Deism: This is usually taken today to imply belief in the concept of a Supreme Being who, having created the universe, then lets it proceed according to its inbuilt, created laws and capacities. More particularly and historically it has involved ‘The belief that God exists but has not revealed himself except in the normal courses of nature and history’ (The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (FDMT), ed. A. Bullock and O. Stallybrass (London: Fontana, 1977). This understanding of ‘God’ strongly emphasises God’s transcendence and scarcely attributes any immanence to God’s activity in the world.
Dissipative systems and structures: A dissipative system is one that is open to exchange of matter and energy with the external surroundings and has the capacity at a certain critical point of developing a new structure, a new molecular order, ‘that basically corresponds to a giant fluctuation stabilized by the exchange of energy with the outside world’ (I. Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco: Freeman, 1980), p. 90). In general such behaviour depends on the systems being open, a long way from equilibrium and non-linear in certain essential relationships between fluxes and forces (see A.R. Peacocke, An Introduction to the Physical Chemistry of Biological Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983, chs 2, 4). They can then self-organise into large-scale temporal and spatial patterns in spite of random motions of their constituent units. Such systems are not confined to purely physical and chemical ones; their essential features can occur also in economic and geographical (urbanisation) patterns (I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London: Heinemann, 1984).
Epistemology: ‘The philosophical theory of knowledge, which seeks to define it, distinguish its principal varieties, identify its sources, and establish its limits’ (FDMT).
Immanence: Divine immanence is ‘the omnipresence of God in His universe’ (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd edn, ed. F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 693). Etymologically, ‘immanent’ means ‘in-dwelling, inherent; actually present or abiding in’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), so theologically it carries the sense of an abiding and indwelling presence of God in the universe. It is to be contrasted with ‘transcendent’.
Naturalism: Those types of philosophy ‘which assert that the world can best be accounted for by means of the categories of natural science (including biology and psychology) without recourse to the supernatural or transcendent as a means of explanation’ (A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. A. Richardson and J. Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1983). ‘A view of the world, and of man’s relation to it, in which only the operation of natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces is assumed (1750)’ (SOED). A theistic naturalism is expounded in the present work (Chapter 8 and passim) according to which natural processes, characterised by the laws and regularities discovered by the natural sciences, are themselves actions of the God who continuously gives them existence.
Ontology: ‘The theory of existence or, more narrowly, of what really exists, as opposed to that which appears to exist but does not ... The ontology of a theory or body of assertions is the set of things to which that theory ascribes existence by referring to them in a way that cannot be eliminated or analysed out’ (FDMT). It is ‘The science or study of being: that department of metaphysics which relates to the being or essence of things, or to being in the abstract’ (SOED).
Panentheism: ‘The belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but (as against Pantheism) that His Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe’. Pantheism is ‘The belief or theory that God and the universe are identical’ (both definitions from The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church).
Transcendent: Theologically, ‘Of the Deity: In His being, exalted above and distinct from the universe’ (SOED). The term stresses the ultimate ‘otherness’ of God’s nature in relation to all else. More generally, ‘to transcend’ means ‘to pass over or go/extend beyond either a physical or a non-physical limit’ (SOED).
Wave function: In quantum theory, a mathematical expression, of the form used to depict waves, which represents the probabilities of a given system being in a certain state at various times. Before a measurement, the state of a system, according to quantum theory, is represented by a superposition of wave functions which collapse into one after the measurement – which one is governed only by probability and is, to that extent, unpredictable.