"...In a Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking pointed his mental radio telescope at the remnants of the Big Bang, and what he saw was God. We don't want to point you in that direction.
A dynamic does not necessarily imply a purpose. Darwinian evolution has a dynamic, but organisms do not seek to evolve. The existence of attractors does not imply that dynamical systems are goal-seekers: on the contrary, they are goal-finders, which only recognize what the "goal"is when they have found it.
The fallacy of seeing God in the Big Bang is the leap of logic from "There is a dynamic in the universe that created us and makes us feel at home" to "The universe was set up in order to create us and make us feel at home". It may have been, but the discovery of a dynamic does not of itself imply any such thing.
However, as with the anthropic principle, it is tempting to derive a sense of purpose from a dynamic and see it as a spiritual frame that we must use. "We are here because we are meant to be here". Well, we may be and we may not. But because of the shared dynamic, we feel at home here-whether we are a goal or an accidental by-product- so the dynamic provides a spiritual frame that we find both comforting and awe-inspiring.
Romanticism alone is empty. Reductionism alone can provide a strong feeling of sympathy with the universe. We understand individual bits and pieces; we can kind of see how a tree works, how it gets its water into the topmost branches. But the shared dynamic goes much further: it creates a feeling of empathy with the universe. Put your cheek against a tree and feel the roughness of the bark against your skin."
'The Collapse of Chaos - Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World'
Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart
A dynamic does not necessarily imply a purpose. Darwinian evolution has a dynamic, but organisms do not seek to evolve. The existence of attractors does not imply that dynamical systems are goal-seekers: on the contrary, they are goal-finders, which only recognize what the "goal"is when they have found it.
The fallacy of seeing God in the Big Bang is the leap of logic from "There is a dynamic in the universe that created us and makes us feel at home" to "The universe was set up in order to create us and make us feel at home". It may have been, but the discovery of a dynamic does not of itself imply any such thing.
However, as with the anthropic principle, it is tempting to derive a sense of purpose from a dynamic and see it as a spiritual frame that we must use. "We are here because we are meant to be here". Well, we may be and we may not. But because of the shared dynamic, we feel at home here-whether we are a goal or an accidental by-product- so the dynamic provides a spiritual frame that we find both comforting and awe-inspiring.
Romanticism alone is empty. Reductionism alone can provide a strong feeling of sympathy with the universe. We understand individual bits and pieces; we can kind of see how a tree works, how it gets its water into the topmost branches. But the shared dynamic goes much further: it creates a feeling of empathy with the universe. Put your cheek against a tree and feel the roughness of the bark against your skin."
'The Collapse of Chaos - Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World'
Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart
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