According to Suárez, each of Aristotle’s four causes counts as a cause because it inflows being to another, and each has a proper influx. Several scholars regard Suárez’s account of the influx of the final cause as unsatisfactory. These interpreters overlook his identification of the influx of a cause with its causality, and his view that the causality of a cause is an entity, a res or a mode. I argue that, on Suárez’s view, the influx or causality of the final cause is a component of the mode of action, and that this account satisfies the demands of his influx theory of cause. I also uncover some unfamiliar elements of Suárez’s view of final causality: that it is simultaneous with efficient causality and that, wherever an end is a real cause of some effect, its causality is an intrinsic feature of the action by which that effect is produced.

The authors run through the major arguments for the existence of God: Anselm’s ontological argument (and also Descartes’s version), arguing that the very notion of God a priori proves hs existence; Aquinas’s cosmological (or causal) argument, that God is needed to stop an infinite regression of causes from the present to the past; and the teleological argument or the argument from design, that the design-like natural objects of this world demand a designer. Then they raise the standard objections: Gaunilo’s criticism that the ontological argument proves the existence of perfect islands, which is ridiculous, and Kant’s objection that you cannot infer matters of fact by a priori reasoning; Dawkins’s criticism that the cosmological argument raises the unanswered question of what causes God; and Hume’s criticism of the design argument, and Darwin’s subsequent demonstration that natural selection can explain final causes naturalistically, and so there is no need to invoke a Designer God.