Plato's Timaeus), nor by emanation from the divine substance (Neoplatonism, pantheism), but by bringing the entire universe — matter, space, and time itself — into being where there was nothing before. Several points:

"Nothing" is not a stuff. Ex nihilo does not mean God made the world out of a peculiar material called "nothing"; it means there was no material at all — creation is not transformation but the sheer origination of being. This distinguishes the cosmological argument's God from a mere arranger.
Creation is not (only) a first event. On the classical view (Aquinas), creation is primarily a relation of dependence, not a temporal beginning. Even if the universe had no first moment (were past-eternal), it would still be created — continuously held in being by God. Aquinas held that creation-in-time is known by faith (revelation) but that philosophy cannot prove the world began; the Kalām argument disagrees, making the temporal beginning central. So "creation" and "the universe had a beginning" are separable claims.
Why creation? A perfectly self-sufficient God (aseity) does not create from need. The classical answer: creation is an act of gratuitous goodness — the diffusion of the divine goodness (bonum est diffusivum sui). This raises the simplicity/freedom worry (could a simple, necessary God have not created, or created otherwise?) examined under the attributes.

Conservation and concurrence

Creation is not a one-off. Classical theism holds that God's creative act is ongoing:

Conservation (preservation). God sustains every created thing in existence at every moment; were God to withdraw his sustaining power, things would not fall apart but cease to be entirely. Creatures have no "ontological inertia" — existence is not something a thing, once made, possesses on its own. (This is why the cosmological argument's essentially-ordered series is a here-and-now dependence, not a past chain.)
Concurrence (concursus). A stronger and more contested thesis: God not only sustains creatures but co-operates in their every action — no created cause produces any effect without God's concurrent causal contribution. When fire burns, both the fire and God (as primary cause) act. Concurrentism is the mainstream Thomist–Molinist view, positioned between two extremes (below). The difficulty: how do two complete causes (God and creature) produce one effect without redundancy — and, acutely, how does divine concurrence in sinful acts avoid making God the author of sin? (This connects concurrence to the problem of evil.)

Primary and secondary causation; occasionalism

The framework for relating divine and creaturely causation is the primary/secondary cause distinction:

Primary cause: God, the first and universal cause, the source of being and of all causal power.
Secondary causes: creatures, which have genuine causal powers of their own — real efficacy — but derived from and dependent on God. Fire really heats; the will really chooses; but neither does so independently of the primary cause that grounds its power and concurs in its act.

This is the concurrentist middle. The two extremes:

Mere conservationism (Durandus): God creates and sustains creatures with their powers, but does not concur in each act — creatures, once endowed, act on their own. This maximises creaturely autonomy (and eases the problem of evil) but is charged with deism-by-degrees: God becomes a remote sustainer, not intimately involved.
Occasionalism (al-Ghazālī in kalām; Malebranche): creatures have no real causal power at all; God is the only true cause. What we call "fire heating cotton" is really God producing the heat on the occasion of the contact — the apparent causal connections are regular conjunctions God reliably maintains. Occasionalism radically exalts God's sovereignty and dovetails with a Humean (regularity) view of causation, but at the price of emptying nature of genuine powers and making every event (including evil and sin) directly God's doing — a severe theodicy cost, and a threat to creaturely free agency.

The choice among these shapes everything downstream: how involved God is in nature, how autonomous creatures (and free agents) are, and how the problem of evil is handled.

Special divine action and the laws of nature

The hardest contemporary problem is special divine action (SDA) — God's doing something particular (a miracle, an answer to prayer, a providential guiding) as opposed to the general divine action of creating-and-sustaining the whole law-governed order. The dilemma:

If God acts specially by intervening — overriding or suspending a law of nature — then divine action looks like a violation of the very order God established, and sits awkwardly with the success and integrity of science (the "interventionist" worry, and a science-religion flashpoint).
If God never intervenes (the deist option, or strict NOMA), then providence, petitionary prayer, and miracles are illusory, and God is causally idle within history.

The project of non-interventionist objective divine action (NIODA) — pursued in the Vatican Observatory / CTNS series (Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, John Polkinghorne, Thomas Tracy) — seeks a third way: objective special divine action (God really brings about particular results, not merely in the believer's perception) that is non-interventionist (does not violate or suspend any law). The strategies look for "causal joints" — places where nature's own description leaves room for God to determine an outcome without breaking a law:

Quantum indeterminism. If the standard interpretation is right and quantum events are objectively undetermined — the laws fix only probabilities (the Born rule), not outcomes — then God could determine which of the physically-possible outcomes occurs without violating any law, since the law did not dictate a unique outcome to begin with. Aggregated and amplified (e.g. through mutations, neural events, chaotic sensitive dependence), such quantum-level determinations could yield macroscopic providential effects. God acts "in the gaps" the laws themselves leave open — not the discredited "God of the gaps" of ignorance, but a principled openness in the physics.
Chaos and "top-down" causation. Polkinghorne appeals to the unpredictability of chaotic systems (re-read metaphysically as ontological openness) and to whole-part / top-down causal influence as room for divine input.

The objections are serious: (i) it is interpretation-dependent — on a deterministic reading of QM (Bohm, Everett) there are no open quantum outcomes for God to fix, so NIODA's central move rests on a contested physics; (ii) it risks a new God-of-the-gaps, hostage to future physics that might close the "gaps"; (iii) it threatens to make God's action causally indistinguishable from chance (if God "determines" quantum outcomes that look random, in what sense is this action rather than just the statistics?), echoing the luck objection from the free-will debate; and (iv) some object it makes God a cause among causes within the system, compromising the primary/secondary transcendence — God should act as primary cause through secondary causes, not as one more secondary cause nudging particles. The classical Thomist alternative is precisely to deny that SDA needs a "gap": as primary cause, God can bring about any outcome through secondary causes (including law-governed ones) without competing with them or violating anything, because divine and natural causation operate at different levels.

Where divine action sits

Divine action is the metaphysics of a God who is not merely posited but active — and it inherits the tensions of the attributes: a timeless, immutable God's "acting at a moment" is already puzzling, and creation's relation to a simple, necessary being strains divine freedom. Creation ex nihilo and conservation express the world's total dependence on God; the primary/secondary cause framework (between deistic mere conservationism and all-consuming occasionalism) calibrates how involved God is and how autonomous creatures and free agents are. The sharpest live problem is special divine action: how God can act particularly — grounding providence, prayer, and miracles — without either violating the laws (the interventionist worry that troubles science and religion) or lapsing into deism. The NIODA appeal to quantum indeterminism is the most discussed contemporary proposal, ingenious but hostage to the interpretation of quantum mechanics and pressed by a luck-style objection, while the classical Thomist reply denies any "gap" is needed at all. The topic connects forward to the afterlife (God's action beyond the natural order) and to creation and time.