ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the operation of human providence under causally indeterministic conditions, in hopes of illuminating how divine providence might function under similar conditions. Assuming libertarianism (about free will) as a parameter for discussion, the chapter will address its difficulties. Providence will be understood as the purposive and effectual orchestration of events, designed to bring about states of affairs represented within the providential agent’s intentions, a broad characterisation that encompasses both human and divine providence. This process must be purposive (designed, guided) and intentional because accidental or unforeseen or unintentional outcomes are matters of luck, and a significant measure of agential control must be present to keep the luck at bay. Indeterminism will be understood as the thesis according to which not all actual event patterns are subsumable under deterministic law. What laws there may be covering such patterns are irreducibly probabilistic, and explanations of undetermined events fail the test of contrastive explicability – they do not (e.g.) satisfy canonical formulations of the principle of sufficient reason. After expanding on the definitions of providence and indeterminism, the first section presents the most pressing challenges to indeterministic human providence (or to libertarian theories of human agency), and how these challenges are best approached. In the remaining sections the chapter considers the degree to which indeterministic human providence parallels indeterministic divine providence and explores the problems and possibilities attending each.
