a need for some religious or metaphysical explanation. I believe in the concept of God and in His existence. Charles Townes, Nobel Laureate

provides a supportive metaphysical framework for understanding the concept of human nature that he has developed in this essay. Alfred North Whitehead ’s philosophy emphasizes processes or events rather than substances. These events

of nature based on metaphysical determinism and indeterminism? In what ways do they shed light on the problem of general and special providence, and in particular on a non-interventionist understanding of objectively special divine

may be compelling, their metaphysical conclusions, like any others, are options not directly supported by physics. Finally Clayton turns to theistic metaphysics, considering both classical theism and panentheism . Theism asserts that the world

upon a particular metaphysical structuring of experience. Consequently, the aspects of nature suggested by the sciences must be represented in ontological categories. Beyond and through the abstractions of the scientific

coheres with Aquinas’s metaphysical vocabulary regarding intellectual powers: the world of interiority that Husserl examines turns from the consciousness of the subject to a self- reflexive knowledge of that subject; the unified body and

these concepts are open to metaphysical and theological grounding and that a careful understanding of God renders an evolving natural world more intelligible. Rather than a danger, Darwin offers theology a gift: the context for a doctrine of God

embody what is, in fact, a metaphysical assumption. Modern thought also extended atomism to areas such as political philosophy and ethics through the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant . Still, the determinism of the laws of physics

in turn was elevated to a metaphysical principle by Jacques Monod, who rejected God’s involvement in evolution, but Peacocke disagrees. Instead, chance connotes the many ways in which potential forms of organization are thoroughly explored

attempt to give metaphysical meaning to its emerging technological relationship with nature.” Rifkin’s message is that we ought to let nature be. In advocating this hands off policy, Rifkin does not appeal to any