Time & Perspective Quote by Arthur Peacocke

A tame-sounding sentence that quietly detonates the old picture of God as a celestial engineer who built the universe, wound it up, then watched it run. Arthur Peacocke, a theologian steeped in modern science, is doing conceptual repair work: saving divine agency from both fundamentalist micromanagement and deist absenteeism. The key move is the phrase "at every moment" paired with "in and through". Creation here is not an ancient event but an ongoing process, and God's action is not competitive with natural causality but expressed through it.

The subtext is a bid for intellectual credibility in an evolutionary age. By locating creativity in "the very stuff of the world", Peacocke baptizes emergence: novelty, complexity, life, consciousness. Matter is not inert clay waiting for supernatural interruption; it is "perpetually endowed" with capacities that, in religious language, are gifts. That choice of wording matters. "Endowed" suggests generosity rather than coercion, and "creativity" reframes chance and mutation as openings rather than threats. It's a theological defense of scientific openness - a universe that can genuinely surprise us without implying God is absent.

Contextually, Peacocke is writing against the culture-war script where faith requires plugging gaps in scientific knowledge. His intent is to relocate God from the gaps to the grain of reality itself: not the rival explanation, but the depth dimension of the whole unfolding. The rhetoric is deliberately dense because the target is sophisticated doubt - the kind that won’t be satisfied by miracles, but might be moved by a God who creates without breaking the world.