Regarding the concept of a "personal God" who interferes in human affairs, there is a passage from an extraordinary novel by Mary Doria Russell, very literary, part science-fiction, and very much a novel of ideas:   After a long and harrowing inquest into the disaster that happened to an expedition, which included a number of Jesuit priests, to the newly discovered planet Rakhat orbiting Alpha Centauri, the Father General of the Society of Jesus and a couple of other priests are walking in a garden and trying to sort out what they have just learned

         . . . He sat back in the bench and stared at the ancient olive trees defining the edge of the garden. "There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everything and everywhere, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, creation exists."
          "So God just leaves?" John asked, angry. . . . "Abandons creation? You're on your own, apes. Good luck!"
          "No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."
          "Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine, " Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. "'Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.'"
          "But the sparrow still falls," Filepe said.
         They sat for a while, wrapped in their private musings.

Respectfully submitted for your own private musings.

Don Firth