Here's a subjective tabulation of "surprise" exclamation-marks that might be attributed to mostly 19th century idea-sets (columns in the table) associated with the everyday properties of electricity and magnetism, when those idea-sets encounter observations of various phenomena (rows in the table) which might have been unexpected at first even if on reflection said idea-sets could fit them into their picture. If the screen you're reading this on is indicative, the awareness provided by these models continues to serve us well even into the 21st century.
Although any of the natural behaviors listed in the left column might be explained after the fact by tempermental deities, there was for example no deity-model which predicted (in advance) that electrostatic repulsion would fall off inversely as separation r squared and not as separation to some other power. The exponent of r was therefore a fit-parameter in the deity models not needed in the action-at-a-distance models, which (like Newtonian gravity) behaved in this way because of the 3 spatial-dimensions in which they were embedded. In that sense the deity-model either predicted with less precision, or was able to predict accurately only after lots of data had been obtained to empirically-determine the exponent to be approximately 2.
Related references:
Basil Mahon (2003) The man who changed everything: The life of James Clerk Maxwell (Wiley, NY).