Divine providence is about God’s direction of all history in accordance with his plans, without thereby frustrating human freedom or undermining nature. Much discussion exists about what the best philosophical model is for making sense of this, and various models have been proposed over the centuries (see the relevant section on my resources page for a summary of some of these). I believe the best to be a Thomistic model which I’ve come to call “omni-instrumentality”, which I have discussed in the following ways.

First, I have given a brief overview of the view as part of a talk I did for Faith Seeking Understanding, a project I run with a friend of mine. In our module Know Thy Maker, the third talk is dedicated to the question of divine providence:

• Know Thy Maker: God is in Control

Second, I have given a detailed discussion of the view in the course of four blog posts:

• Omni-instrumentality 1: Cooperation
• Omni-instrumentality 2: Concurrence
• Omni-instrumentality 3: Providence
• Omni-instrumentality 4: Contrasting Views

See also my follow-up posts which go into more detail on some issues only given cursory attention in the main series of posts:

• The sense in which an agent is directly involved in producing the effect
• God causes evil actions without causing the evil in actions