Hypothesis for this knowledge.

The analysis of these conditions is a philosophical and theological task. These presuppositions are of three kinds. 

• The first refers to the intelligibility or rationality of nature; it can be labeled as ontological and is closely related with the natural order. 

• The second refers to the human ability to know the natural order; it can be labeled as epistemological and includes the,different forms of scientific argument. 

• The third refers to the values implied by scientific activity itself; it can be labeled as ethical and includes the search for truth, rigor, objectivity, intellectual modesty, service to other people, cooperation, and related values. 

Scientific progress provides feedback on these presuppositions, because it retrojustifies, enriches, and refines them. Just as these presuppositions are necessary conditions for the existence of science, scientific progress is sufficient evidence of their existence and enables us to determine their scope.

Seen in the light of that feedback, the analysis of each of these presuppositions can provide a clue to the philosophical meaning of scientific progress and, therefore, to its theological relevance. This is the aim of my study, which is divided into four parts. In the first part, I consider which method should be

used to study the philosophical and theological implications of science; then I analyze these implications in the following parts, which deal, respectively, with the ontological implications of scientific progress and the corresponding image of divine action, the epistemological implications of scientific progress and

the corresponding image of man, and the ethical implications of scientific values. I conclude by examining the results of my study and the plausibility of the naturalistic and the theistic positions using criteria similar to those applied to evaluate scientific explanations. I also include some suggestions for further research.

My study should be considered a concrete proposal, centered on a particular perspective, which can be combined with many other approaches. The method I follow connects science and theology by means of a most interesting bridge, which belongs at the same time to science and to philosophy and theology. It belongs to science because the point of departure of my argument is the group of general presuppositions of science. But these presuppositions transcend the specific approaches used in the sciences, and thus their analysis is properly speaking a philosophical task. And this philosophical task in turn can serve to connect science and theology.

Contemporary science provides us with a marvelous worldview, which includes the very small and the very large, the living and the nonliving, the different branches of empirical science, the structural and dynamic features of nature, in a coherent and unitary whole centered on the concepts of selforganization. This worldview can be considered complete because it includes all levels of nature and their mutual relations. Nevertheless, every progressive step opens up new vistas and, with them, new, oftentimes, previously unsuspected problems. In this way scientific progress may serve to increase the sense of awe and admiration before the world and, above all, before its Creator. At

Mariano Artigas, The mind of Universe