[BasilAwad]

Sorry for my late response. Not sure if you will ever see this.

Not sure if it’s intellectual conflict [1]. I think it’s more of motivation. Do you care to keep exploring horizontal causes if you see causation vertically to the fullest (all causes, effects, and relationships between causes and effects are being upheld by God).

Also, we can’t evaluate occasionalism as a philosophy on its own. Occasionalism is a point of creed only after certainty of God’s existence. It’s irrelevant if you don’t believe in God.

One can still do science. Assume life is simply Conway’s Game of Life. This is an extreme example of secondary causation where “god” wrote the code - then evolution/causation is determined from an initial state without any further input. In addition to doing the science of discovering the patterns of scientific laws (in this example, patterns like oscillators, spaceships), a person that believes in traditional sunni creed may also raise the following questions: (1) Who is sustaining this cellar automation in every moment? In other words, there is constant “power” running the computer. (2) We can’t take stop at the simplest of observations as givens with their own creative agency. In this example, everything we observe was initially defined. Extending this example, things as simple as death can be perceived as a variable that was defined. Death exists because of God created it. It’s not a truth that exists independent of a Creator. (3) There is still creative precision in chaos. In this example, no matter how chaotic the patterns in the game become, the code that is constantly being executed is precise without a single character error.

Al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error [2], an easy read, may also be of interest.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-causation/... [2] https://www.aub.edu.lb/fas/CVSP/Documents/Al-ghazaliMcCarthy...