Vraith had an excellent point: wonder is wrought. Who wrought those wonders? The characters themselves.Wosbald wrote: Even discounting all of the other textual and thematic clues in the LCs, it certainly seems hard to account for the use "Providence" in any other way.
I'm not sure how much you know about Donaldson's personal views and upbringing. I think the evidence (i.e. his own statements about his life, his beliefs, his books as well as the text itself) shows clearly that he was intending to take religious concepts and turn them on their head. If you've ever read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, you'd see that this is the same literary and philosophical strategy of Nietzsche: to reclaim 'heavenly' values for the earth, to take traditional Christian virtues and show how they are vices in the way they are traditionally used (i.e. life-denying, world-denying). His purpose is to show how humans can develop their own values and morality in the absence of an external source validating them or giving them to us.
Donaldson takes religious tropes and shows how they are evil (e.g. the preacher's sermon in TWL), reinterpreting them in a way that requires no god, because he gives them a human meaning. So 'providence' can be something we create and give to each other. It can be a way we interpret reality, something we choose to see in the world as our own attitude, not something given to us by any god.
Donaldson says interpreting the Chronicles based on something like god misses the point of his story. That's not my words, it's his. You can cling to the interpretation that backs up your own bias if you want, but he's telling you explicitly: you're missing the point of his story.
He also said this in the GI:
Wikipedia says this:Donaldson wrote:So you could--if you were so inclined--say that my stance as a story-teller is one of "existential humanism."
And this:Existential humanism is a concept that can be understood in several different ways, each tending to validate the human subject as struggling for self-knowledge and self-responsibility.[1]
And this:Existentialism ... philosophical thinking begins with the human subject —not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.[5] In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.[6] [7][8]
Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism). The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated, according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it.[1] Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of a "human nature" (sometimes contrasted with antihumanism).
In modern times, humanist movements are typically aligned with secularism, and today "Humanism" typically refers to a non-theistic life stance centred on human agency, and looking to science instead of religious dogma in order to understand the world.[2]