Posted on 01/01/2012 5:02:18 PM PST by grey_whiskers
Consider this:
"...let's turn to a passage in Heller's Creative Tension. He points out that recent developments in deterministic chaos theory have demonstrated that "there are strong reasons to believe that a certain amount of randomness is indispensable for the emergence and evolution of organized structures.... Randomness is no longer perceived as a competitor of God, but rather as a powerful tool in God's strategy of creating the world."
"He quotes the physicist Paul Davies, who wrote that,
"God is responsible for ordering the world, not through direct action, but by providing various potentialities which the physical universe is then free to actualize. In this way, God does not compromise the essential openness and indeterminism of the universe, but is nevertheless in a position to encourage a trend toward good. Traces of this subtle and indirect influence may be discerned in the progressive nature of biological evolution, for example, and the tendency for the universe to self-organize into a richer variety of ever more complex forms."
"In a similar vein, he quotes A. R. Peacocke: "On this view God acts to create the world through what we call 'chance' operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next."
"So the bottom line is that if your life were totally planned, it couldn't be. In other words, the more you attempt to tamp down randomness and chance, the more you are likely to create disorder. To put it another way, there is a higher principle at work, which uses randomness and chaos to break up evolutionary impasses and "lure" the system toward its own destiny, so to speak. We must surrender to this destiny, as each of us, to paraphrase Sri Aurobindo, is a "unique problem of God."
"Or you could say that "the answer is the disease that kills curiosity," or that twoness resolves the problem of oneness through the discovery and synthesis of eternal threeness, in which Love abides. ....."
You’re just like a liberal. It’s never what I said, it’s how I said it.
That's some conviction you have there. :)
"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" ~ Charles Darwin
It appears the mathematicians and physicists were invited to the table and once they began making observations from their own, much more rigorous, disciplines were often ignored or eschewed by many biologists, e.g. Pattee, Rocha, Rosen, Yockey.
Most notably in my view is the question "what is life v non-life/death in nature" which is rather fundamental to mathematicians and physicists looking at biological systems whereas to biologists, whose mission is to study life, there is almost no interest in anything beyond descriptions. Or to put it another way, the biologists seem to be content to know what life looks like and have no interest in what life "is."
Thank you so very much for your engaging essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!
LOLOL!
She’s fond of the fallacy of the undistributed middle, also.
"Unpredictable" is the accurate term for what science currently deems as "random."
And truly, I'd rather believe that scientists misappropriate words from mathematics because they do not understand the discipline than to think they are intentionally misrepresenting their observations.
Heller, I think, makes a good point, if in the process, he isn’t conflating “random” and “chance.”
”Planned chaos,” it’s sometimes called. I’m not sure that’s a useful idea. Heller’s idea, I think, is.
Quite so. True, I think, of Materialists generally.
True, I think. Not so true, perhaps, of others, Materialists generally, with an agenda to push.
You're welcome. I agree.
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