Chapter seven addresses the difficulty of the theological interpretation of evolutionary biology in delineating a precise account of the concurrence of divine and contingent causes engaged in speciation. Invoking Aquinas’s famous distinction between God’s primary and principal causation and the secondary and instrumental causation of creatures, a constructive model of the concurrence of divine and natural causes in evolutionary transformations is offered.

Is it consistent to maintain that human free will is incompatible with determinism in the natural world while also maintaining that it is compatible with divine universal causation? On the face of it, divine universal causation looks like a form of determinism. And the intuitions that lead to incompatibilism about free will and natural determinism also lead to incompatibilism about free will and divine determinism. W. Matthews Grant resists this conclusion. Grant contends that we can understand all of God’s activity as an exercise of divine “libertarian” free will and can construe God’s actions as nothing over and above the (created) effects brought about. I argue that Grant’s attempted reconciliation of human free will and universal divine causation fails, and on two counts. First, Grant’s account of the interaction of divine and created agency is occasionalist; second, even if we assume Grant’s account successfully avoids the charge of occasionalism, it fails to reconcile divine agency with created free agency. The latter is illustrated by exploring the nature of the determination relation required by incompatibilist, agent-causal accounts of free will.

This essay shows that Duns Scotus firmly believed in the dignities (plural) of human nature—both the natural human dignity celebrated by Aristotle, who maintained that the material world was made for the sake of rational animals, and the supernatural dignities paid to humankind by God in the Incarnation and to particular human beings by predestining them to glory. When it comes to identifying more concretely the features in which such dignities consist, Duns Scotus’s metaphysical views—about essential powers and about what is essential to powers—combine with his theological conviction that, when it comes to patterns of Divine concurrence with or obstruction of natural powers, God has different policies for different states of human history—to complicate his method.