choice is compatible with foreknowledge of what the choice
will be, let alone compatible with the necessary fulfillment
of the omnipotent God’s will. Their theistic opponents,
however, urge that the creation of free persons should not
be interpreted as curtailing either God’s power or his knowl-
edge in any way that would limit his control of all there is
and will be. They argue that we should not impose on the
perfect, timeless Person the conditions of temporal succes-
sion to which finite persons are limited in knowing. They
suggest that something like human intuitive knowing “all at
once,” which differs markedly from discursive inference
“from one meaning to the other,” provides a more helpful
clue to God’s knowing.
It is plain that the self-existent Creator, whose immuta-
ble transcendence is contemporaneous with his immanence
in the temporal world, leaves theists with theoretical ten-
sions. But they find these tensions more acceptable than the
identification of all that exists with the One.
TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT. In advancing the concept of the
contemporaneous cause as Creator-Person, the theist implies
his conviction that causal order is best understood in terms
of some goal. Such teleological thinking examines composite
things and series of events that strongly suggest design,
namely, the cooperation of parts that produce one kind of
goal and not another. The spring of a watch is best under-
stood in terms of its relation to the other parts that, along
with it, effect the purpose of the watch. So, also, although
every animate cell has its own order, understanding of that
cell is increased once its contribution to the orderly function
of the whole organism is specified.
Accordingly, the teleological argument for God does
not arbitrarily add purposeful goal seeking to nonpurposive
causes. It centers attention on the designs that can be reason-
ably inferred as causal patterns when they are viewed in the
context of unifying goals. For theists moving from cosmolog-
ical considerations to teleological understanding, the con-
trolling conviction is that the physical, the organic, and the
human orders are most reasonably understood as fitting to-
gether within the comprehensive purpose of the Creator.
Moreover, teleological theists hold that the inanimate and
subhuman orders are so created as to provide for the good
of persons, persons who can and should realize that they live
in God’s world, a training ground for the life to come.
Insofar as theists expound and defend a teleological ar-
gument that calls to mind a Creator-Architect-Carpenter
who provides the specific physical environment for specific
biological species and who does so to suit the created endow-
ments of persons, they continue to encounter strong opposi-
tion from scholars who draw on scientific data to support
their conviction that no such planned creation and no such
Creator is tenable. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
(1859) spurred on the explanation of present organic struc-
tures as consequences of gradual modifications that favored
the survival of the fittest. Other scientific discoveries relevant
to the theory of evolution and scientific and philosophical
interpretations of pertinent new data have enlarged the area
of confrontation between teleologist and nonteleologist.
The teleological theist argues, however, that, even grant-
ing explanation of evolution in terms of the survival of the
fittest, it is the arrival of the fit that still calls for teleological
explanation. Nonetheless, the Darwinian theory of evolution
led many theists to emphasize the demands of moral con-
sciousness and religious consciousness as independent
sources of belief in God.
WIDER TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT. All the more significant
is the comprehensive rethinking of teleological theism that
has produced a “wider teleological argument,” a position that
has developed systematically in the context of historical
philosophic issues. The outstanding statement of this posi-
tion is in the two volumes of Philosophical Theology (1928–
1930) by Frederick R. Tennant. Tennant defends the irre-
ducible unity of the person and explores the cognitive limits
of knowledge based on a person’s sensory and nonsensory ca-
pacities; he concludes that no dimension of personal experi-
ence can arrive at logically coercive beliefs.
Tennant does not assume that a nonteleological view of
the universe is already established. Nor is our world, as
known, more reasonably explained as the product of ulti-
mate, random variations or chance happenings. Rather, such
knowledge as we guide ourselves by is the joint product of
continuing human interaction with an amenable framework
of things. Accordingly, to postulate planning in the ultimate
collocation of things is to understand better what the human
search for truth and values presupposes, namely, the basic
relevance of cognitive activities to the order of things. Thus,
“If Nature evinces wisdom, the wisdom is Another’s” (Ten-
nant, 1930, p. 107).
This wider teleology is articulated when Tennant points
out that the nonbiological, physical order does not itself re-
quire either the existence or the progressive evolution of spe-
cies. Yet, the drift of subhuman evolution allows for the ar-
rival of the new order of conscious-self-conscious persons, for
whom “survival of the fittest” does not adequately account.
Persons, in turn, cannot exist unless their comprehensive rea-
soning with regard to the other orders guides their moral ef-
forts to improve the quality of their individual and commu-
nal survival.
Tennant does not exclude the inspirational value of reli-
gious experiences from the chain of evidence for the Creator-
Person. But, in his analysis of the varieties of religious experi-
ence, he does not find the immediate, uninterpreted knowl-
edge of God to warrant the conclusion that religious
experience should be independent of criticism grounded in
the rational and moral dimensions of experience. Religious
experience with all its suggestiveness is not given cognitive
priority, but it does serve as an important confirmatory link
in the chain of evidence, reasonably interpreted.
All in all, then, the claims to reasonably probable knowl-
edge are the more reliable insofar as they can be viewed asTHEISM 9105