One Solution, Reached Twice, for Different Reasons

It is genuinely striking that European Cartesian philosophy and classical Islamic kalam arrived at the same distinctive metaphysical position from almost entirely independent starting points, one working from the technical demands of substance dualism, the other from a theological commitment to unlimited divine omnipotence, and the convergence is exactly the kind of case this atlas exists to register: occasionalism is one claim, held twice, in two traditions with no direct line of influence connecting Malebranche to Al-Ghazali six centuries earlier.

The position stands opposed most directly to interactionism, which affirms real, direct causal power passing between finite things, and its critics on both sides of that divide, Averroes among the philosophers and most interactionist theologians among the theistic traditions, press the same underlying worry: a universe with no real secondary causation seems to make ordinary explanation, and ordinary moral responsibility for actions genuinely one's own, difficult to sustain. Occasionalism's defenders, in both traditions, answer that God's absolute sovereignty over causation is worth this cost, and that regularity sustained by God's consistent will is no less reliable, and arguably more secure, than regularity supposedly built into matter itself.