Priority of Causal Explanation

"All causes, therefore, are adequate to the effects they produce, and all things can be in principle adequately explained by the causes that produce them. To have discovered the cause of something is to have explained it. There is no need to invoke purpose or design as an explanation. There is no place for miracles or divine intervention in providence as categories of explanation. God may be conceived, as in eighteenth-century Deism, as the ultimate author of it all, but one does not need to now the author personally in order to read the book. Nature - the sum total of what exists - is the really real. And the scientist is the priest who can unlock for us the secrets of nature and give us the practical master of its workings."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 25