Abstract

In this essay, a Jewish thinker argues that the world as depicted by science forms a single system: each part is related to all because all are related to a single knower; this single system constitutes a whole which has priority over its parts because it conditions or delimits their behavior. This totality is the unchanging source of all processes, all making actual what had been merely possible. This totality Kohn attempts to define as God, and, taking it for granted that science depicts the universe as undergoing continuous evolution on the whole and within its parts, he attempts to show how such evolution reveals, in the human perspective, that God is creativity. He distinguishes three "levels of being" produced in the course of the cosmic evolution--inorganic matter, sensitivity, conscience--but denies that the arising of any one of these phases involves the super-addition of something new to the preceding ones. He argues that this notion of God answers all religious requirements, and concludes with a warning and a plea regarding the possibility of future evolution in the light of man's ability to exercise conscious control over events.--K. P. F.