ABSTRACT
The world can have its own being and realize its own evolutionary potential, therefore, only if God’s creative power and love consist of a kind of self-concealment. Alfred North Whitehead himself admitted that the ancient Aeschylean sense of tragedy has always been intertwined with modern science. Even though a pessimistic interpretation of the cosmos is more the product of myth than of science, physicists and evolutionary biologists have generally displayed their ideas in such a way that tragedy seems to be their most natural setting. Purpose is a much wider notion than design, and it can live much more comfortably with chance, disorder, and the abyss of cosmic time than can the all too simple notion of design. The enormity of cosmic time simply adds to the suspicion that intelligence is something that emerged, perhaps only in the evolution of the human species.
