ABSTRACT
The charge of atheism was levelled in particular against those who denied the doctrine of divine providence, that is to say rejected it, misunderstood it, or simply left no room for it. Providence as one of God’s attributes was not a Christian innovation but the offspring of early philosophical responses to Greek mythology. According to Stoic theology, all things are governed and administered by divine wisdom and intelligence. Unlike other Christian ideas, the origins of the doctrine of divine providence were predominantly Greco-Roman. In the literature on the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and eighteenth-century Enlightenment there is typically little attention paid to a persisting faith, both among orthodox and moderate thinkers, in divine interaction with the world. The man-made nature of the economy apparently did not exclude it from the reach of divine influence.
