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If this reasoning is sound, the metaphysics implied by the radical monotheism of the Jewish and Christian religions must be in one important sense monistic. Although these religions are pluralistic in the sense that they clearly imply that there is more than one ultimate subject of predication, there being a fundamental distinction between the one God who is the primal source and final end of the world and the many other individuals and events that together comprise the world, they are at the same time monistic in implication, in that there cannot be more than one ultimate or irreducible kind of such ultimate subjects of predication. For if any such subject were of an absolutely different kind from any other, it would also be absolutely different from God and, therefore, absolutely different from being itself, and so, self-contradictorily, nothing at all.

Wiki MarkupThis means, on the one hand, that the Jewish and Christian religions have never had any good reason to try to express their witness to the one and only God through the kind of dualistic metaphysics that allows for an absolute difference in kind between history and nature, mind and matter. As often as they may have allied themselves with such dualism, they have done so only by implicitly contradicting the belief in God that they thereby sought to express. On the other hand, this conclusion means that Judaism and Christianity, at least, have every reason to welcome the kind of comprehensive scientific generalization, "the evolutionary vision," as Kenneth Boulding has called it, for which, rightly or wrongly, Professor Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures and other related developments in nonequilibrium or irreversible thermodynamics have been taken to provide the basis and the paradigm (Jantsch \ [ed.\]: xv f.).

This is all the more so because, on the comprehensive scientific understanding provided by this evolutionary vision all natural things at all .levels of emergent self-organization are conceived to be, in their different ways, "open systems," related to and dependent upon an environment of other things--whether equals on the same level of emergence or also inferiors and/or superiors on other lower or higher emergent levels. Thus things at all levels of nature image or embody in their respectively different ways the universal interaction of God, conceived as universally.  related to and dependent upon all things even as they are all universally related to and dependent upon God and one another.

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