How might order and disorder shape scholarship?

 Order and Disorder: Nigel Biggar in Dialogue with the University, Edited By Terence C. Halliday and K. K. Yeo

has just been published by Langham.

In 1992, John Stott, the founder of Langham, made an “urgent plea for double listening” for Christians to listen to both the Word and the world. This book is a notable response to Stott’s plea, in the context of the highest levels of academia. There is an intellectual chasm between academic theology and the research that takes place in secular universities, even though the best ones have deeply Christian origins.

In this volume, Professor Nigel Biggar claims that the “existence of a given created order – be it physical or aesthetic or moral – implies that academic endeavour is properly about the discovery of the truth of reality as given by God.” However, given human finitude and fallibility, finding such truth is subtle, complex, multi-faceted, and ambiguous. Elucidating the nature and extent of the connections between theology and academic disciplines is a formidable multi-disciplinary challenge that must contend with overspecialisation, compartmentalisation, secularisation, institutional inertia, and political polarisation.

The Global Faculty Initiative (GFI) has developed a community and method that provides small concrete examples of how to make progress. Thanks be to God! This book is the wonderful fruit of their concerted labour and is the second in a series showcasing the work of GFI. Biggar provides a Theology Brief that elucidates the conceptual dialectic of order and disorder in creation to set the contour of a dialogue with Christian scholars from diverse academic disciplines. His Brief is succinct, accessible, balanced, profound, helpful, stimulating, and relevant. The responses are creative, concrete, stimulating, and gracious in disagreement and correction. Biggar’s final response is noteworthy: “We all learn from what should be a genuine dialogue. We all need to learn – non-theologians to think more Christianly, and theologians to think more realistically.”

Upon engaging with the book, my main disappointment was that I did not somehow make the time to contribute to the discussion. My own field of condensed matter physics is largely about how the interplay of order and disorder can lead to the emergence of hierarchical structures. Nevertheless, the book is a stimulus for future engagement with the ideas presented and with this vibrant alternative academic community. 

Finding order in the chaos of life

Life in this world often seems to be chaotic. Think of your experience of the weather, the economy, politics, and human relationships. It is hard to predict what will happen next. We yearn for order and sometimes seem to be able to create little oases of it, only to see them slip from our grasp. Sometimes things even seem to make sense; much of the time they don't. 

On the other hand, some claim there is a grand plan for the universe and it is all pre-determined. We just follow our destiny.

What is the relationship between order and chaos? Is the universe random or deterministic? Scientists have wrestled with these questions for centuries. How might different scientific views related to how the Bible addresses (or not) these questions?

I have enjoyed re-reading,  Let There Be Science: Why God Loves Science, and Science Needs God, by David Hutchings and Tom McLeish. This week we are discussing it in the theology reading group.  I think that this is the best introductory book I have encountered about the relationship between theology and science.

The questions above are nicely discussed in Chapter 6, entitled Order from Chaos. Here are some highlights.

chaotic systems are both predictable and random (p. 115)

The probabilistic approach shows us that order really can emerge from disorder (p. 118)

Theoretically predictable systems (can) collapse into randomness. Theoretically random systems coalesce into predictability. 

Is the future knowable, or not? It seems that science gives a rather unscientific answer: “sort of”. (p. 119)

Some related issues are discussed in posts I wrote a while back. 

The collective activity of many randomly moving actors can be effectively predictable, even if individual motions are not.

Random dynamics at one level can lead to deterministic dynamics at a higher level, and visa versa.

True randomness requires design. This is illustrated by the fact that it is very hard to make random number generators that are truly random.

Job struggled with the chaos of life. He lived a morally ordered life, yet he experienced chaos, reflected in his great suffering. He ranted at God.

Even if I summoned him and he responded, 

I do not believe he would give me a hearing. 

He would crush me with a storm and multiply my wounds for no reason. 

Job 9:16-17

In a development that is both surprising and entirely fitting, God does indeed respond to Job, speaking to him and his four counsellors from within a storm. This is our first clue that there may be far more to the apparent randomness of nature than Job had brought to his argument. (p. 122)

Job is being invited into a new way of thinking. God will push him to examine things afresh. Could it be that randomness and overall divine care can walk hand in hand somehow? (p. 122) 

God goes on to take full responsibility for the processes Job has raged about, but he suggests that Job has misunderstood the situation badly: 

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?  

