154 struggling with the worldthese social and conceptual frameworks are not to be analogized to
things in nature: they are nothing but the petrifi ed remnants of our
practical and visionary contests. Yet all our faculties, including those
by virtue of which we create such structures, we possess as the outcome
of our natural history as natural beings.
In the present state of our knowledge, we lack any good account of
how the experience of consciousness could have emerged in a universe
to which it seems alien, or of how mind relates to brain. Nothing, how-
ever, is gained and much is lost by representing our ignorance as a tri-
umph of insight into the fundamental structure of reality and into its
divisions. What is lost is, fi rst, the consistency of our beliefs about dif-
ferent parts of the world and of our experience of it, and, second, the
ac cep tance of our natural state as the terrain in which we must exercise
even our highest spiritual powers, including the power to imagine the
proximate possible and to create the new.
Th e theological aspect of the argument about arbitrariness and
anti- naturalism is that the reifi cation of a par tic u lar view of our limits
and its restatement as an account of the workings of nature represent a
confession of our failure to develop an integrated view of the world
and of our place within it. Finding that we have two sets of ideas— one
about ourselves, the other about the great world beyond us— and that
they cannot be reconciled, we describe this failure as a success and
praise our own confusion as a discovery of two diff erent orders of real-
ity. When we do so, we impose an unnecessary restraint on our faculty
of transcendence: our ability to develop our powers, including our pow-
ers of discovery. We deliver ourselves to a voluntary servitude of the
intellect.
For the religious versions of the struggle with the world, as conveyed
by the Semitic mono the isms, the doctrine of the two regimes may at
fi rst seem to render a ser vice: to police the distinction between the
natural and the supernatural. Th ere is no such advantage. If we say that
there are two domains of reality rather than one, we simply double the
bet of supernaturalism. God’s saving intervention in the world then
disrupts two orders of reality: the natural and the human. For even by
the terms of the nominalist wave, the human order is not equivalent to
the miraculous workings of grace; it is simply the fi eld in which grace
most directly operates. It continues to have its own structure and rules.