Modern Biology & Natural Theology

Alan Olding

Introduction; Part 01 Part I Biology; Section 01 1 The decline of purposive explanations; Section 01-01-01 Purpose in physics and biology; Section 01-01-02 Paley and Darwin; Section 01-01-03 Biological functions; Section 01-01-04 Functions and accidents; Section 01-01-05 The teleological imagination; Section 01-01-06 Beyond tautology; Section 01-01-07 The quest for the wholly real; Section 02 2 Biology and metaphysics; Section 02-01-01 Presuppositions; Section 02-01-02 Drawing teeth and blunting claws; Section 02-01-03 For reality; Section 03 3 The stuff we are made of; Section 03-01-01 Behind appearances; Section 03-01-02 Atoms and their qualities; Section 03-01-03 Levels of discourse and levels of reality; Section 03-01-04 Ontological levels; Section 03-01-05 Polanyi’s notion of levels; Section 03-01-06 The contradiction in the notion of levels; Section 03-01-07 Tensions; Part 02 Part II Problems; Section 04 4 Reductionism or Darwinism; Section 04-01-01 Ungrateful offspring; Section 04-01-02 Trouble in mind; Section 05 5 Biology and knowledge; Section 05-01-01 Perception and survival; Section 05-01-02 Darwinism and scepticism; Section 06 6 Consciousness and its objects; Section 06-01-01 Metaphysics again; Section 06-01-02 The argument developed; Section 06-01-03 The sensitive mind; Section 06-01-04 Perception as belief; Section 06-01-05 The perceiving self; Part 03 Part III Natural theology; Section 07 7 Biology and cosmology; Section 07-01-01 ‘The fitness of the environment’; Section 07-01-02 Anthropic answers; Section 07-01-03 The joker in the pack; Section 08 8 From world to God; Section 08-01-01 Design; Section 08-01-02 An embodied god?; Section 08-01-03 Equivocation as analogy; Section 08-01-04 God willing; Section 09 9 And back again; Section 09-01-01 The world willed; Section 09-01-02 Much ado out of nothing; Section 09-01-03 Science and theism; Section 09-01-04 The empirical content of theism; Section 09-01-05 Deism and the notion of ‘the world’; Section 09-01-06 The agony of the world; Notes; Bibliography; Index;