PROVIDENCE. A long standing Biblical and Christian understanding of the stuff around us is that God provides and we receive. Christians give thanks and are grateful for all that is provided because they believe that to be the true response to what we receive. They say grace before meals, because receiving food is far more than just eating. It is various kinds of nutritious food, the conditions for their growing and the work of farmers and retailers which brings food to our tables And it is far beyond that to the created provision of this food. One grace is especially naff: “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen.” Requiring the Creator to evoke our gratitude, if providence is true, is especially flaccid; gratitude should be the response to what has actually happened. But has it? Is Providence a compelling argument? It can, of course, merely be an emotional bias. When something nice is provided, it is providence, but when things go wrong, it is not.

But even this response is wrong. Providence is not about things happening. It concerns what, if anything, is provided. “Provide” is prepared beforehand.  It is already there. Someone has provided the toilet paper – Good. It involves a prior independent act by Someone which has now realised its benefits. It must not be accident, coincidence or happening, but foresight -something seen before. which has now come to pass. It differs from emergence in quite a striking way. Emergence emanates from what was before. It is contained in it. Superficially we say the butterfly emerged from the chrysalis. Partly, this is because we do not know the chrysalis well enough – the genetic code, the growth process, the effects of weather and so, but it does emerge. It comes from within. It follows from. Providence does not follow from. It is provided by an Other. So we are looking  for foresight and non-emergence. The problem seems to be that the more we understand, the more compelling, and intriguing, the possibility becomes.

                We are provided with water to run our bodies, oxygen to breathe, the right level of gravitation to become featherless bipeds, a climate that suits us and food which comes in a variety of forms which are accessible to a herbivorous and carnivorous mammal. But say that is just the result of a whole load of highly unusual conditions which happen to occur on our earth among a lot of galaxies, stars and planets where other outcomes are the case, and it occurs by chance, and not through the Creator? Notice the chance reference says nothing. God may have designed a universe where the possibilities of human life are very rare; yet we are here but not “by chance”. Indeed, the design of a universe where these possibilities of providence occur anywhere may require the hand of God rather than, I was going to say, “mere concatenations”, but the chaining of events underlines our problem. Chance involves no chains. Chance is the old non-explanation. Yet, let us, for the sake of considering the depth of the problem allow that a whole load of basic things for our benefit could happen and through a long process of evolution be accommodated into our lives.

                Consider, for example, food. Living things eat in increasingly complex ways and most animals, including ourselves, have learned to absorb these aids to energy and growth. The menu is now vast. It includes corn, caviar, carrot, coffee, chocolate, cauliflower, cheddar, camembert, crab, clam chowder,  cream, celery, chicken, cherries, chives, cabbage, chips, cantaloupe, cranberry and many other Cs. Some of them are as given. Some have been developed through plant and animal breeding, and some focusses around food preparation. God, or Chance, is not directly responsible for Cheddar or Chips. But that is not Providence. That is what goes before. What goes before is millions of years of species development. It is the long process of laying down fenland soil, of glaciating rock into soil, of changing the atmospheric content, temperatures and sea levels. In this sense most of world history has been preparation for a cabbage a chicken or a crab. The question is whether this is Provident, what would happen now has been in preparation across the aeons, and God said, “Let it be and it was so”  eventually, or whether all this food just tumbled out without rhyme or reason.

There is an issue in the scale of what has been provided. Above we just looked at the C foods, but the full provision picture will be ten to fifteen times that. And, the issue is bigger than food. Providence is vast in scale. There are ordinary things – stone for building, slate for roofs, wood for furniture and clay for bricks. There are the old discovered things like glass for windows, wool and cotton for clothes, leather for shoes and wine to drink. Then consider all the other things which have been discovered as useful recently, but which had no use-meaning through most of human and world history. We have coal and oil, buried until later industrialisation. We have iron ore and steel, silicon and silicon chips. We have superconductivity, which must have been set up in the early quantum development of the universe. This is not biology, but the things built into the physical structure of the universe which are for us, which provide.. We, of course, in our arrogance focus on the science we have discovered, and seem not to see the extraordinary extent to which providence is there, for plants and animals and us. Really, most of what we use in our daily lives for everything – machines, power, heat, clothes, artifacts, furniture, technology and travel has been provided down the aeons. We are mere waiters, carrying the food to the table.

In the past the carpenter reverently ran his hand along the piece of oak he had been given to use. Now that process is machined down to a selfish act of consumption, without awe, respect for the provenance of all things or an awareness of how slight our contribution is. Yet it remains true that most of what we receive is provided by God, previously beyond our comprehension, but now increasingly understood. Sadly, we are now in the business of destroying a lot of it, the opposite of Providence, the great long-term God denying impoverishment.  Our first step to preventing roaaring away global warming is to acknowledge and study what we have been given for our good. When we see that, we will love God and truly see God’s creation for the act of love it is.