Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance. [pg 428] Upon this view we remark:
(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.
Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first. “Love God and do what you will,” said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.
(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.
In Luke 10:31, our Savior says: “By chance a certain priest was going down that way.” Janet: “Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”
(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.
The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester. “Climate?” he replied; “Rochester has no climate,—only weather!” So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply “cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.
3. Theory of a merely general providence.
Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.