This paper is a response read at a joint session of the Polanyi Society and the Religion and Science Group at the AAR Annual Meeting in Denver, November 16, 2001. Though a paradigm example of the conversation between systematic theology and contemporary science, Philip Clayton’s God and Contemporary Science is questioned for taking the natural sciences too seriously: it endangers the autonomy of theology and by implicitly advocating a grand metaphysics, it creates an unbridgeable gap with ordinary religious meaning, and in regard to some theological doctrines, with science as well.

Ikujiro Nonaka, whose formative experience is Japanese, is an established scholar who has written about large business organizations. He sees knowledge at the heart of the organization and its products and aims to develop Michael Polanyi’s conception of tacit knowledge in a practical direction to enhance organizational “knowledge creation.” For Nonaka, what matters is the practice, the doing, the embodiment of knowledge. An organization can amplify and crystallize individuals’ tacit knowledge in a process that allows them to experience deeper understanding . Nonaka holds that it is iimportant to explore the potential that knowledge holds. His spiral process describes disciplined practices that make tacit knowledge independent and available to restructure the organizational knowledge context.

In this paper I argue that there are good reasons for not reading the last part of Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge (1958) as the outline of a finalistic metaphysics, as proposed recently by Haught and Yeager, but rather as a modest speculative attempt to fulfill the requirements of a Gifford Lecturer, namely to treat of the relation between God and the world. Apart from the background of the writing of the book, I suggest that the predicament of theism in the contemporary antimetaphysical climate and Polanyi’s emphasis onreligious practice, rather than metaphysical theorizing, as the locus of meaning in his other writings on religion, support this reading as well.