ABSTRACT
Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and the other evolutionary materialists the people have met in preceding pages claim that the "dangerous" idea of evolution has wrecked the ancient religious intuition that the universe is the expression of an eternal meaning. The challenge evolutionary science poses to religion, therefore, consists in great measure of its apparent collapsing of the sacred hierarchy in which the sense of a purposeful universe has been positioned for ages. To view religion or idea of God as having emerged only gradually from the ignoble historical origins posited by modern history and the various scientific studies of religion is to subject it to the same reductionist treatment that evolutionary thought has already accorded the cosmic hierarchy. Some version of hierarchy, theology rightly insists, remains essential to any intelligible conception of cosmic meaning. Nasr’s thought is illustrative of the challenge theology faces in mapping evolutionary science onto the classical hierarchy of being to which the “perennial philosophy” tightly adheres.
