fully knowable and, therefore, understandable. The human observes nature, and then reflects on how best to understand it.Immanuel Kant (17241804) built further on such an understanding, placing God fully in the noumenal sphere, which is beyond the bounds of any contact with humankind. According to Kant ([1993] 2000:211), the noumenon is 'not an object of our sensible intuition'. In terms of such thinking, God is effectively taken out of nature and declared unknowable. In his three critiques, the Critique of pure reason, the Critique of practical reason and the Critique of judgment, Kant defines the boundaries of reason as forming the basis for ethics and judgement (Schroeder 2005:17). The Copernican revolution, which Kant brought about, regarded the source of understanding and coherence as being displaced from the object to the subject. According to Kant ([1993] 2000:59), '[t]ime and space are, therefore, two sources of knowledge, from which, a priori, various synthetical knowledge can be drawn.' All manifold appearances are arranged and viewed in terms of pure sensible intuition. What we can know of nature is, therefore, constrained by a priori human ideas and categories, which are capable of assimilating phenomena, but not the entire transcendental reality beyond them. An entity cannot be known in itself, but simply as it appears to us. Kant's approach saw as unbridgeable the gulf between nature and God. Such a gulf was seen to prevent humankind from being able to say anything meaningful about God. In this way, humankind became a non-participatory observer of nature.The metaphor of the 'two books', authored by the same Divine hand, has been universally known since Galileo. In terms of such thinking, two sources exist on which to rely when practising theology and understanding reality. Nature is read and interpreted, as is a text. The classical example of nature being read in this way is naturally the renowned work, titled The excellency of theology compared with natural theology, which was produced by Robert Boyle in 1674. The two books can, moreover, be read and appreciated independently of each other too. The danger is obvious: God is largely taken out of Creation, with the concept of God's Providence being undermined in process. Barth's aversion to a natural theology consisted of such thinking, in terms of which there was a disjunction between Creator and Creation, resulting in a deistic concept of God (Torrance 2001:8789).In conclusion, the Enlightenment upheld an epistemology that overvalued humankind as knowing subjects, ultimately declaring God to be in an 'inaccessible light'. However, Paley contributed to our shaping of a natural theology, in that nature would, henceforth, not represent only mountains, rivers and vegetation, but incontrovertibly also humankind. An ontology of nature that sets out what the world is, appears to be so significant that it allows for our responses to be determined thereby, rather than by personal likes and dislikes. Such an understanding is a sine qua non in any critical intellectual discourse (McGrath 2001:121). Ricoeur (Changeux & Ricoeur 2000:46, 65, 93) prefers to call the basis of such a transition from a semantic foundation to one that is ontological