ABSTRACT
Newtonian mechanics depicted a causally closed universe with little, if any, room for God’s special action in specific events— and then only by intervention. Friedrich Schleiermacher understood God’s relation to the world in terms of universal divine immanence; the result was to collapse the distinction between creation and providence. Since the Enlightenment, the idea of objective special providence has seemed to entail belief in divine intervention: for God to act in particular events, God must intervene in nature, violating or at least suspending the laws of nature. When scholars focus on the classical world, God’s action as ongoing creator is often seen as bringing order out of chaos. The purpose is to explore the claim that God might be thought of as acting to achieve specific results that otherwise would not occur in the evolution of biological complexity, though without intervening in or violating the laws of nature.
