The Self-Creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview

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The Self-Creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview - J.J. Clarke - Google Книги

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Your Mobile number has been verified! In the course of his lifetime Darwin was torn between two ways of making sense of this creative exuberance. In his early days he viewed the world as reflecting divine grandeur, as a great cosmic harmony created by God. Later, and rather reluctantly, he came to see the creative power of nature as something which is simply inherent in nature itself, an extraordinary product of the natural order of things.

God or Nature Caught between these two visions, his personal dilemma stood at an historic turning point. Traditional thought, in the West at any rate, has tended to see the order and beauty of the world as a product and mirror of something much higher, the divine Pantocrator, from whom nature draws its harmony and its grandeur. So, is it God or nature that is causa sui? My inclination is towards the latter and what I would call a naturalist presumption, an approach which limits its outlook, its values and its meaning to the natural world of which we human beings are an integral part.

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I contrast this with an eternalist presumption which typically locates the source of values and its meaning beyond nature, beyond the world we can experience. This latter view is epitomised in the Platonic belief that this natural world is but an imperfect shadow, an illusory reflection, of an eternal, perfect, spiritual world beyond. I doubt if either of these presumptions can be transformed into a completely impregnable theory or worldview, but I believe that naturalism offers conspicuous advantages over eternalism, not only in theoretical terms but in relation to the search for that which makes life valuable and meaningful.

The naturalist presumption I advocate is not new for it stems from a variety of historical traditions, but it has acquired fresh life in recent times and is nowadays attracting increasing attention in the sciences, the humanities and beyond. It is especially relevant, I believe, in times of economic crises, social upheaval and intellectual uncertainty. There are of course various forms of naturalism, some modern versions stemming from the scientific revolution, advocating a materialist approach in which nature in all its complexity and beauty is reduced to matter in motion, and the whole thing likened to a great machine.

But it does not have to be like that. In recent times a new, richer, and altogether more inspiring form of naturalism has come into focus, arising in part from the revival of holistic thinking, and springing from developments across the whole intellectual spectrum. It is called emergenism. This is not a very attractive word. It is none-the-less a very beautiful idea, complex, protean, serendipitous. Responding to the rise of Darwinism, in its early usage it was deployed to find a special place for the evolution of life and mind, one which might succeed in holding back the rising tide of mechanism and reductionism.

The term was especially popular in the early years of the last century among philosophers such as C.

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Broad and Samuel Alexander, and zoologists such as C. Lloyd Morgan, as well as Henri Bergson who was an important influence with his idea of creative evolution. In more recent times the term has taken on a wider compass, largely as a result of exciting new speculations and discoveries in the sciences. Its particular influence has been in relation to attempts to understanding complex self-organising phenomena ranging across a variety of fields from physics and biology to economics and psychology.

In the view of some commentators such as Paul Davies and Erich Jantsch it has evolved into what can be described as a new paradigm, or even a new worldview, one which not only addresses scientific problems, but opens up new approaches to some of the most pressing philosophical questions of value and meaning. Most recently Stuart Kauffman from the Santa Fe Institute, a speaker at a recent SMN conference, has become a leading spokesperson for this development.

The quotation above from Darwin sums it up succinctly: The question at the back of this remark is: How is it that out of the simple emerges the complex, whether it be molecules, viruses, plants, animals, the human brain, the conscious mind, human society, or the works of science and literature?

The Self-Creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview by J. J. Clarke - Paperback

How are such wonders created? It is of course the old question going back to the ancient Greeks: Emergentism provides the framework of an answer to this question. This framework, which has itself emerged from various traditions, Eastern as well as Western, has arisen out of attempts to understand a whole range of complex systems, natural, social, psychological, in terms which go beyond the entrenched reductionist paradigm.

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