Occasionalism
Occasionalism holds that no created substance possesses genuine causal power. God alone is the true cause of every event at every instant; what we perceive as natural causation is merely the regularity of God's habitual willing. Creatures provide the "occasion" for God's action but never the cause.
I. Time
| Extent | Finite |
| Ontological Status | Emergent |
| Grain | Discrete |
| Freedom | Deterministic |
| Traversability | Linear |
| Dimensionality | One |
| Direction | Uni-directional |
Time is emergent and finite — it is not an independently existing container but the sequence of divinely willed instants. God recreates the entire universe at each moment; temporal continuity is God's habit, not a natural necessity. Time is discrete (each instant is a fresh divine act), linear, deterministic (all events follow God's will), and uni-directional because God has chosen to order instants in this way.
II. Space
| Extent | Finite |
| Ontological Status | Emergent |
| Curvature | Flat |
| Dimensionality | Three |
| Locality | Local |
Space is emergent, finite, flat, and local — it is the spatial arrangement God wills at each instant, not an independently existing medium. Space is three-dimensional as God has chosen to create it. There is no natural spatial causation between objects; any appearance of spatial interaction is God acting on the occasion of one object's proximity to another.
III. Matter
| Extent | Finite |
| Ontological Status | Emergent |
| Conservation | Non-conserved |
| Dimensionality | Three |
| Locality | Local |
Matter is emergent and finite — it has no intrinsic causal power and is entirely dependent on God's continuous creative sustenance. Conservation is non-conserved: God could annihilate or create matter at will; the apparent stability of the material world reflects only the regularity of God's habitual willing. Matter is local: objects occupy determinate positions by divine arrangement.
IV. Observer
| Time Instance | Single |
| Space Instance | Single |
| Extent of Knowledge | Immediate |
| Retainment of Knowledge | Total |
| Physicality | Both |
| Agency | Passive |
| Number | Plural |
V. Energy
Finite and emergent — energy has no independent existence; it is recreated at each instant by God's direct action. Conservation: Non-conserved — since God is the sole cause, he is free to create or annihilate energy at will; conservation is merely his customary habit, not a necessary law. Dispersibility: Irreversible — the directionality of physical processes reflects God's chosen ordering of instants, not any intrinsic property of energy itself.
VI. Information
Information transfer between events requires divine intervention — there is no natural informational causation between created things. God is the sole conduit of information. Information is emergent because it arises only through God's momentary creative acts. It is non-conserved because without God's continuous intervention, no information would persist from one moment to the next. It is continuous because God's creative acts are not quantized.