AKG wrote:

If so could a case for theism be made from these metaphysical ideas such as a cosmological argument based on powers/dispositions, arguing for the divine attributes or contingency from new essentialism or other things?

My hunch is that what will be necessary is using new forms of dispositionalism or essentialism to motivate a return to a more classical metaphysics, and then arguing from that to the existence of God. That is basically what Feser attempted to do in Scholastic Metaphysics, as I understand him. He tries to step into the debates and show how different positions are each missing something, such that a return to the scholastic position is warranted.

His claim isn't the, in my view, implausible one that the existence of God will follow from dispositional accounts of causation or the new essentialism or anything like that. The reason I think that is implausible is just that the contemporary theories are too thin. They are concerned with providing 'good accounts' of causal statements or scientific statements, but I don't think their proponents themselves think them strong enough to support any sort of exceptionless causal principle, which is what a cosmological argument needs.

Well, what I have in mind is that such accounts are metaphysically "thin". They do not get far enough along to say something about the metaphysical issues relevant to arguments for God's existence.

Take Nancy Cartwright for instance. She argues that the laws of physics are non-factive and instead are best thought of as articulating how certain bodies causally contribute to the explanation of the movement of each other. Fair enough. I don't think that account, though, could be said to imply that every reduction from potency to act occurs by something which is actual in the same respect. It may be an account about "causal powers," but it doesn't imply such a causal principle.

And Thomists wouldn't feel comfortable arguing directly from such an account to God's existence, anyway. Cartwright takes her account to apply just to the physical; she doesn't think one is required to give a non-factive account of biological laws, if there are any, for instance. (Of course, one might think that is unwarranted. I think a non-factive account of biological laws is appropriate, if one reads them as universal generalizations at least. And I also think it would be odd if the concept of a power or disposition, which clearly has its focal sense in ordinary human experience, were only applicable to microphysical phenomena, and yet still comprehensible in that context. Talk about throwing away the ladder.)

I probably spoke uncarefully in using the word 'thin', which has a pretty precise meaning in many philosophical contexts. Perhaps it'd be better to say that I suspect most of these accounts (generally aimed at arguing that dispositions or essences are indispensable at the microphysical level) are too weak to say much about the traditional philosophical problems.