Random events could only occur if God has left the scene, since in the presence of providence Thomas argues “Nothing hinders certain things happening by luck or by chance, if compared to their proximate causes: but not if compared to Divine Providence, whereby ‘nothing happens at random in the world’ as Augustine says”.
Thomas argues “We must therefore say that what happens here by accident, both in natural things and in human affairs, is reduced to a preordaining cause, which is Divine Providence.”
I suspect you are misunderstanding the meaning of “preordaining cause.” You appear to take it to mean that preordaining requires that every subsequent effect is “ordained” by the cause. This ain’t necessarily so.
God could, in fact, preordain the conditions which enable the capacity for free will and, therefore, would not have “preordained’” the outcomes of free will choices but merely the capacity of the cause (free will) to initiate its own novel causal chains. Free will, itself, could be underwritten by God as its “preordaining cause” but God would not necessarily have to “pre-ordain” the choices of such an agent with the capacity for making free will choices.
Likewise, since underwriting the capacity for free will in created agents with a capacity for free will would seem to require far and away more underwriting than merely preordaining complex secondary causal chains which fortuitously bring about coincidental outcomes, There is no need for God to “preordain” outcomes, merely to preordain the complex network of causal antecedents which then “unfold” and bring about relatively predictable or unpredictable effects.
Thomas doesn’t require God to intervene, since “‘If God foreknew that this would happen, it will happen.’ Wherefore Boethius, having said that the chain of fate is fickle, shortly afterwards adds—‘which, since it is derived from an unchangeable Providence must also itself be unchangeable.’”
I suspect you misunderstand the meaning of “unchangeable” by taking it to mean something like “static.” The risk is to reduce God to being merely a very complex originating cause which is self-limiting and determined rather than unchangeable because nothing can change him. God is omnipotent and unrestricted in what he can bring about – the meaning of omnipotent, I.e., not constrained and, therefore, “unchangeable” by any “outside” thing or agent.
Thomas’ argument doesn’t require require God to intervene, since “If God foreknew that this would happen, it will happen”. But nor does he rule out miracles. Thomas’ argument works even if God allows everything to evolve, or whatever else, since “If God foreknew that this would happen, it will happen”.
I’ve strong reservations about Thomism, but must admit that his argument on fate seems copper-bottomed bomb-proof.
Actually, merely preordaining a complex network of antecedent causes doesn’t require that God intervene after the fact. Neither does it require that he mustn’t interfere.
I’ve never found the argument that God’s omniscience and omnipotence means he had to set all of creation in motion from the beginning and could never interfere thereafter without threat to his reputation for perfection – THAT would be deism. This assumes that a plan/execution model for all of God’s creative efforts is the only one permitted to a three-omni-God, thus putting arbitrary restrictions on God.
Part of why it isn’t logically compelling is that it presumes God is in time and restricted to a sequential mode of creation by necessity. Why is improvisation necessarily an inferior means of creating as compared to crafting or assembling an artifact? I wouldn’t suppose it is for the same reason I don’t think a jazz piano or trumpet player who improvises as he plays is necessarily inferior to one who plays perfectly every note he has pre-written as notation on a page. Yet, the second seems to be the only kind of God you seem to find acceptable – one who “sticks to his script.”
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