ABSTRACT
Orthodox theology is based on a self-consciously conservative stress on the writings of the Fathers of the early centuries of the Christian era. One possible starting point is the observation that one of the main objections sometimes voiced to a purely naturalistic theology is the assertion that such a theology whatever the scope of divine action it allows must still envisage the essentially absent God of the deistic model. One of these is the belief that the traditional theological conception of God as existing beyond time is incompatible with the notion of God's "involvement" in temporal processes. This possibility may be argued both from a scientific perspective in terms of what the physicist calls regime change and from a theological perspective, in terms of the sort of implicit notion of a higher level of the laws of nature to be found in the writings of St Augustine.
