 Before proceeding further, we might briefly examine why the CCC thesis was so broadly accepted as the orthodox view, by considering what implications the rejection of the CCC thesis was thought to entail. The most significant implication of rejecting the CCC thesis, from the perspective of the proponents of the CCC thesis, is the consequence that divine causal activity at creation is markedly different from divine causal activity in moments of conservation, such that the difference is sufficient to deny the identity of the two acts. Hence, conservation is not continuous creation. An intuitive way of cashing out this difference, which indeed is how “mere conservationists” such as Durandus proceeded, is to think that while God does everything there is to be done, causally speaking, at the moment of creation, God does less in subsequent moments of conservation such that God merely conserves the creatures in existence. How is God doing less in conservation, according to the conservationist? In moments of conservation, if the event that is caused is a non-miraculous natural event, the direct, immediate cause of this event is a creaturely cause, and not divine. God is involved, even for the conservationist, but only in a mediated, indirect manner—God works in the background, as it were, keeping the creaturely cause in existence, allowing the creature to exercise its causal powers in a direct, immediate fashion. For instance, if the fire of a gas range causes the water in the coffee pot to boil, the boiling of the water is directly and immediately caused by the fire, even if it is fully granted that the existence of the fire must be directly conserved by God. Thus, God, in keeping the fire in existence, which in turn allows the fire to boil the water directly and immediately, is mediately and remotely involved in the boiling of the water, according to the mere conservationist. God is merely conserving the fire (and water) and not directly causing the water to boil. From our contemporary perspective, this indirect, mediated involvement on the part of God might seem sufficient to give divine causality its due place in nature. But the theistic philosophers of the late Scholastic and early modern period found this way of securing the role of divine causality theologically insufficient and suspect. The main worry appears to have been that to think that the dependence of creatures on God is somehow reduced, once creation has past, fundamentally misrepresents the critical dependence creatures have on God throughout their existence, be it creation or conservation. Because in terms of creaturely dependence conservation and creation are fundamentally the same, these philosophers seemed to have been thinking, what other differences there might be between conservation and creation, these differences are negligible. It is from this perspective that the orthodox view was to affirm the identity between conservation and  creation.[25] 