Page 12 - GALIET PHYSICS BLOSSOMS I+

because it is conceivable that intelligent design could have arisen not from an intelligent designer, or a supreme personal being, but from a random event and chance structuring over billion of years, such as the one expounded by Kant’s nebular hypothesis, and by Darwin’s natural selection (struggle for survival, mutations, selective reproduction). As much as we marvel at the order and beauty of nature, and as much as Paley in Natural Theology and Paul Davies argue that we can deduce that intelligence and a final end exists simply by the sheer awe and wonder and symmetry in the laws of nature, in the body, in a crystal, in a gem, or a pineapple, or a beautiful flower, or in the self-same similarity of fractals, nature’s complexity, evolution and quantum mechanics resist any simple reduction to intelligent design or to universal sameness given that there is duality in nature. Chaos and disorder, dynamic and thermodynamic systems, universality and particularity, periodicity and concreteness exist. Diseases and viruses exist. Chance, contingency, uncertainty (Heisenberg’s principle), multiformity also exist. As if all these eerie things had not been designed at all by an intelligent being.
Amidst this perplexity, we find that our universe is no longer closed or unified, but that it appears to be an open system, capable of not only manifesting dissonance and discordance, but also of showing the most wondrous constancy and symmetry, as if it had been intelligently designed. And this mysterious duality is perplexing and terrifying to us. For there is no absolute certainty whether an intelligent designer exists or does not, and ambiguity prevails. We neither know whether entirely irrational or chaotic systems may actually exist beyond our observable universe, or whether, entirely perfect systems, such as those of Plato’s Forms, may actually exist somewhere in the yet unobservable cosmos. For all these reasons, there is no absolute certainty whether there is an actual intelligent designer or a Platonic demiurge with an overall beautiful and just and good purpose to the cosmos, as much as we would love to believe this to be true, or whether all things are under the whims of an actual irrational, romantic or Dionysian mad designer who adores chaos and chance, who by mere chance, happens to attain some beauty and symmetry from his designing impulse. A question we may want to ponder on is whether intelligence can bring forth chaos. Plato would have said, no! Only from intelligence arises intelligence, or from the good, arises goodness! This seems as self-evident as Euclid’s 5th postulate, but science does show otherwise! Yet we are courageous and striving mortals, given this enourmous Sisyphean task, we still attempt and try to unravel the mystery of intelligent or chance design. We are Odysseuses or Protagorases believing that we can be the measure of things that are and are not, wishing to believe and to absolutely affirm that the universe has a telos in the way Aristotle dreamt, or Hegel too dreamt. Perhaps the ultimate end is the Absolute Idea of Hegel, but it could also be Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of all things. What then might be the ultimate end of the
universe? Flourishing? Eudaimonia? The Ultimate Good? The Absolute Idea? The
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