One of the most basic of all philosophical and theological questions is 'What in the world is God doing?' I have recently been reading a couple of books which have forced me to think more deeply about the answer to this question, and in this article I am going to explain what I have learned from them.

The first book is Michael Denton's book The Miracle of Man which was published last year. Denton is a British-Australian scientist who is Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in the United States, and he is a proponent of what is known as Intelligent Design, the theory that holds that what we know through science about the nature of the physical universe is best explained by the hypothesis that it is the work of an intelligent designer, or, in Christian terms, the work of God.

In The Miracle of Man Denton notes that whereas in the Middle Ages human beings were seen as being at the centre of the universe, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards a range of scientific discoveries led to this anthropocentric view being generally rejected. The old view of the cosmos with the earth at its centre, and humanity as a special creation by God, was replaced by the view that the earth was an unremarkable planet, and the existence of humanity was a meaningless cosmic accident.

However, argues Denton, this view is now itself outdated because detailed scientific study since the nineteenth century has made it clear that: "Humans are clearly no contingent afterthought. The exquisitely fine-tuned ensembles of environmental fitness described here, each enabling a vital aspect of our physiological design, amount to nothing less than a primal blueprint for our being written into the fabric of reality from the moment of creation, providing compelling evidence that we do, after all, occupy a central place in the great cosmic drama of being."

He further adds that: "... nature is uniquely fine tuned to enable beings of our biological design and size to make fire, develop metallurgy, build an advanced technological civilization, and come to do science and its unique fitness for our type of life.

"In sum, it is as if, in an act of extraordinary prescience, there was built into nature from the beginning a suite of properties finely calibrated for beings of our physiological and anatomical design and for our ability to follow the path of technological enlightenment from the Stone Age to the present."

From a Christian perspective the result of this purely scientific argument is to show that the atheist arguments of writers such as Richard Dawkins are undermined by the very science to which they appeal. Christian writers such as William Paley, the author of Natural Theology, were right all along. Nature testifies to the belief, taught also in Scripture, that human beings exist in the way they exist because they were designed to do so by a creator God.

Indeed, the work of scientists such as Denton provides us with an even more awe-inspiring understanding of God's activity than we previously possessed. They tell us that God has been working in precise detail throughout his creation over the billions of years since he first brought the universe into being. Nothing is accidental. All is part of God's good plan.

However, the conviction that all is part of God's good plan seems to become problematic once one considers the behaviour of the human creatures God has so painstakingly created. God has created humans as intelligent creatures capable of conceiving and using advanced technology and, as the war In Ukraine reminds us, they use this ability to kill and maim each other. If God has a good plan for humanity then why can't we see this plan being played out on the stage of history? Why does history seem to testify more to the wickedness of humanity than to the goodness of God?

The second book I have been reading, The Justification of God, by the Congregationalist theologian P T Forsyth, tackles this issue head on. This book was first published in 1916 and its sub-title Lectures for War-Time on a Christian Theodicy tells you what it is about. Theodicy is the vindication of God's goodness in the face of evil, and the purpose of Forsyth's book is to vindicate the goodness of God in the face of the horrors of the First World War. As he writes, the question it addresses is: "How do we stand today to the old dilemma, 'If He has power to stop these things and does not, He is not good; if He is good and does not, He has no power'?"

The specific problem Forsyth addresses was one caused by the development of Liberal Protestant theology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This theology had come to hold that God's plan for humanity could be seen in the development of Western Christian civilization through which God was bringing in the kingdom to which Jesus refers in the Gospels. There was evil in the world, but in the providence of God the rise of Christian civilization was gradually overcoming it. This optimistic theology was quite literally blown apart by the gun fire of the First World War in which the nations supposedly bringing in God's kingdom turned on each other in savage carnage.

Forsyth's response is to point out that the mistake made by Liberal Protestant theology was to assume that we can deduce the outcome of history (and therefore the work of God in history) from the study of history itself. As he writes:

"Creation means life, movement, evolution. What is the goal and where? We cannot see it simply by looking out. The future is a book shut and sealed. The great end does not gleam, a City of God with shining towers, on the horizon that closes our gaze. Can we, then, presume it from a survey of history as far as it has gone? Can we calculate the final trend, if we do not see the point of convergence? How can we? How do we know how much of history is yet to run? Is the decisive part, the fifth act, yet to come? Have we any idea in which act we entered the house? We see but a small area of all time as yet. And the lines are not straight, nor on any calculable curve. They are labyrinthine."

However, this does not mean that we cannot see what God is doing in history. This is because the teleology (the end and purpose) of all things has been revealed to us by Spirit in the finished work of God in Jesus Christ. To quote Forsyth again:

"We possess, in a living and present Christ, God's goal and the destiny of the soul and of the world. We are put (miraculously it is true, by the Spirit) in possession of a God whose holy self-sufficiency secures the certainty of his purpose, and whose purpose is the world's salvation to Himself in a kingdom. it is not a salvation to prosperity, nor to civilization, nor to idealism, but to Himself, to His obedience, His communion, His realm. In this revelation, the economy of salvation becomes the principle of the movement of the universe. Nature is but a draught scheme of salvation with the key on another sheet where the eternal act of redemption is found to carry and crown the long process of creation. It is God's salvation of the world that dominates the long history of the world infallibly, if not at every point palpably. Such is the position of Christian faith, and it is the ground of all our good hope and sure outlook for the future. Such is the nature of Christian teleology. It rises from our experience of the Christian revelation."

To put it another way, what Forsyth is saying in this quotation is the truth declared in the words of the great traditional hymn:

"How firm a Foundation, ye Saints of the Lord,

Is laid for your Faith in His excellent Word;

What more can he say than to you he hath said?

You, who unto Jesus for Refuge have fled?"

We may not know what God is doing in and through the war in Ukraine, or in the lives of all those who are caught up in it. However, we do not need to know these things. To seek to know them is simply pointless curiosity. As C S Lewis insisted in his Narnia stories, what we need to know, and what God does tell us, is our own story, the story of how we, along with all the world, are the subject of his redeeming work in Jesus Christ made known and applied through the Spirit.

In summary, what I have learned from my reading of Michael Denton and PT Forsyth is two key things. First, that an impartial study of the world and of humanity shows that human beings are not mere cosmic accidents. Each and every human being is a precise creation whose existence has been prepared for by God from the dawn of time.

Secondly, we cannot trace in detail the work of God through the tangled skein of human history. Nor can we forecast with any accuracy what paths human history will take in the future. However, what we do know, and what is enough for us to know, is that God has already completed his work in this world through the work of Jesus Christ. Those who put their trust in Christ share in the benefits of this work already and will one day experience them fully in the world to come. The justification of God in human history is that he has purposed and achieved this good end. That is the answer to the question 'What in the world is God doing?'

Martin Davie is a lay Anglican theologian and Associate Tutor in Doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.