My Weird Prompts
Daniel Rosehill
Podcast
Episodes
Listen, download, subscribe
Who Believes God Is Personally Involved? The Data on Divine Providence
Everything happens for a reason" sounds like one belief. It's actually at least three — God orchestrates every event, God permits events for a purpose, or God neither causes nor permits suffering but good can still come of it. This episode traces the vocabulary of divine providence from Maimonides and Nachmanides through the Baal Shem Tov's 18th-century expansion to hashgachah pratit, then compares how Christianity, Islam, and deism each draw the line. Along the way: the Reformed distinction between God's appointment and God's authorship of sin, the Mu'tazilite and Ash'arite split over kasb, and the theodicy problem every providential tradition has to answer for. Then the part nobody expects — decades of polling exist on belief in God, religious affiliation, and the afterlife, but measuring belief in personal divine involvement turns out to be a much stranger project, and the findings don't line up with the usual assumptions about who holds that view. Key sources: • Wikipedia, Divine providence (last edited 2026-10-11) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_providence • Wikipedia, Divine providence in Judaism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_providence_in_Judaism • Michoel Rotenfeld, The Baal Shem Tov's Expanded View of Hashgaḥah Pratit, *Ḥakirah* vol. 36 (2025) — https://hakirah.org/Vol36Rotenfeld.pdf Episode 5929 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5929 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/340229)
My Weird Prompts RSS Feed
