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To say that God is sovereign over all things is to say that everything depends on God. To say that God exists a se is to say that Gods depends on nothing. This chapter examines and defends strong versions of five theses pertaining to God’s sovereignty and aseity: (1) Everything that exists depends on God for its existence. (2)Every situation that is the case depends on God for its being the case.(3)God depends on nothing for his existence. (4) God depends on nothing for his being what he is.(5)God is perfectly free. The implications of these theses for the doctrines of creation ex nihilo, continuous creation, and God’s eternality, freedom, and simplicity are discussed. I argue that although the theses portray a deity who is quite different from humans, they nevertheless are consistent with God’s being personal, that is, a being to whom beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions are correctly ascribed.

This paper argues that Berkeley restricts his endorsement of the continuous creation thesis to the domain of physical bodies. Such a restricted application of the thesis reveals the distinctive nature of Berkeley’s occasionalism, an occasionalism ‘contained’. In contrast to the ‘top-down’ approach of Malebranche, where foundational theological principles dictate the nature of divine and creaturely causality, resulting in a type of global occasionalism, in the case of Berkeley, the approach is better characterized as one that is ‘bottom up’, an occasionalism that finds its place after the basic setup of the metaphysical makeup of the world is in place. Consistent with this reading is the suggestion that Berkeley’s occasionalism thus restricted is motivated by the explanatory advantages of occasionalism rather than the theological claim that conservation is continuous creation.

The first chapter begins with the state of the art in current Edwards studies. In it, I argue that Edwards does not abandon essentialist metaphysics, but stands within the Reformed tradition of embracing such a metaphysical account of the world. This runs counter to Sang Lee's understanding of Edwards's metaphysics, which has been influential on many of the current generation of Edwards scholars, and which offers the most powerful and sustained account of Edwards's philosophical theology to date. Having set out my own understanding of Edwardsian ontology, I show how Lee's interpretation is mistaken in several important respects. In the course of this argument, I set out some central structures of Edwards's ontology. These include his idealism, mental phenomenalism, essentialism, and his particular combination of a doctrine of continuous creation with occasionalism.

This final chapter concerns questions of the continuity of existence through time. There are various difficulties: if substances produce their own states, how is this compatible with divine concurrence? And if creation is continuous and yet their states are instantaneous, how does Leibniz avoid reducing monadic duration to a discontinuous aggregate of states? It is argued that a solution to these profound difficulties requires a recognition that monadic states are actually discrete and of finite duration, each containing other smaller states to infinity; yet they are physically continuous, in that each state issues by degrees from the preceding one, and there is no assignable instant at which change does not occur. It is also explained how momentaneous states and forces are to be understood in terms of Leibniz’s foundation for the differential calculus.

Both Nicholas Malebranche and George Berkeley maintained that what was becoming a paradigmatic example of efficient causation—body-body causation at impact—is in fact not that at all, that God must be the efficient cause of such corporeal change. On some recent interpretations, they secure this conclusion by maintaining that only volitions, or beings with wills, are legitimate candidates to be efficient causes. This chapter argues against these interpretations. Malebranche does not rule out corporeal causes by fiat, but rather (and rightly) sees bodily impact as a serious challenge to his occasionalism, one which motivates him to emphasize his argument from continuous creation. And Berkeley does not rule in spiritual causes by fiat, nor by conflating efficient with final causation. The chapter also considers the extent to which their occasionalist conclusions overlap, and their divergence when it comes to drawing implications for physics from their metaphysical results.

Edwards forged a system of metaphysics, ethics, and history that incorporated Puritan Christianity and Newtonian science, while confronting the new philosophies of Descartes, Locke, Hutcheson, and others. He countered materialism by arguing that matter was basically resistance, defending a form of subjective idealism, and maintaining that the world is subject to continuous creation by God at each moment. He believed that the waves of religious awakening that he witnessed constituted evidence for divine intervention in the world, and he argued that the moral life does not primarily consist of the benevolence to humanity propounded by Hutcheson, but is a matter of being in tune with a beautiful and “excellent” universe. This chapter also takes up Edwards’s vision of sinners in the hands of an angry and wrathful God, his compatibilist theory of freedom, his radical account of personal identity, and his defense of slavery.