Notes

1. . This is essentially what is done by Schubert Ogden in The Reality of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). In this kind of thinking, the reality of God becomes the most basic assumption of that field of life or culture called religion. Hence, theism functions much as does “event” for some scientists or “obligation” for some ethicists.
2. . Michael Polanyi addresses this question cogently in The Study of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). He here argues that there is no discontinuity between the study of nature and the study of man.
3. . Lynn White, Jr., Machina ex Deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968), p. 49.
4. . Note Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Human Values in an Evolving World,” in Human Values and Advancing Technology, comp. Cameron P. Hall (New York: Friendship Press, 1967), pp. 49–67.
5. . See Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man, the Myth and the Reality (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1969): PhilipHefner, “The Relocation of the God‐Question,” Lutheran Quarterly  21 (1969): 329–41 (a revised version is in Zygon  5 [1970]: 5–17); and PaulL. Holmer, “Evolution and Being Faithful,” Christian Century  , November 22, 1967, pp. 1491–94.
6. . For further elaboration, see Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan Co., 1967). On p. 94, he says: “The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices.” On p. 96, he'says: “The concept of matrices with fixed codes and adaptable strategies, proposed as a unifying formula, appears to be equally applicable to perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills and to the psychological structures variously called ‘frames of reference,’‘associative contexts,’‘universes of discourse,’‘mental sets,’ or ‘schemata,’ etc.” The “code” operative in Koestler's understanding of a matrix is not unlike the tacit component of knowledge as Michael Polanyi conceives it. Hence, the same pair of matrices can produce a number of results. Note on p. 45: “When two independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact with each other, the result… is either a collision ending in laughter, or their fusionin a new intellectual synthesis, or their confrontation in an aesthetic experience. The bisociative patterns found in any domain of creative activity are trivalent; that is to say, the same pair of matrices can produce comic, tragic, or intellectually challenging effects.”
7. . Note the words in Joni Mitchell's song “Big Yellow Taxi” (quoted here by permission of Siquomb Publishing Co.): They paved paradise, put up a parking lot with a pink hotel and boutique and a swinging hot spot. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got ‘till it’ gone.
8. . Joseph Sittler's The Ecology of Faith (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961) uses the term “ecology” as a symbol or analogue for the organic shape of the biblical message which is to be preached.
9. . Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. vii.
10. . Ibid., p. 53.
11. . Polanyi writes: “The most pregnant carriers of meaning are of course the words of a language, and it is interesting to recall that when we use words in speech or writing we are aware of them only in a subsidiary manner” (ibid., p. 57). And on p. 59: “Hammers and probes can be replaced by intellectual tools; think of any interpretative framework and particularly of the formalism of the exact sciences. I am not speaking of the specific assertions which underlie the method by which these assertions are arrived at. We assimilate most of these pre‐suppositions by learning to speak of things in a certain language, in which there are names for various kinds of objects, names by which objects can be classified, making sure distinctions as between past and present, living and dead, healthy and sick, and thousands of others.”
12. . Ibid., p. 61.
13. . Ibid. See esp. p. 82.
14. . Ibid., p. 106.
15. . Note the following observations by PaulL. Holmer in “Polanyi and Being Reasonable,” Soundings  53 (Spring 1970): 95–109. On p. 104, he writes: “… his way of describing human intelligence at work has a heartiness about it, an infectious zest and spirit, that appeals very much to literate people. He really does rekindle hope. He does it by breaking up that cluster of argument and mood, precept and feeling, that sense of frustration, that grips so many intellectuals. For either you are scientific and then are doomed to speak in artifices about things you do not really care about (especially if you are an economist, a psychologist, a theologian), or you are unscientific and out of the main stream, cognitively at least, but terribly ‘in’ with the masses of men. Such blocs of conviction and mood are wrong; and the net effect of Polanyi's work, organic chemist turned social theorist turned philosophic guide, is not to argue away but to erode away by the sheer weight of examples such constellations. In a peculiar way, Polanyi is a social force, getting intellectual people to take their bearings again. So if this is the way the intellect is, one can take hope after all!“It is another question, it seems to me, whether or not Polanyi's peculiar kind of epistemological theory is really a substitute for a technical positivistic theory…. What was wrong with positivism was not a mistake in its theory, e.g., a too great stress upon exactness, or a too Laplacean kind of schematizing: it was that there was a theory at all…. There is something equally odd about knowing something and then knowing about the knowing…. To lump that wide variety of rules and that sense for what matters under a theory, must have been one of the reasons why epistemology went the way of metaphysics and so much of the rest of pretentious philosophy.” And on pp. 105–6: “…‘knowledge’ [is] so many things that a single theory will not grasp it at all. When the range of cases is made large enough, it seems to me that one absurdities. One absurdity is that of forcing all kinds of knowing into a kind of positivist scheme of exactness and logically precise forms; the other absurdity is having to see all the instances of objectivity as if they really are disguised instances of tacit knowing and odd commitments. My suspicion is that Polanyi pushes too hard to get everyone into the positivist camp, where explicitness is the rule, and then argues the other extreme, namely, that implicit knowing must really obtain in all instances. “… Polanyi recites a lot of cases, but always with his alternative theory in mind; and his theory, though it apparently comforts the intellectually lost, is in a genre that ought not to be.” Polanyi is still the metaphysician. We can move with him only so far. He certainly lessens the grip of positivism… but is then quietly gripped by a new ideology. His language reveals that he feels he has captured the form of the “tacit,”“subsidiary,”“commitment” elements in his epistemology. In doing so he violates such words. He plays a metaphysical game.
16. . Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 143.
17. . See Lawrence Kubie, Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958).
18. . Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 264.
19. . AldousHuxley, “The Ecological Problem,” in “Selections from Ten Years of Center Dialogue,” Center Magazine  (2 September 1969): 28.
20. . GeraldSykes, “The New Salvation,” in “Selections from Ten Years of Center Dialogue,” Center Magazine  2 (September 1969): 27.
21. . Koestler, p. 178.
22. . White, p. 79.
23. . Ibid., p. 102.
24. . Ibid., p. 105. Note also the following on p. 129: “We have been pondering an abstraction, the act of technical innovation. It is quite possible that there is no such thing to ponder. The analysis of the nature of creativity is one of the chief intellectual commitments of our age. Just as the old unitary concept of ‘intelligence’ is giving way to the notion that the individual's mental capacity consists of a large cluster of various and varying factors mutually affecting each other, so ‘creativity’ may well be a lot of things and not one thing.”
25. . Note Bernhard Erling's “Theology as Art and Science,” Journal of Religion  47 (1967): 240.
26. . White, pp. 54–55.
27. . A rough translation of the pregnant Russian word sobornost.
28. . Nicholas Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963), p. 285. For a more thorough discussion of the potential significance of the Russian religious tradition for contemporary theology in an ecological matrix, see Daniel F. Martensen's “Eastern Orthodoxy and the Secular,” in Christian Hope mid the Secular, ed. Daniel F. Martensen (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Press, 1969), pp. 55–77.