I am perhaps misreading what you wrote, but if I understand you think your friend is on to something.......If I understand your earlier statement in this post it describes a pantheistic universe...."all is one".....certainly not a Christian worldview. If I misread...please clarify for me. Thank you.
You are very perceptive, dear Texas Songwriter! My friend is not a Christian, and he seems to be engaging what appear to be pantheistic ideas. He and I have been to-and-froing for a long time now (to our mutual enjoyment) on the problem of the origin of the universe, and ultimately such conversations take on a religious character.
What I gather is that he would prefer not to grapple with the origin problem; thus he's effectively on the "eternal universe" model, which is consistent with pantheism. Yet he doesn't regard himself as a pantheist.
Like many physicists who do not want to take on the origin problem, he finds a certain intellectual refuge in Eastern cosmology (source of the "eternal universe" model). This sort of thing goes back to Schrödinger at least.
But it seems to me that Atilla's cosmology, premised in three great fundamental principles of nature — the physical, biological, and psychological — and which stresses the lawful behavior of the universe, has no way to explain or account for "principled" or "lawful" behavior absent an explanation of origin. Only the Judeo-Christian tradition is explicit about this.
In Aristotelian language, logically there must be a first uncaused cause. Otherwise what one has is a situation of infinite regression in which there is never any basis for a principle or law to arise. When a mathematician sees that his equation is generating a situation of infinite regress, the alarm bells go off that there's something wrong with his equation! An infinite regression is ultimately unthinkable, and is "unconstructable in physics."
I suspect this is what Voltaire — whom Balint Vazsonyi identified as the man "endowed with the clearest and most incisive mind of his age" — meant by his terse observation, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to create Him." [see Vazsonyi, America's 30 Years War: Who Is Winning?]
Unfortunately, I have not yet succeeded in conveying this, to me, utterly indispensable understanding to my friend. Still I believe that, in the end, all scientific reasoning is rooted in the Logos whether people recognize this fact or not.
For how can logic, or reason, or mathematics arise from a situation of infinite regress? This is the BIG PROBLEM.
But I'll keep working on my friend! In the meanwhile, I am attracted to his model, even though he does not yet acknowledge that it ultimately rests on something he does not yet have the ability to recognize. (That's the part I'm "working on." :^) )
In any case, it is very clear to me that the Creation of heaven and earth constitutes a single universal system which is spatially and temporally distinct from its Creator God. It is still "one system" for all of that — and it is lawful and orderly. That cannot be "accidental," or the result of an infinite random development.
Or so it seems to me. I don't think my belief violates what God has conveyed to us in the Book of Genesis....
I hope the foregoing makes sense, dear brother in Christ. I think this is an issue that's a tad difficult to grasp, at least the first time one hears it. I know I've struggled with it for a long time by now.
Thank you so much for writing!