 A second important consideration has to do with the relationship between God’s creative will and the things he creates. We are prone to think of this as an event-causal relation, in which God issues a kind of command, and the command in turn produces the mandated effect. Applied to our example, this would mean that God creatively wills that I decide to attend the concert, and his willing then causes me to decide. And of course this sounds exactly like what Aquinas describes as the violent operation of an external principle. On this scenario my deciding is passive, and hence involuntary, because God’s creative fiat is an event independent of my decision, which by acting upon me robs me of my autonomy. I am reduced to a puppet manipulated by God, rather than a free agent. Clearly, however, this scenario does not reflect the way Aquinas thinks creation works, and on that score there is reason to think Aquinas is right. For consider again the causal relation alleged to obtain between God’s willing and mine. Whatever we take this to consist in, it must exist contingently, for causal connections are not necessary beings. But then this supposed causal connection must also be created by God, and if that occurs through another process of command and causation, we would be facing another regress. The only way out is to hold that God directly creates the causal nexus — which is to say that in its creation, the nexus itself, not some command, is the first manifestation of God’s creative activity. But if God’s creative will can be directly efficacious in this task, then it can also be so in his creation of us and our actions. There is, then, no need for a nexus to explain the efficacy of God’s creative will, nor is there any causal distance whatever between God and either us or our behavior. Rather, we and all that we do have our being in God, and the first manifestation of his creative activity regarding our decisions and actions is nothing short of the acts themselves. This is why it may be misleading to call this traditional view by its common name, “theological determinism,” because the sort of determination involved in God’s providential ordering of creation is very different than ordinary causal determination within the created order.