the singularity of being and nothingness
Posts tagged Peacocke
Peacocke Tuesday – Randomness and Causality
Oct 2nd
Over the last week, I have rolled through several chapters of Peacocke's book, "Theology for a Scientific Age," and I will not spend time going over the finer details of each discussion. I simply wish to note one of the issues that stood out most to me.
In a sort of continuous investigation, Peacocke looks at the nature of causality and its relation to the universe in which we live. Until the last century, it was generally assumed that causality was a one-way street, a sort of "top-down" movement with determinable and predicatable outcomes. What recent inquiry has revealed, especially in relation to quantum physics, however, is that causality is infinitely more complex than the old assumptions would leave one to believe. Because of the interconnectedness of the universe, the precise nexus of the "cause" of an "effect" becomes increasingly blurred as the lines between a "something" as cause and the same "something" as effect converge more closely upon one another.
So what does this mean? Far and away from the classic models of the universe which assumed that absolutely predicatability of naturalistic processes could be gained by a sufficient amount of data, this understanding of the interrelatedness of causality reveals More >
Peacocke Wednesday – Interconnected
Sep 12th
In the first chapter, "What is There," Peacocke examines the shift in metaphorical language about the nature of reality that has been necessitated by advances in understanding of the physical universe, most particularly the insights gleaned from quantum mechanics. While humans tend to think of space and time as isolated, irreducible "things" (e.g., this "lamp" and "my childhood"), the quantum world reveals not only an incessant fluxuation in the nature of space/time, but even more importantly a reducibility of all "things" as metaphors to their irreducible constituent elements. Rather than viewing ourselves and our actions as something that exists "in" space/time or "over-and-against" space/time, the quantum world reveals that who and what we are–in terms of reducibility–are themselves partakers of the fabric of space/time as opposed to alient substances existing therein.
One obvious conclusion of these observations is that it remains no longer possible to speak of reality (people, events, weather, solar systems, etc.) as a series of potentially related, yet closed "systems." No matter how small or seemingly significant something may be, its existence comes to bear on the whole of all else that exists–the butterfly in Cuba disturbing the air effects change in the weather patters in Los More >
