ecessary series of accidental changes, to become living, growing, sentient, and intelligent beings. This suggests that there is no real and unbridgeable difference between the living and the non-living, the sentient and the non-sentient, the intelligent and the non-intelligent. They are all simply different forms of the same thing and reductively are on the same level because there is only one level. That may not be a theory of a flat earth, but it looks like a theory of a flat biological world.
The Rev. Francis Canavan, S.J., is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Fordham, and the author of several books, most recently The Pluralist Game.
© 1997 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved. April 1997, Volume LXIV, Number 3. Reprinted with permission of the New Oxford Review.