Does the Universe Suggest Design, Purpose, Goodness, or Concern?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Steane
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Random Fluctuation ◽  
Design Purpose ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Claim ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Universe

This chapter tackles the question of whether or not the natural world presents us with a picture empty of purpose or good or evil or concern. No empirical evidence can entirely refute the claim that random fluctuation is the complete truth about the origin of all things, but it follows that this is not a scientific claim. Therefore it is a question of forming a reasonable judgement. It appears that the natural world has a depth and richness that exceeds what would be necessary for thinking brains to come to be realized in it. Also, notwithstanding the pain of the world, it is a project that merits our engagement and commitment, and occasionally the transcendent breaks in. We are not competent to make an overall judgement, but we can join in with the creative process of the world and find our role.

Cosmos: The Universe Translated

2018 ◽  
pp. 187-232
Author(s):  
Alison E. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Scientific Thought ◽  
Physical Description ◽  
The World ◽  
Terrestrial Life ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Universe

This chapter is devoted to Humboldt’s last, great work Cosmos. This multi-volume ‘Sketch of a Physical Description of the World’ ranged encyclopaedically from the darkest corners of space to the smallest forms of terrestrial life, describing the larger systems at work in the natural world. But, as British reviewers were swift to query, where was God in Humboldt’s mapping of the universe? Appearing on the market in 1846, just a year after Robert Chambers’ controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Humboldt’s Cosmos unavoidably underwent close scrutiny. Hitherto overlooked correspondence between Humboldt and Edward Sabine shows how the Sabines deliberately reoriented the second volume of the English translation for Longman/Murray explicitly to include references to the ‘Creator’ and thus restore Humboldt’s reputation. The fourth volume of the Longman edition on terrestrial magnetism – Edward Sabine’s specialism – included additions endorsed by Humboldt which made Sabine appear as co-writer alongside the great Prussian scientist, and Cosmos a more obviously ‘English’ product. Otté, who produced the rival translation for Bohn, was initially under pressure herself to generate ‘original’ work that differed from its rival, producing a version of a work that would remain central to scientific thought well up to the end of the nineteenth century.

A Science So-Called

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Megan Faragher
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Inherent Difficulty ◽  
Group Psychology ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The University ◽  
The Universe

H.G. Wells’s life extends the radical evolution of psychographics outlined in the Introduction, but his oeuvre also proves the inherent difficulty in aestheticizing the emergent age of social psychology—a point evinced when producer Alexander Korda demanded Wells revise the script version of his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come three times to make it “filmable.” While Wells’s novel imagines a peaceable future wherein social psychology becomes the “whole literature, philosophy, and general thought of the world,” the film adaptation instead symbolizes this philosophical transformation by starring a sole philosopher-king who, against the people’s will, seeks to control and colonize the universe. This chapter argues that the conflict between these two Wellsian visions is prefigured by his intimate and conflicted relationship to sociology and group psychology. As early as 1906, Wells sought out the position as the first British chair of sociology at the University of London. But Wells was immediately to become a gadfly in academia: he engaged in scathing critiques of sociology for denying its utopian impulses and refuted theories of group dynamics put forward by Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter. Incorporating readings across Wells’s literary career—including Anticipations, An Englishman Looks at the World, and In the Days of the Comet—this chapter contends that Wells’s writing captures a life-long effort to reprise the scope of sociology from outside academia, and captures the writer’s foundering efforts to aestheticize the institutional promise of social psychology—efforts that inevitably succumb to Wells’s fetishization of pseudo-authoritarian technocracy.

A New Quarrel

On Universals ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
To Come ◽  
Question Today ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

This chapter assesses the new “quarrel of universals” that now occupies philosophy and other overlapping disciplines. In this new quarrel, the question today is not only whether one is for or against the universal; the question is also how one defines the universal—a term whose surprising equivocity has become increasingly clear. Still more fundamentally, the question is how one should articulate the relationship between three related but heterogeneous terms whose widespread use has prompted conflicting claims: the universal, universality, and universalisms. The chapter begins by situating the question of the universal and its variations within the field that seems to constitute the strategic site of intersecting domains: philosophical anthropology, understood as the analysis of the historical differences of the human and of the problem that those differences pose to their bearers. It then outlines the difficulties which can be identified in every philosophical and political usage of the universal and its “doubles” according to three aporias. The first is the aporia of the multiplicity of the “world,” or of the universe as multiversum; the second is that of Allgemeinheit or All(en)gemeinheit, in other words, the irreducible gap between the universal and the common (or community); and, finally, that of co-citizenship, the form of belonging to a political unity to come, a unity whose law of belonging (membership) would be the heterogeneity within equality or the political participation of those foreign to the community.

