theology was capable of renewal. Brunner's accusation against Barth that he allowed no 'conceptual space' for human beings' active involvement in the process of understanding nature appears to hold true. Barth's fear that theology would be dictated to by anthropology allowed him to overlook what might otherwise have become valuable insights. Although Barth inverted the roles that the Enlightenment allocated to God and humankind, to him human beings remained passive. However, both such theologians understood perception no matter how important it was considered to be as a mainly passive process, in terms of which the human subject was on the receiving end of Divine mercy. McGrath (2008:163) recognises the existence of such a shared perception and praises Brunner for elevating the status of human observation in his acknowledgment that human beings ontologically possess a particular Fahigkeit. To Barth, in contrast, human activity and involvement were merely incidental. THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENTIn his Discourse on method, Rene Descartes (15961650) reveals his conviction that individuals determine their own beliefs rationally, rather than automatically accepting the commonsensical or traditional. By rejecting conflicting metaphysical assumptions, Descartes prepared the way for the development of a new scientific approach to reality. Underlying the adoption of such an approach was his conviction that reality has a decidedly mathematical structure (Descartes 1912:xiv). Such a conviction served to reinforce the individualism that was expressed by the Reformation, by taking as its point of departure that the rational individual could arrive at the truth 'clearly and distinctly' by means of logical deduction. Descartes (1912:86) asserted that everything that is certain is the result of thinking: cogito ergo sum. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes sought certainty as the absolute foundation of knowledge. He asserted that nothing that can be doubted can be true, resulting in the res cogitans being the means of privileged access to real knowledge. By contrast, the body and the corporeal reality are known as the res extensa. Descartes is universally regarded as the father of mindbody dualism, as well as of phenomenareality dualism (Schroeder 2005:2). By conceiving of dualism in this way, he clearly detached the conscious observer from real-world experience, the latter of which he relegated to a subordinate position. According to Descartes (1912:123), to think of God is to think of God's existence, in just the same way as thinking of a triangle is to think of its three angles being equal to two right angles, or thinking of a mountain is to think of a valley.William Paley (17431805), once the archdeacon of Carlisle, gave his last, and most important, work the title of Natural theology. The work was written during the Napoleonic wars, while England was in the throes of an economic slump, which partly accounts for the evolution of his thought to the concept of the Goodness of the Deity. In his foreword he wrote that, although the work was to be his last, it should be read as a preface to his others (Paley 2006:4), as, in it, he presents his 'comprehensive design'. Charles Darwin, in reading the work, rediscovered