ABSTRACT
Probably no modern thinker has been more persistent than Teilhard in seeking to transform theological sensibilities in a way that takes evolution seriously. Although science must be distinguished carefully from metaphysics, what scientists actually decide to focus on or leave out of their scientific pictures is deeply determined by their general visions of what is real and what is not. It is worth noting once again that biblical literalists are not the only ones who cannot make room for evolution in their religious thinking. Evolutionary materialism’s picture of things has attained its intellectual appeal only at the price of abstracting from the concrete actuality of nature in process. An alternative view of reality, one more commensurate with the evidence provided by evolutionary novelty, is a metaphysics that gives priority to the future rather than to the past or the present. The Taoist intuition is that nature is informationally shaped by the noninterfering effectiveness of-ultimate reality.
