Divine Action

"the prospects for a traditional theistic understanding of SDA are bleak"

"The main reason why Wiles seeks to deny SDA is because he argues that there is implicit in the concept of a God who acts to favour one part of creation over another an overwhelming moral difficulty"

Other basis "primarily scientific- the world, he argues, is increasingly predictable by science"

"[preserving providnece] is only like winding up a clock, which puts it into motion, but gains no new perpetual motions to it, but leaves its motions to be guided by its own springs and wheels"

"There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of Nature and the books of Science in serach of gaps, gaps which they will fill up with God. As if God lived in Gaps?"

"Over a long period in Western thought God seemed to be progressively edged out of descriptions of the development and functioning of the world"

"Christian thinkers tend to want to acknowledge a partial autonomy to the world, such the physical laws describe processes that happen dependant only on God's overall sustaining"

"God's action is always consistent, in being always a lure towards goodness and harmony, but it is never overwhelming, it never decides the face of other entities"

"the vale of soul-making"