Benidict, there is a lively discussion of the very topic you propose here, going on among the fellows of the International Society for Science and Religion (
www.issr.uk.org). Some scholars do adopt the Jewish mystcal model of God “withdrawing from a portion of the cosmos,” as it were, to allow room for creation. I regard this as too literalist, in imagining creation as spatially located in a blank space left by God.
I find the panentheist model more coherent and compelling, in which creation is within the divine reality, so that God is intimately present to creation at all moments. If the universe is within God, God suffers with us, uniting Godself to the sufferings of animals and humans through the Incarnation and the redemptive suffering of Jesus. It is precisely because God has become Incarnate, taking on the quarks of the Big Bang, the dinosaur DNA, and the human genome and history, that Creation is united with God. This is not, of course, in a Hindu pantheist way of “identity without difference.” It is in the sense of creator in partnership with creation, as in John 12:32: “When I am lifted up I will draw all things to myself” (καγὼ ἐὰν ὑψωθῶ ἐκ τῆς γῆς, πάντας ἑλκύσω πρὸς ἐμαυτόν.)
StAnastasia