In fact Plotinus does believe in divine providence, though when he talks about divine providence, he talks about that providence being exercised by the intellect and the soul of the world, rather than the One.

In fact Plotinus does believe in divine providence, though when he talks about divine providence, he talks about that providence being exercised by the intellect and the soul of the world, rather than the One.

The forms in intellect are some kind of blueprint or model on which the physical world is based, and something needs to come along and shape the matter in accordance with that blueprint. What does that is soul.

Once you're in a kind of revealed religious tradition, you wind up having to explain how the things said about God in the Bible or the Qur'an or whatever religious text you're dealing with, why these statements are true.

Plotinus is a neo-Platonist, so he would encourage us to go back to Plato.

Basically the problem is that if the intellect is looking at or beholding the forms, what it will get is some kind of representation or image of the forms, but it won't actually have the forms, it won't touch them as it were, or it won't incorporate them.

Plato in his dialogue The Phaedo says that whereas sticks and stones are both equal and unequal, (so maybe what that means is that each stick is going to be equal to some other sticks and unequal to some other sticks, so equal to the stick on the left maybe but shorter than the stick on its right) the form of equal is going to be just equal, and it won't partake of inequality at all. And it will be the cause of equality in things that are equal, for example, equal sticks and stones.