Saying that God can work through nature does not imply that everything nature does should be attributed to God, but rather that in some events that nature brings about we can recognize indications of what God is doing. In other words, there are events that at one level can be understood as natural phenomena, but might also have a fuller meaning for a person of faith. Perhaps some cases of God working through nature are a matter of allowing nature to take its course, but we might also think that God’s presence can be an influence on what created things do.

Aside from the question of what events God arranges, the idea of God bringing about meaningful coincidences raises the question of how God does such a thing. Some people may be content to say that God can do anything and leave it at that. But suppose we ask whether this kind of display of God’s power involves miraculous interventions in which God overrides the ordinary operation of nature. Christians who think such a thing are likely to think that this kind of miraculous intervention is common. But believing that such miracles are common raises a problem when we consider that there are many occurrences of terrible things that God doesn’t intervene to prevent.

Some people think that there are reasons why God might set up a system in which making prayer requests is a factor in what God does, but I don’t find any of the reasons I have heard convincing. However, the standard model is not the only option. Instead of thinking about petitionary prayer as trying to get God to do something, suppose we think of it as a way of accessing powers that God has made available.

Thinking that there are powers that produce events that seem anomalous from a scientific point of view does not lead all the way to God. But if there are powers other than God’s that might lead to remarkable events, we can be more open to levels of reality beyond our ordinary understanding of physical causality. Viewing the world through a lens that is shaped by materialist assumptions conditions us to filter out aspects of reality that don’t fit with these assumptions.