If science is defined by a model of concentric epistemological zonation, design cannot be construed as a scientific hypothesis because it is inconsistent with the core aspects of scientific methodology: naturalism, uniformity, induction, and efficient causation.
Final and efficient causation does not figure in mathematical demonstrations, but in any proper demonstration, Grosseteste thinks, the conclusion will not merely assign a predicate that belongs universally to its subject, but one that is commensurately universal with it.
This difference could be conceived in terms of the Aristotelian distinction between formal and efficient causation and the accompanying metaphysical preferences for form over matter and mind over body that are deeply embedded in western philosophy.
According to Leibniz, (a) modal truths and modal truth-makers depend wholly on God's intellectual activities and (b) the form of dependence is ontological and does not involve efficient causation.
Indeed, as others have objected (Bennett 1991, Carriero 1995, Melamed 2009), this proposal makes Spinoza's claim in Ip15 so unremarkable that it is hard to see why Spinoza went to such obfuscating lengths to phrase his ontology in terms of modes and inherence in the first place, since he had the categories of efficient causation and dependent beings at his disposal.
In short, Reid's views of power, efficient causation and moral liberty appear to be inconsistent with one another.
The most extensive treatment of Aristotelian efficient causation, and the most influential, is given by Ibn Sīnā (987 1037), known to English speakers by his Latinized name, Avicenna.
As Hartshorne notes, Whitehead's concept of prehension brings efficient causation and perception under a single category (Hartshorne 1984b, chapter 9).
On the contrary, he insists that history is governed by efficient causation and that we should try to discover as far as possible the specific ways in which it is so.
For this reason, Ockham insists that the definition of an attribute is a nominal definition, not a real one, and Aquinas holds that the conclusion of a demonstration of the highest sort will be per se both in the second way (presupposing the subject) and the fourth (indicating efficient causation) (Aquinas, Commentary on P.A. I 10).
Efficient causation of this sort is referred to in later Thomistic writers as "emanation"—so Cajetan in his commentary on the Summa Theologiae I, questions 54 and 77, and Suarez in his discussion of efficient causation in Metaphysical Disputation 18.3.
