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usually very reluctant to give up.) But part and parcel of the account of creation is the suggestion that God ordinarily influences human life by bringing about the very natural and human influences that shape it. In general, because God influences the world as its creator, God’s working does not begin where created causes break off; God works, instead, in and through the created causes that God brings about. Christians are therefore able to give a double account of most happenings in the world: one that discusses what has happened in terms of the coordinated created powers and activities sufficient to explain it within the created order; and one that talks about God’s creative activity in bringing about those same coordinated created powers, activities, and their consequences in their totality. It is the sufficiency of the explanation in terms of created causes—the self-containment of that explanation within its own order—that allows human beings to attend to the created order without taking into account the relationship of dependence upon God that is its presupposition.

The temptation to lapse into habitual obliviousness of one’s relationship with God is easily countered, however, by other beliefs about God that Christians hold. Christians do not just believe that God is the creator and sustainer of the universe, but believe a lot of other things about God. For example, the common Christian belief that God acts as more than a creator in individual lives helps to counter obliviousness to God. God does not merely act as creator by giving individuals the created gifts that make them what they are—for example, their own capacities and operations, the ability to influence and be influenced by their human and natural environments,

and so on. God also acts to give them God’s very presence—by way, for example, of their relationship with Christ who Christians believe is God in human flesh. The very presence of God in human life means one’s relationship with God cannot be ignored. The created causes and influences, through which God also influences human life, consequently no longer have the same capacity to distract human attention from God.

Christians often believe, moreover, that God’s direction of human life by way of God’s own presence to or within it is no optional matter: God’s presence forms an essential component of human life. In addition to created capacities and influences brought about by God, God’s presence is necessary for ordinary human capacities to operate as they should. xvi To be morally good, for example, requires not just virtuous capacities of one’s own, given to one by God, but the presence of the Holy Spirit within one. Knowing well requires not just the formation of good ideas through the usual human processes of investigating one’s environment—the entirety of which has its source in a good creator God--but also a mind informed by the very Word of God. And so on.

Such beliefs imply that attention to God’s presence, some sort of God-directedness, should be a constant feature of an individual’s everyday, ordinary life, in order for that life to be lived well. The individual Christian is accordingly given a reason to bring to mind his or her relationship with God, motivated to attend to that relationship as much as possible, indeed, in the effort to lead a better life. An active God-reference becomes part of a prospective, goal-oriented process of self-reformation

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