I am going to try to address the question that Father Thomas Davenport reminded me I was supposed to address.

I have to admit the way that I think Father Nickenor's talk went where at the end he was setting up for a conversation about, you know, how do we make sense of the emergence of novel forms?

What's the picture with, you know, agent causality on a tomistic account?

That's a lot of what I was interested in and thinking about, you know, it's that consequence

of recognizing all of this evidence for a historical developmental cosmos.

And then, okay, how do you square that

with Aristotelian and Timistic metaphysical and natural philosophical principles? I will try to

actually address the question that he had in mind along the way, though, because it is a very

important question. I was going to begin with a sort of another, you know, defense of the

importance of and helpfulness of engagement between Aristotelian and Thomistic Natural

Philosophy and the findings of contemporary science. I can do that again during the Q&A.

Hopefully the exercise of the talk manages to be a sort of defense.

I think there's already been a wonderful defense and demonstration of the value of this sort of

conversation in all of the presentations that we've had in this workshop. So I am going to just

jump in from where we left off from the sessions this morning.

We have heard in the sessions this morning a general overview of central points of the best

present consensus among cosmologists and biologists of the history of our universe

and of the evolution of life on our planet. And even presenting from the details of their presentations,

the scientific work of the past century has uncovered very strong evidence

in favor of the thesis that in many respects,

the natural order that we observe today is different

from the natural order of the past, thinking about the notion

...