Table of Contents

• • Acknowledgements     ix
  • Introduction     x
• Part I Biology
  • 1     The decline of purposive explanations     3
  • Purpose in physics and biology     3
  • Paley and Darwin     6
  • Biological functions     10
  • Functions and accidents     15
  • The teleological imagination     18
  • Beyond tautology     22
  • The quest for the wholly real     23
  • 2     Biology and metaphysics     25
  • Presuppositions     25
  • Drawing teeth and blunting claws     30
  • For reality     36
  • 3     The stuff we are made of     47
  • Behind appearances     47
  • Atoms and their qualities     51
  • Levels of discourse and levels of reality     53
  • Ontological levels     57
  • Polanyi's notion of levels     60
  • The contradiction in the notion of levels     64
  • Tensions     67
• Part II Problems
  • 4     Reductionism or Darwinism     71
  • Ungrateful Offspring     71
  • Trouble in mind     74
  • 5     Biology and knowledge     75
  • Perception and survival     75
  • Darwinism and scepticism      79
  • 6     Consciousness and its objects     94
  • Metaphysics again     94
  • The argument developed     96
  • The sensitive mind     102
  • Perception as belief      106
  • The perceiving self     112
• Part III Natural Theology
  • 7     Biology and cosmology     117
  • 'The fitness of the environment'     117
  • Anthropic answers     120
  • The joker in the pack     122
  • 8     From world to God     124
  • Design     124
  • An embodied god?     125
  • Equivocation as analogy     130
  • God willing     135
  • 9     And back again     141
  • The world willed     141
  • Much ado out of nothing     146
  • Science and theism     152
  • The empirical content of theism     153
  • Deism and the notion of 'the world'     154
  • The agony of the world     162
  • 
    Notes     165
  • Bibliography     170
  • Index     177