. . . The long run of history may be very long run indeed. Already, entire epochs have known far more oppression than liberty, far more war than peace, far more famine than plenty. Of the roughly 106 billion human beings who have so far lived on the Earth, it seems a fair estimate that an extraordinary percentage have lived in circumstances of considerable material, political, and/or spiritual deprivation. Not even the providential theist can be certain that many more millennia or moral darkness donot still await us. To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that the belief in divine providence need not be a sufficient guard against deep despair about the likely course of any particular span of human history or the course of any particular human life. Indeed, to the extent that the theist concedes, and even insists upon, the inscrutability to human reason of god’s divine plan, it would seem to follow that nothing merely in the world is we cognize and experience it can directly ground or justify a belief in providence. Nor is it merely a matter of the currently unfinished state of the human drama. For all we know, the culmination of god’s divine plan may come only in the great hereafter. Once human history has run its entire earthly course. But just because the culmination of god’s plan might take place outside of history, there is no reason to suppose that even if we could survey in one glance the entire earthly course of the human adventure, we would ipso facto have sufficient grounds for the providential hypothesis. ~ Page 151 ~ Kenneth A. Taylor - Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University.