scholarly journals THE FACT OF CREATION AND THE LIMITS OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-101
Author(s):  
Ion Marian CROITORU ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Physics ◽  
The Body ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Universe

Although scientific research is in full bloom regarding, for instance, the environment, the fact of creation cannot be ignored either, even if some scientists deny it, while others ascertain it, albeit from perspectives, however, foreign to the patristic vision specific of the Orthodoxy. Consequently, the limits of cosmology are structured as well by Christian theology, which shows that the study of the world, guided by laws of physics in a limited framework, is carried out inside the creation affected by the consequences of the primordial sin, so that the reality of the world before sin is known only to those who reach spiritual perfection and holiness, therefore, from an eschatological perspective, since they, too, go through the moment of separation of the soul from the body, waiting for the general resurrection. Therefore, a new way of being is affirmed in the Orthodox Church, by the personal experience of each believer, which is a transformation on the personal and cosmic level, according to Jesus Christ’s resurrected body, which means the reality of a new physics, which concerns both the beginning of the universe, but also its new dimension, at the Lord’s Second Coming, when heaven and earth will be renewed by transfiguration. Regarding the existence of the universe, the differences are given by the perceptions of two cosmologies. Thus, the theonomous cosmology highlights man’s purpose on earth, the necessity of moral and spiritual life, and the transfiguration of creation, explaining God’s presence in His creation, but also His work in it, namely the transcendence and the immanence in relation to the creation. The autonomous cosmology engenders the evolutionist theory, which leads to secularism and, consequently, to the gap between the contemporary man’s technological progress, and his spiritual and moral regress. Today, more scientists are turning their attention also to the data of the divine Revelation, the way it makes itself known by its organs, the Holy Scripture and the Holy Tradition, in the one Church, which will mean a deepening of the dialogue between science and theology in favour of the man from everywhere and from the times to come.

Embracing risk in the Canadian woodlands: Four children’s risky play and risk-taking experiences in a Canadian Forest Kindergarten

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 374-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather A Coe
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Canadian Context ◽  
The World ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Canadian Perspective ◽  
Risky Play ◽  
Physical Challenges

Children are born with an intrinsic drive and natural curiosity to explore the world around them. Just as young children are attracted to the natural world, they too are enticed by the physical challenges and risk-taking experiences that such environments provide. Based on research conducted at one of Canada’s first Forest Kindergartens and using Sandseter’s conceptualization of risk, this article aims to explore the safe risk-taking and risky play experiences of four children at a nature-based early years programme in rural Ontario. Not only does this research add to the growing body of empirical evidence surrounding risk and nature-based learning in the early years but also provides a unique Canadian perspective not often discussed in the literature. An incidental outcome of this work is exposing researchers and practitioners to the types of safe risk-taking and risky play experiences that may occur within an early years Canadian context.

scholarly journals The Categorization of Dou (都) in Chinese: A Study from a Cross-linguistic Perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-234
Author(s):  
Zhang Ying
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The World ◽  
Universal Quantification ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Universal Quantifiers ◽  
To Come ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
Linguistic Approach

Compared with prototypical universal quantifiers in other languages of the world, dou in Mandarin Chinese presents more complicated semantic behaviors. One of the most disputed issues is what are the relations between dou expressing “universal quantification” (uq) and dou expressing “scalar trigger” (sca). First-hand data that comes from 40 languages demonstrates that Mandarin Chinese is the only language that employs the same form for “universal quantification” and “scalar trigger”. The empirical evidence strongly suggests that uq dou and sca dou are different, and the two functions uq and sca lack universal conceptual correlations. The special polysemous behavior of Mandarin dou, is proved to come from two language-specific reanalysis processes in dou’s diachronic development which also supports the two-dou claim. The study thus instantiates how a cross-linguistic perspective provides insights to explain long-standing language-particular issues. Besides, it is also argued that the cross-linguistic approach is promising in predicting if a future research is on a right track as it can steer us through overgeneralization and undergeneralization.

