Koppelman on God's Role in Creation

Northwestern law prof Andrew Koppelman has an interesting post over at Balkinization on the intelligent design debate.  Here's an excerpt:

Cardinal Schonborn writes that there is “purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.” He could mean two things by this. The first is that there is a point to the universe’s existence, and human life has cosmic significance. The second is that ordinary physical processes are not the product of blind causation, but of continuing divine intervention. You can accept the first proposition without accepting the second one. God might well have created a universe in which physical processes – say, the emergence of homo sapiens from other species, or the operation of your car’s engine – take place by themselves. The universe as a whole might be fraught with purpose, even if its parts operate mechanically. This in fact appears to be the view of the book of Genesis, which informs us that on the seventh day, after creating the universe, God rested. If God was resting, then evidently the universe was able to keep running by itself.
. . . .

Galileo and Darwin do place greater demands on religious faith than their predecessors. They require that faith stand on its own bottom, rather than leaning on comforting hints drawn from observed phenomena. And this is, perhaps, why they are resisted so fiercely. Faith is hard. But the enemies of Darwin are not helping religion’s cause. If we did not, in our daily activities, assume a mindless, predictable nature, we probably could never do anything at all. The idea that religion necessarily rejects science and mechanism ought to appeal only to the most militant atheists. Its embrace by sophisticated religious people is bizarre.

I agree with the thrust of the post, but Koppelman seems to assume that there are only two possibilities: a totally intervening God who orchestrates every movement and occurrence in nature, or a totally absent God who starts things running and then leaves the scene.  Christians, in my understanding, split the difference between these perspectives.  Yes, God intervenes in nature, but God is not nature's puppet-master.  The intervention is undeniable for those who believe in the Incarnation; the lack of absolute orchestration is undeniable for those who believe in free will (and the fallen state of nature that has resulted).

Rob