 (2) The traditional theistic position that God’s creation of the universe is continuous can easily be developed in pantheistic directions. The view that the world could not exist—even for a second—without God, makes it wholly dependent on God and, hence, not really an autonomous entity (Oakes 1983). Moreover, to further develop this argument, if God creates every temporal stage of every object in the universe, this undermines the causal power of individual things and leads to occasionalism, which in turn encourages pantheism; for in so far as independent agency is a clear mark of independent being, the occasionalist doctrine that all genuine agency is divine—that it all comes from a single place—tends to undermine the distinction of things from God. Both Malebranche and Jonathan Edwards have found themselves charged with pantheism on these grounds, and it was for this reason that Leibniz, in attempting to refute the pantheistic monism of Spinoza, felt it most important to assert the autonomous agency of finite beings.