1 1 Cul-de-sac of causal thinking: challenge to build an a-casual theology Cornel W du Toit Introduction: important factors in thought about causality Questions such as ‘where do things come from?’, ‘who made everything?’, ‘why are things what they are and not something else?’ appear to be part of the human condition. Causality, it seems, is intrinsically human. We know intuitively that everything has a reason, that effects have causes and that nothing happens for no reason: ex nihilo nihil fit. At that level people attribute different causes to events: when a group of soccer players are struck by lightning on the field it is ascribed (depending on where it happened) either to natural causes (the prevalence of lightning) or to an act of God, or maybe to supernatural forces, magic, sorcery. If lightning happens to strike an enemy who is hot on your heels, it will probably be regarded as a miracle. For aeons people’s worldview was governed by a reductive notion of causality. In a geocentric worldview, which assigns humans special status in the universe, it follows that everything that happens is directed to Homo sapiens. Humans are the acme of creation, take pride of place in the creaturely realm, are the image of God. This contrasts with the new cosmology and physics, in which humans are paltry beings in a vast universe, a random outcome of biological processes. Events are not planned for a purpose, are not designed to benefit or harm human beings: they just happen. Causal patterns that people discern and interpret as directed to their weal or woe are projections, arbitrary reconstructions of events. Naturally humans and their life world serve as a norm for causal factors. These intuitions were probably imprinted over millennia. They make life predictable, hence manageable. If existence was not governed by laws, there would be no way of learning to handle it, for each new day would be different and past experience would be worthless. Reality is orderly and humans have adapted to that order. That adaptation enabled them not only to survive but to flourish. Yet a cosmic order does not imply total predictability: from the outset humans were aware that some things might or might not happen. God was connected with order. Laws underlying reality were posited and ascribed to God’s will. These laws ruled the cosmos, hence God was slotted in as the all-determining cause of events. Thus causality was linked with determinism. Many other intuitive assumptions are products of the concept of causality, as are our erroneous answers to such questions. If two things consistently happen in succession, we establish a causal link between them. Cause and effect operate on the principle of post hoc, ergo propter hoc: if