Philosophers have tackled this for millennia. Looking at events in the natural world, how things change, you can find overviews of those opinions from author's like Donald Worster in his tome Nature's Economy, dealing with natural history over ~ the last 3-400 years and the view of how things change once one discards the "hand of god" as a factor. Pass over that with Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and you have an evolution of opinions, or paradigm shifts. None of them assign a role to an "unseen hand" of a deity. At least, none of them taken seriously by anyone else. From Selborne to String, it's all human observation and trying to figure out the story behind what we see.