implies that, on a macroscopic scale where quantum effects are usually not noticeable, nature seems to conform to deterministic laws.1
Epistemological uncertainty reflects the ontological uncertainty that is built into the universe. John Polkinghorne maintains that chance, in the quantum sphere as well as in the sphere of evolution, is evidence not of disorder but of freedom—the freedom given by the Creator to the natural order to create itself, developing as a process within the framework of the Creator’s overall purpose. Chaos theory can be instanced as another theory pointing in this direction. This theory, as I understand it, refers to immensely sensitive physical systems which are unpredictable in behavior because they cannot be insulated from even the tiniest events in the environment, and by “environment” one doesn’t mean just the immediate planetary or even galactic locality but the entire universe.
Polkinghorne, in his Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity, gives the example of air and weather systems.2 The recently posited theory of nonlocality shows that particles that have interacted at some point remain mysteriously linked even if physically separated by vast distances. Some tiny, even microscopic, event can affect an entire physical system such as the weather, in a manner that is altogether unpredictable. But chaos theory goes on to show that the range of possible behaviors is contained within certain bounds and that the randomness itself is contained within a patterned structure. Polkinghorne likes to call the pattern-forming propensity within nature “active information,” and he suggests that the spontaneous generation of order emerging from indeterminate randomness points to a holistic level of reality deeper even than the concepts of energy and matter and not reducible to them.3 He thinks that this concept of “information” will be a main focus of research for the rest of this century.
Where does all this order come from? How can we best explain the regularities and patterns within nature, which we call laws, and which, to a real extent, we can discover and elucidate by mathematics? How is it that even what we call chance occurrences at the quantum level are not manifestations of chaotic randomness but are events within a larger, apparently ordered framework? It would seem that there are only two explanations on offer today: the first is the existence of multiple parallel universes, perhaps infinite in number, of which ours, by chance, happened to turn out this way; the second is that an all-powerful creative mind—God—created the universe in just this way. The first possibility, without any basis in observation or experiment, seems, to many scientists, believers in God or not, to be a completely unscientific flight on mathematical wings into metaphysical fantasy in order to escape the second possibility—the one that points to God—which provides a far simpler and indeed much more probable metaphysical explanation of the order we find in the universe.
The biblical texts in the Old and New Testaments that I alluded to earlier, which speak of the Creator God and his creation, provide a plausible underpinning for the second hypothesis. The Triune God, who imagines, speaks, and breathes out the cosmos, is an inconceivably powerful, personal, rational mind, and the cosmos he created by his Word, the Logos, is therefore orderly and rational; man, because he is created in the image of this personal, rational God—of this Logos—and because he is given moreover the mandate to exercise dominion over the creation and is therefore designed to be able to know it, possesses in consequence the rational capacity, through mathematics, to do, among other things, what we call science, that is, to fruitfully investigate God’s handiwork that we call nature and to discover its inner workings and laws.
The same explanatory strategy applies to the much-discussed Anthropic Principle, which refers to the nearly unbelievable fine-tuning of the initial cosmological conditions that would permit carbon-based life to eventually emerge. The universe, we now know—and this is a very recent discovery—has not always existed; the laws of this universe are contingent; the causal order we find is not a matter of logical necessity. This means that we cannot know this causal order by a priori rational deduction, as Aristotle believed; we must observe it. We can only know it through a posteriori empirical investigation.4 It is this truth, revealed through sacred Scripture, that led Christian thinkers to the experimental method, which laid the basis for modern science. On the other hand, the convergence and intrinsic strength of certain fundamental constants (e.g., the four cosmic forces: gravity, the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force), and the incredibly specific numerical values of these constants with respect to electrical charge, density, and velocity that shaped the evolution of the universe starting an instant after the Big Bang, had to be, and were, of such precision that some astrophysicists can speak of the virtual inevitability not only of the formation of stars and of the heavier atomic elements necessary to carbon-based life, but also, subsequently, of the emergence of simple organisms followed by their increasing complexity all the way up the ladder to the human brain and the astonishing phenomena of self-consciousness and rationality.
The convergence of so many apparent coincidences among the primordial variables, all of them a priori independent of each other, demands an explanation other than chance. The presence of such precision had nothing to do with natural selection, obviously. The laws of nature that underlie the possibility of biological evolution were in place from the beginning of the universe, long before the mechanisms of biological evolution came into play; and it is becoming clear that they are still operative in the processes of biological development, though exactly how has yet to be discerned. But in themselves these basic laws, whose very existence to begin with remains an unfathomable mystery, cannot explain the emergence of life and the increasing information needed for the development of that life.
One of the many currents of thought in the ongoing debate in the scientific community about the mechanisms of evolution corresponds strikingly with the notion of directionality implicit in the Anthropic Principle. According to the biochemist and geneticist Michael Denton, there exist archetypal forms underlying proteins, similar to the structure underlying snow crystals.5 This leads Denton to think that the evolutionary process is guided fundamentally by laws of nature—hence by the constants present since the Big Bang—and not just by chance mutation, adaptation, and natural selection. According to this understanding, the unity of a biological type would arise not just from a common ancestor and the laws of heredity but, beyond that, from rational criteria—for instance, all the legs of different terrestrial vertebrates obey a common principle. Such common morphologies, it is suggested, possess an internal logic and are not merely the result of blind processes following the rule of trial and error. This insight, strengthened by the fact that many organic forms are governed by mathematical laws (mathematical laws do not develop by chance!), provides, to my mind, a noteworthy parallel with the notion mentioned earlier that explanatory mathematical equations are actually discoveries of archetypal structures, ideas in the Platonic sense that exist beyond space and time and yet govern cosmological reality.
Notions like these lend plausibility to an associated contention, shared by a growing number of paleontologists, zoologists, and biologists, that the neo-Darwinian gradualist mechanisms used to describe microevolution are inadequate to account for macroevolution, i.e., the passage—sometimes occurring quite rapidly by a kind of leap—from one class or order to another. Large-scale shifts from one biological genre to another—macromutations such as that from reptiles to mammals—cannot, it is held by scientists such as Roberto Fundi, Jean Dorst, and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, be the result of pure chance, but must arise by virtue of preexistent archetypes, comprehensive organizational schemas that are somehow potentially present and are triggered under opportune environmental conditions.6 Denton observes moreover that many conditions such as the structure of the carbon atom, the nature of water as the liquid best adapted to carbon, the suitability for life of the light spectrum emanating from the sun, point, when gathered cumulatively, to a teleological orientation of the evolutionary process. As with the Anthropic Principle in relation to the initial conditions
