Theistic Humeanism?

Here’s an option that is underexplored: theistic Humeanism. There are two paths to it.

The path from orthodoxy: Start with a standard theistic concurrentism: whenever we have a creaturely cause C with effect E, E only eventuates because God concurs, i.e., God cooperates with the creaturely causal relation. Now add to this a story about what creaturely causation is. This will be a Humean story—the best I know is the David Lewis one that reduces causation to laws and laws to arrangements of stuff. Keep all the deep theistic metaphysics of divine causation.

The path from heterodoxy: Start with the metaphysics of occasionalism. Don’t change any of the metaphysics. But now add a Humean analysis of creaturely causation in terms of regularities. Since the metaphysics of occasionalism affirms regularities in the world, we haven’t changed the metaphysics of occasionalism, but have redescribed it as actually involving creaturely causation.

The two paths meet in a single view, a theistic Humeanism with the metaphysics of occasionalism and the language of concurrentism, and with creaturely causation described in a Humean way.

This theistic Humeanism is more complex than standard non-theistic Humeanism, but overcomes the central problem with non-theistic Humeanism: the difficulty of finding explanation in nature. If the fact that heat causes boiling is just a statement of regularity, it does not seem that heat explains boiling. But on theistic Humeanism, we have a genuine explanatory link: God makes the water boil because God is aware of the heat.

There is one special objection to theistic Humeanism. It has two causal relations, a divine one and a creaturely one. But the two are very different—they don’t both seem to be kinds of causation. However, on some orthodox concurrentisms, such as Aquinas’s, there isn’t a single kind of thing that divine and creaturely causation are species of. Instead, the two stand in an analogical relationship. Couldn’t the theistic Humean say the same thing? Maybe, though one might also object that Humean creaturely causation is too different from divine causation for the two to count as analogous.

I suppose the main objection to theistic Humeanism is that it feels like a cheat. The creaturely causation seems fake. The metaphysics is that of occasionalism, and there is no creaturely causation there. But if theistic Humeanism is a cheat, then standard non-theistic Humeanism is as well, since they share the same metaphysics of creaturely causation. If non-theistic Humeanism really does have causation, then our theistic Humeanism really does have creaturely causation. If one has fake causation, so does the other. I think both have fake causation. :-)