ABSTRACT
The American philosopher W. T. Stace once remarked that “religion can get along with any sort of astronomy, geology, biology, physics.” Provine goes on to argue that ethics needs no religious grounding either. There is a way, of course, by which the people might avoid the whole issue of whether our moral passion requires the support of a purposeful universe. The cosmic breadth of Whitehead’s philosophy is hardly typical of modern theological reflection, much of which has been content to rescue human existence from what theologians have silently conceded to be an inherently pointless universe. The physicist Freeman Dyson suggests comparably that the universe is constructed according to what he calls the “principle of maximum diversity.”. Pre-evolutionary pictures of the cosmos could all too easily represent the physical universe as a deviation from, rather than as an exciting journey toward, the fullness of being.
