2007

Both Nature and God take plurals poorly, only provisionally or penultimately, with a certain logical and experiential drive toward the singular. In earlier times, persons have often believed in multiple gods, of course; but "gods" shifts to the lower case and changes its meaning. Further, such beliefs have tended to be replaced by monist or monotheistic creeds. The spirits are but fractured omnipresence. There can be but one God, at most. Likewise, there are natures in local things-the weasel has one nature, the oak another. Granite is hard, while water flows. By this we refer to the distinguishing characteristics of phenomenal entities. But we can recognize and enjoy these natures and still find, as science does, that lawlike operations govern the whole. There are fundamental constituents, origins, kinships, patterns, connected levels. Then we come to think more comprehensively of systemic Nature, which is expressed in the diverse natures of particular things. Just as polytheism in religion gives way to monotheism, so science makes connections, more and more, and pluralism shifts toward more unified theories of nature, a universal nature omnipresent but delimited in particular things. Both science and religion are driven toward collective terms. The many are referred to the one. We do not check these impulses by admitting that we are assigning to both fields more than they have yet delivered-an integrated model of nature and history, or one of God as the warrant for nature and history. The sciences are plural, with their multiple paradigms. The differing models of persons and societies in the human sciences mesh poorly with one another, and these in turn have not yet been fully correlated with models used to describe biological or physicochemical nature. The religions are many, with their multiple creeds, and even within theism there are several leading denominations. Believers and scientists both live with a certain hope that we can gradually envision the unity of things more clearly, but both know that we travel hopefully and slowly arrive. We are always on a frontier where what is known mingles with what is believed and hoped about things incompletely known, wrongly known, and unknown. This drives the ongoing quest. We should hardly have predicted that our intellects would know nature as well as they already do, but, given where we now stand, we may believe that we will know nature yet better still. But to hold that nature is corporately singular, a Universe, or that there is one God grounding this systemic unity, claims 297 298 / SCIENCE AND RELIGION that are believed amidst the diverse phenomena and the competing, only partially convergent theories and creeds, will at present and in the foreseeable future require acts of faith. I SCIENCE AND RELIGION that is, transcending and irreducible to existing manifestations of the natural. All the lower steps, however, will with rather more plausibility be regarded as natural, having progressively come to seem merely natural with their introduction across the stages of natural history (Figure 7.1). These phenomena are able to be understood (at least partially) by the probing mind. But we may also be forgetting when we term what lies behind "merely natural" how amazing is what has already managed to happen, and how incompletely our natural science categories explain the subsequently emerging developments in the story thus far. Further, events have to be understood not just in their particular, plural natures, not in their classes, nor even in their causal connectedness or their lawlike operations, but in the parts they play in a drama. Sometimes a thing needs to be understood not merely immanently, in terms of what it now is in its own-being, but in terms of what it is becoming, as a link in a story. But the higher principles that it foretells on the story line are not yet evident, and are indeed, in our sense, supernatural, not immanent in that thing nor anywhere yet evident in the natural system, but ulterior in as-yet-uncreated, never-yet-natural states. In that sense, every emergence presents a kind of emergency in its challenging of theories and laws competent for the previous levels. Every lower science proves a limited case within some higher theory, and for adequate explanation we increasingly must pass through science into history.

Antipode, 1989

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2009

What the theoreticians fail to observe is that beneath the process of creation lies a conglomerate which is the source of all trouble in art theory, history and aesthetics. This conglomerate might be the result of a “collective mind”, or an “unconscious mind”, or the “unseen”, depending on whom one is asking. When creating an image, the full mental process of the artist is almost instinctive, being usually considered a monolith, and it would be fully instinctive if it weren’t for the technicalities that make the artwork understandable to its peers and contemporaries. That is where the social aspect really lies. But the whole process of “building” an image, similar to the process of interpreting it, is based on a series of principles - structures that lie deep. My presentation is an exercise of tracing elements that build up the creative act that results in the image.

The article formalizes the composition and structure of the natural systems, and their physical measurements. The article identifies a new property of the natural systems called the Most Important Property of the Natural Systems (MIPNS). MIPNS represents an indivisible unity of the material and nonmaterial. When applied to the fundamentals of material world, MIPONS confirms dualism, and rejects monism and pluralism. The natural systems consist of the material matter-energy and nonmaterial entropyinformation substances. The two substances cannot exist in isolation from each other. The two substances are well connected with the two principles of thermodynamics, space, and time, forming the inseparable "Great triad of pairs," which is the fundamental bases of the universe.

Perspectives on science and Christian faith: journal of the American Scientific Affiliation