Secondary causes

[Carbon]

What is a clear and easy way to explain how God works through secondary causes?

 

[ReverendRV]

What is a clear and easy way to explain how God works through secondary causes?

I had a thought the other day. The WCF c3 p1 says the Liberty of the Will is established as a Secondary Causation, without God offering Violence to get his way. This means our Freedom of the Will belongs to Secondary Causes; but only God has Liberty of the Will as a First Cause...

Free Will proponents want to establish that the Will of Man is also at Liberty as a First Cause. If our Will really is Free as a First Cause; the Serpent was correct in saying we would be like God...

God works through Secondary Causation because he uses Agents. Agents can only perform on a Secondary level; therefore they are Subjects of Providence...

 

[CCShorts]

What is a clear and easy way to explain how God works through secondary causes?

Question: Was Adam’s choice to eat of the fruit a “secondary” cause?

If so what was the “Primary cause” of Adam’s choice?

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[fastfredy0]

Question: Was Adam’s choice to eat of the fruit a “secondary” cause?

If so what was the “Primary cause” of Adam’s choice?

God is the primary cause of all things. Any other belief is dualism; the belief in other eternal entities for the first cause is not and effect and thus must be eternal.

God could not foreknow that things would be, unless he had decreed they should be. He cannot “look into the future”, so to speak, to find out what will happen for that would be knowledge acquired from learning; God is immutable and omniscient and therefore cannot learn. Furthermore, from nothing nothing comes and since before creation nothing existed, all knowledge must come from God and the source of His knowledge is His wisdom and ability to cause all things. If God's knowledge of his creatures were derived from the creatures by the impression of anything upon him, as there is upon us, he could not know from eternity, because from eternity there was no actual existence of anything but himself; and therefore there could not be any images shot out from anything, because there was not anything in being but God. Stephen Charnock


Nothing can happen that God did not know from eternity, and therefore nothing can happen that God did not intend as he is all powerful. Psalm 148:6 And he established them forever and ever; he gave a decree, and it shall not pass away.
God chooses what, and whom he will create, and the times, places and circumstances in which he will place those he creates. He marks out to all his intelligent creatures the paths of their lives. He uses them for his purposes.

• God never wills what he cannot do
• In God, the will is never influenced from without (independent)
• In God, the prevailing motive is not only the most pleasing to God as He is the only one with intrinsic worth, but, presumably, the best.
• In God there is but one will, or purpose, which comprehends all his ends and means; he does not will, by successive acts, nor in successive moments, but simultaneously, and eternally.
• The will of God is always accomplished
• God never changes his will, nor perceives any reason for such change

All things are decided and caused by God – nothing is free from his control, and he has not chosen to forego his control on anything. Vincent Cheung Systematic Theology

 

[Reformedguy]

Question: Was Adam’s choice to eat of the fruit a “secondary” cause?

If so what was the “Primary cause” of Adam’s choice?

…

I would say he is the efficient cause of his eating of the fruit. God being the sufficient cause.

 

[civic]

God working through man would be a secondary cause or even through both His angels and fallen angels. God even works through a fish with Jonah or a donkey with Balaam.