I can’t really argue with other people’s personal experience, but I can comment on my own:

I had many times in my life where it seemed like someone was watching out for me. One time that pops to mind: I had to go through a public lecture for a degree: I submitted something like 12 proposed topics, then about 48 hrs before the lecture they told me which I would lecture on, then I would give the lecture and take questions both from the board and from the public. Keep in mind, I witnessed people crash and burn on these–actually fail and not get the degree. In hindsight, I realized that several of the topics I’d proposed were topics I absolutely was not well enough versed in to give a respectable academic lecture on: I realized in hindsight, I could absolutely have failed spectacularly. But the topic they picked turned out to be one that I had absolutely mastered–the whole talk was written and I knew the material inside and out. It would be easy to see that as some sort of divine intervention.

But then I wonder, like Bart, why would God look out for me in pursuing something as trivial as a degree, and ignore, for example, the pleas of those mothers living through famine who have to watch their suckling infants cry themselves to death as their milk supply dries up from malnutrition? And if God is answering prayers, wouldn’t we expect believers to do measurably better in life than non-believers–recovering more often from terminal conditions and getting good jobs that they want? I mean, if prayer does anything, over a broad enough sample, we should see its effects manifest in statistically significant ways. I don’t see much evidence of that. It seems more likely that what actually happens is a matter of luck, and we just attach significance to the times that it seems like things turned out particularly well, and we write off the times that things seem to turn out poorly. If we do face the times we rolled snake-eyes, we explain them away–God has a plan, he’s letting this happen to me for a reason even if I can’t understand it just yet–thus making our belief in providence unfalsifiable. We can always just indulge the cliche that when God closes a door he opens a window and call it good. Or maybe we instead say God is giving me a chance for spiritual growth and humility–since those things are more important that earthly success.

Something I’ve found particularly ironic is that things worked out perfectly for me to lose my faith: If things had gone as I’d planned, I would have had tenure at a very conservative Catholic college by the time I lost my faith–the sort of place where a theologian is required to adhere strictly to Catholic dogma–, and my family would have been dependent on that income, creating a very significant obstacle to my admitting that Catholicism isn’t true. If things had gone according to much earlier plan, I would have been a priest–even more personally invested in the truth of Catholicism, and in a position where it was even more imperative to maintain the ruse of believing. As it was, the whole vocation thing didn’t pan out, and neither did the career at a conservative Catholic school, and that gave me a lot of freedom to admit that things weren’t adding up. If I were a believer, I’d say someone had saved me from myself, and put the pieces in place to facilitate my loss of faith. Things worked out so perfectly, and so contrary to my plans, that even now I feel tempted to thank God for unanswered prayers, it just that those unanswered prayers let me lose faith in a God who attends to prayers.

It’s not the mystery I find objectionable; I am perfectly happy to acknowledge things are true that I can’t understand. My issue is that, from where I sit, I can find no good reason to think there is a God who rules the world providentially in the first place.

If we start by saying there certainly is such a God, then I don’t have a problem saying we can’t understand his providence.

But the first issue is whether there is any reason to think there is such a God in the first place. That’s what I’m at a loss to find, and the only alternative I can see simple fideism.

And I can’t take serendipity as evidence of providence unless we can measure it and show it is more than we would expect just from chance. We know too much about human psychology (specifically things like confirmation bias) for me to just accept that anecdotes of some things occasionally turning out well against all odds is evidence of providence.

Humans can find purpose even where there is none. We naturally focus on the times that things defy our expectations, or times that seem to indicate purpose and planning, especially if those things reinforce a prior belief, and ignore that many other times they don’t.

The Spanish blamed the storm that sank the Armada on the devil, while the English saw it as the hand of God. Who was right? Or maybe neither was and it was just a freak gale.

Again, if God is answering prayers for things like healing of diseases or getting jobs, we should be able to find a statistically significant difference in the fortunes of those who who pray (or at least who have religious family who pray for them) and those who don’t. But I don’t see evidence of that outside of anecdotes that are entirely compatible with chance. Sometimes people just have good luck; sometimes they don’t. Before we can say good luck is a sign of a providential God (or guardian angels or any other intelligent force intervening on our behalf) we have to make sure we are not just selectively picking data.