What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? 

Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?

                     Job 38:22-27 

Here, God turns Job’s argument on its head. These events do not show a lack of control; they are actually how God brings about his plans. Job has seen them as individual, one-off uncertainties. He has seen them as uncontrolled events which terrorize mankind. God, though, is saying that they are not isolated instances at all; he is painting a bigger picture. The apparent randomness on the smaller scale is combining to form the order which emerges for creation as a whole. Job’s field of vision is far too narrow. God is telling him to widen it. (p. 123)

The authors then allude to some of the scientific research that McLeish has been involved in.

The mystery was solved when it was realized that billions of bumbling peptides had managed to glue themselves together into tapes. Their rapid, erratic motion was crucial to this: only by crashing around haphazardly would they eventually build up any kind of emergent structure. 

 The result of all this “randomness” is the formation of cell walls, the maintenance of correct chemical concentrations, overwhelming victories for the immune system and more. It is from within all the chaos that overall order is formed – and life exists.  

This video illustrates this with a computer simulation of an HIV virus capsid being surrounding by a drug, taken from this paper.

Modern scientists have learned that randomness and predictability are two sides of the same coin. (p. 124-5)

If our world was entirely random or entirely predictable, life as we know it would not be possible, and we could have no hope of any meaningful interaction with either nature or its Creator. 

We are told in the Bible that God has made it neither of these: he is found in both the chaos of the storm and the certainty of his love. (p. 125)

Randomness does not preclude design

Previously I have posted about the misconception that if something appears to be random then it cannot have purpose.

Paul La Montagne recently pointed out to me that true randomness actually requires design. It is very hard to produce "random numbers". Mathematicians and computer scientists work very hard to design random number generators.

Hence, if we observe something that appears to be "random", i.e. has no underlying pattern or order we are not justified in claiming that it has not been designed. There could be a deep and profound and underlying order to it.

Chancing the existence of God

Following up on a previous post about Paul Ewart's paper in Science and Christian Belief.
Paul kindly brought to my attention a summary of the paper published in the Guardian Online and so accessible (both electronically and intellectually) to a broader audience, Why God needs chance: The reality of chance isn't a robust argument for atheism. It might even be necessary for God's existence

Randomness and purpose II

Paul Ewart points how "Disorder and chaos arising from chance are often seen as destructive and randomness per se as evidence that there is no purpose in the universe." But he uses examples from physics to argue that chaos can be constructive and chance to be consistent with meaning and purpose.

I agree. Randomness is actually necessary for biomolecular functionality including optimising the rate of specific chemical reactions. If you want a very technical discussion see the discussion in a recent talk that I gave at a scientific workshop in Germany.

In the book, Biological Physics: Energy, Information, and Life, Philip Nelson begins each chapter with a question. Chapter 4 begins with

Biological question: If everything is so random in the nanoworld of cells, how can we say anything predictive about cells?

Physical idea: The collective activity of many randomly moving actors
can be effectively predictable, even if individual motions are not.

Randomness and purpose

I have started reading Paul Ewart's great article, The Necessity of Chance: randomness, Purpose and the Sovereignty of God. Before discussing the article here are a few old thoughts:

We should be cautious about deducing that a particular phenomena is “random” and therefore “meaningless” or “without purpose.” This has been discussed nicely by Leo Kadanoff in a Physics Today article with regard to the implications of chance and probability playing a role in evolutionary theory. Deterministic dynamics at one strata can lead to apparently stochastic or random dynamics at the next highest strata. Conversely, stochastic dynamics at one strata can lead to deterministic laws at the next strata. An example of the first is Brownian motion. The motion of individual molecules which interact with a larger particle (such as a dust particle) is deterministic at the atomic level but when viewed through a microscope the large particle appears to move in a random walk. An example of the second case is how the random motion of individual atoms in a gas leads to deterministic laws such as the ideal gas equation of state. Kadanoff states,

“Wherever we have looked most seriously, we have seen phenomena that can be described by simple models of lawful behaviour, endlessly repeated, without discernible purpose or goal. .... this is a cold and amoral description of reality. ....However, to apply this picture to the entire universe requires a tremendous extrapolation. Such an extrapolation can have only the strength of a metaphor. ...As a scientist, I can say that we do not have (and probably cannot have) any evidence to show that nature is just a set of laws operating without purpose or goal. But as a person, I find the metaphor congenial.”