Hence, through the concept of emanation, Avicenna explains the God-world relationship and, more generally, efficient causality.
As mentioned above, there is an asymmetry between the relation of efficient causality and the relation of formal dependence that conjoin creatures and Creator: while the former is in time, the latter is eternal.
There are, Maritain holds, four basic principles of metaphysics: the principles of identity, of sufficient reason, of efficient causality, and of finality (i.e., every agent acts for an end).
But such efficient causation is an impossibility for Albert, for Albert takes it that all efficient causation connects actualities (an assumption he perhaps got from Averroes), and seems to take propensities and capacities as nothing more than descriptions how efficient causality works for one or another kind of thing.
Thus he has proved what he calls the "triple primacy": there is a being that is first in efficient causality, in final causality, and in pre-eminence.
Since efficient causality connects metaphysics to physics and final causality connects it with ethics, the "true metaphysician" focuses on exemplar causality,[41] a kind of formal causality which is the grand theme of Bonaventurean metaphysics.
Unless Leibniz indicates otherwise, it is a mistake to equate causal power, activity, or efficacy with productive or efficient causality.
Moreover, because of his rejection of the demiurge (and of the One), Aristotle is also forced to limit efficient causality to the sublunary realm.
By the late 20th century, theologians had found hope in the explanatory inadequacy at the scientific level of a sheerly physicalist theory of efficient causality.
Second, the efficient causality of created things depends on divine efficient causality.
