Not without foundation, it seems, Lee suspects a hint of gnosticism. I really need to get this book [Doors of the Sea]. ~Kevin Jones

There are traces of gnosticism in David Hart’s work, and he himself acknowledges a proclivity for gnostic views in Doors of the Sea, but I would argue that this gnosticism is not so much to be found in his distinction between nature and creation (which accords fairly well with patristic distinctions about the created order before and after the Fall). 

There are, however, other problems with Doors of the Sea.  On that book and his challenge to traditional theodicy, I had this to say last year:

Dr. Hart’s squeamishness, which is what it seems to me to be, at the thought of a wrathful God has already made any patristic account for suffering irrelevant to his argument. The thought of a wrathful God is something he is so far from acknowledging that he does not even engage the Fathers when they speak of God in this way. It is certainly a trend in modern theology, including Orthodox theology, to de-emphasise potentially embarrassing concepts in the Fathers, whether by heavily ‘contextualising’ them historically so as to deprive them of contemporary relevance or by misusing, as it seems to me, the concept of the consensus patrum to write off some patristic ideas as eccentric or idiosyncratic and therefore not authoritative. Hart’s book does not ignore the Fathers–he relies on them for a solid account of the goodness of God, creation, man and his place in the cosmos. But his brisk treatment of the subject apparently precluded testing his idea against the received wisdom of the Fathers–it is not only St. Gregory who makes the case for understanding natural calamities as chastisements, but St. Maximos who approvingly comments on a similar view from a separate Oration. What cannot be stressed enough is that God’s wrath and mercy are both expressions of His love (whom the Lord loves He chastises–Heb. 12:6), and there has never been an inherent contradiction between divine wrath and divine love.