I add thanks for a careful laying out of your views, Chris. I only want to question specifically your use of Job (though in general it seems to me you’ve supported secondary causation by your post rather than any limitation of the scope of providence).
The question of Satan’s involvement (as a supernatural quasi-divinity rather than a mere human) is an interesting introduction into the discussion - potentially confusing, but I think helpful. First, some caveats about using Job as a source: of course it is a poem/theological debate rather than a straight narrative, but I’d say that the “friends” are presenting dodgy theology, and therefore when God is an active character, he is presenting good theology (in other words, it was perfectly valid for you to cite it). I’d add another caveat: that I’d not want to push the accuracy of the divine-council imagery up to the line in such a dramatic conflict narrative: but yet we may assume that the inspired writer had the relationship between God and spiritual powers right.
Nevertheless, I’d contradict you and say that Satan is not given carte blanche to afflict Job. He’s presented as a “government agent”, albeit malicious, and can do nothing at all to nature until granted specific permission, which in both cycles is strictly limited (can’t touch Job’s person first time, then can’t take his life). I believe that role as God’s “secondary agent” is emphasised by his controlling God’s own weapon “the fire of God from the sky.” He is not an independent operator.
the fact that we would call some of these forces “natural” is neither here nor there: they are presented, together with control of Sabean and Chaldean raiders, as agents working out the aims of a purposeful being, Satan - and that by direct permission of God.
The real killer is that the prologue is “for our ears only” - neoither Job nor his friends are aware of it, or suspect Satan’s involvement. The whole thrust of the rest of the debate is not whether God has done this to Job, but why, the inadequate “blame” theology being the main contender of the friends, and blank incomprehension with anger and a little faith that of Job.
Most important, when God appears in theophany, his general word to Job is not “Don’t blame me for Satan or nature”, but “Who are you to question what I do?” - and he appears to Job out of the same kind of storm we saw Satan wielding purposefully in ch1. God, of course, spends a few chapters boasting of his meticulous control of what? Of nature.
Finally, the narrator tells us in ch42 that God comforted and consoled Job over “all the trouble Yahweh had brought upon him” - neither Satan, nor impersonal forces of nature, getting any mention whatsoever.
Now in this case, Satan is clearly a secondary cause, and unlike nature one with his own malevolent angle on things: yet he is permitted to do only what God allows and, we find, eventually ends up fulfilling a deep spiritual purpose for Job as if he were an instrument in God’s hands.
As a comment on secondary causes, then, I’d say Job certainly affirms them, at least in the very special example of Satan. But even in that case, the secondary cause is an instrumental one under God.'s providence. The latter chapters of Job also affirm many natural processes as similarly instrumental and under God’s specific control.
I think the argument for or against meticulous providence depends on more general considerations such as God’s omnipotence and omniscience, and some guidance in Scripture.
