I hate to break this to you, but the Christian god is not conceived of as external to nature, given that he created it. Neither is Plato's, of which nature is a dim reflection.
--- On Sat, 2/14/09, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> No deity need have anything to do with it, and a deity
> *external* to nature cannot conceivably have anything to do
> with it. All that is required is the proposition that the
> ultimate course of events takes form in the determining
> context of formal natural law. Einstein's phrase was an
> idiomatic expression of this (Platonic) concept.
> Sheldrake's suggestion of a "morphogenetic
> field" is another (nonmathematical) expression of that
> concept.
>
>