Oh, I can't wait to see what THIS implies to you. :)
"..."It is only in human understanding that the cosmos becomes a universe in the full sense."
"The really strange thing, as Aquinas observed, is that "the perfection of the entire universe can exist in one of its parts."
"That would be us.
"It is only in human understanding that the cosmos becomes a universe in the full sense." In other words, the "end" of the causal chain cannot be found in the endless horizontal iterations of abstract matter, but in our concrete vertical understanding. Which is another way of saying in truth, specifically, the truth of being.
"... it is only our understanding of the cosmos that makes it possible. For if we couldn't understand it, surely we wouldn't be here. The ultimate cause of the cosmos is its truth, a truth we may know and renew in the timeless ground of the intellect. So when I say that "I caused the universe," I am not really making any special claim for myself. Now and again I do it all the timeless. "
Thank you so much, dear Matchett-PI, for the outstanding link!
RE: LogicWing's reading that Dr. Godwin is saying that "we (or science) have no right to use the concept [universe]." I don't hear him saying that at all. Obviously scientists do use such terms as "universe," "big bang," "genetic program," "life." All "Gagdad Bob" is saying is that they really don't understand what these concepts mean. Or to put it another way, they see the "what," but not the "why."
I think Godwin is right: "the 'end' [i.e., purpose, goal, or limit which, in Aristotelian terms is final cause — the mere mention of which gives many scientists fits these days] of the causal chain cannot be found in the endless horizontal iterations of abstract matter, but in our concrete vertical understanding." If one denies the existence of the vertical extension, as materialists usually do, then understanding actually becomes impossible. For it seems to me that the vertical extension is the province of the subject, or self; the horizontal the province of material objects that are accessible to direct observation (and subsequent reflection) by the thinking subject, who lives in the vertical extension.
It is fascinating to me that Aquinas anticipated a currently raging "debate" in science regarding the relations of parts and wholes in organic systems: "'The really strange thing,' as Aquinas observed, is that 'the perfection of the entire universe can exist in one of its parts.'" What on earth could he mean by this?
In classical (i.e., Newtonian) physics, organic — living — systems are essentially viewed as mechanisms. As whole systems they can be understood, like any other machine, as a simple sum of their parts.
The only problem with that is, as Bohr discovered, "a scientific analysis of parts cannot disclose the actual character of a living organism because that organism exists only in relation to the whole of biological life."
What [Bohr] did not anticipate, however, is that the whole that is a living organism appears to exist in some sense within the parts, and that more complex life forms evolved in a process in which synergy and cooperation between parts (organisms) resulted in new wholes (more complex organisms) with emergent properties that did not exist in the collection of parts. More remarkable, this new understanding of the relation between part and whole in biology seems very analogous to that disclosed by the discovery of nonlocality in physics. — Menas Kafatos/Robert Nadeau, The Non-local Universe, p. 107There seems to be a challenge to Darwin's theory in these remarks. As Kafatos/Nadeau note, "Darwin's understanding of the relations between part and whole was essentially classical and mechanistic." As Darwin put it in The Origin of Species,
There must be in every case a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life." [I.e., the environment]Which of course does not explain cases where the relationship between individual organisms ("parts") "is often characterized by continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence."
A chimera like the hermit crab — a composite, "whole" creature involving "parts" from three different phyla — seems not to be a good candidate for standard Darwinian explication....
...the atomized individual organisms in Darwin's biological machine resemble classical atoms and ... the force that drives the interactions of the atomized parts, the "struggle for life," resembles Newton's force of universal gravity. Although Darwin parted company with classical determinism in the claim that changes, or mutations, within organisms occurred randomly, his view of the relationship between part and whole was essentially mechanistic. [Ibid., p. 109)As Kafatos/Nadeau summarize the implications:
What is more interesting for our purposes is the prospect that the whole of biological life is, in some sense, present in all the parts. For example, the old view of evolution as a linear progression from lower atomized organisms to more complex atomized organisms no longer seems appropriate. The more appropriate view could be that all organisms (parts) are emergent aspects of the self-organizing process of life (whole), and that the proper way to understand the parts is to examine their embedded relations to the whole. — Ibid.]But of course, St. Thomas Aquinas was saying much more than that. He was evidently referring to a particular "part," Man, in his observation that "the perfection of the entire universe can exist in one of its parts." Indeed, that very "part" which was created Imago Dei. But to "go there" would probably take us beyond the scope of the present discussion....
So, to wrap up for now: It seems to me (FWIW) that Darwinian evolutionary–biological "mechanics" cannot be a full, complete, truthful explication of the evolution of species, let alone of the universal phenomenon of Life. The reason being that it confines its scope to a linear, time-irreversible ("horizontal") sequence of cause-and-effect relations which, by the way, have no beginning in time, thus no possible foreseeable end, nor any intelligible "in-between." That is, in this worldview, there is no First nor Final Cause — apperceptions of which are only accessible along the "vertical extension" of self-reflective consciousness.
Thank you so very much, dear Matchett-PI, for your outstanding post!