The Classical Daoist Concept of LI 理 (Pattern) and Early Chinese Cosmology

Early China ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 157-183
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
Expression Of Emotions ◽  
To Come ◽  
Lushi Chunqiu ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Concrete Image

This study traces the origins and development of the concept of Li 理 (Pattern) in early Chinese Cosmology, locating its foundation in the root metaphor derived from the natural lines or veins along which a block of jade can be split by a skilled artisan. From this relatively concrete image, li comes to eventually represent in Daoist cosmology the more abstract quality of the natural patterns or structures within the universe along which all phenomena move and interact with one another without the interference of human beings. After examining how early Confucian works emphasize the more abstract and derivative qualities of order and structure, we see that the likely Yangist authors in the Lüshi chunqiu return to the original metaphor of veins in jade but, instead, apply this to the veins through which the qi circulates through the human body.We then see how this metaphor is expanded beyond the human body in the classical Daoist texts to come to represent the natural guidelines both within all phenomena and those that guide their movements within the cosmos. Within phenomena these include such varied things as the structures for the generation and expression of emotions within human beings as well as the natural lines along which the butcher's chopper passes in order to cleave oxen. In Daoist inner cultivation literature it is these patterns with which sages accord so that their spontaneous actions are completely in harmony with the greater forces of the cosmos. Only after long practice of the apophatic contemplative methods that include concentrating on one breathing and emptying out the normal contents of consciousness can the sage be able to accomplish this goal of “taking no action yet leaving nothing undone.” Thus the concept of li as these natural guidelines comes to serve as an explanation for why this classical Daoist dictum is effective in the world.Finally, the Huainanzi contains the most sophisticated and sustained usages of the concept of li as the natural patterns and guidelines in the cosmos arguing that complying with them is the key to a genuinely contented life.

Materialism and Spiritualism

1917 ◽  
Vol 63 (263) ◽  
pp. 494-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Maudsley
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Complete Regeneration ◽  
As If

Of all the consoling illusions which mankind have harboured to irradiate, hearten, seduce and dupe them in their onward way to the perfection, universal peace and brotherhood which they hope and expect to approach, if not attain—after the devastating deluge of this long war for an unknown Divine event is over—none is perhaps more wildly irrational than that of a complete regeneration of human nature, and the coming of a perfect transformation scene on the troubled earth; for all the world as if the method of vital progress which has been since the beginning of life is appointed to come abruptly to a stop, or to be reversed; with the optimistic belief, too, that life shall be thereby exalted and glorified immeasurably. Could the fatuity of egotistic optimism go farther? Was the universe specially created to be a stage on which man—equally with other species and the rest of animate nature—lives, suffers, decays, and dies, might play his transitory part? Was that the illusive goal which at its outset launched it on its transcendental aim and its mysterious career, along which it has groaned since in long protracted travail? Naturally in that matter the devotees of religion believe the most, hope the most, cry aloud the most; otherwise their faith might be rudely shaken.

scholarly journals Measured Chaos: EcoPoet(h)ics of the Wild in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer // Caos medido: EcoPoética de lo salvaje en Prodigal Summer de Barbara Kingsolver

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-80
Author(s):  
Bénédicte Meillon
Keyword(s):  
Complex Systems ◽  
Chaos Theory ◽  
Natural World ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Barbara Kingsolver ◽  
The World ◽  
Chaotic Nature ◽  
The Universe

      Ecopoetics forms a human expression of the naturecultures that sustain us, enfolding us within an earth that is much more than a mere environment. In consequence, the ecopoet serves as a mediator between the multitudinous voices and lifeforms that take part in the song of the world. Weaving its way into the matter and texts of the world, human language—I argue in the wake of new materialism—provides the measure of and seeks inspiration in the apparent randomness and underlying design motivating the evolution of complex systems in the universe. I interweave approaches originating in Anglophone ecocriticism and ecophilosophy with ecopoetics—as Jonathan Bate and Scott Knickerbocker have defined it—with its close attention paid to the complex, interlaced fabric of the text. Barbara Kingsolver’s ecopoet(h)ics draws from chaos theory, inviting readers to shift interpretative paradigms, moving away from linear, binary grids of logic and reading, toward integrating complex, overlapping systems of meaning. Focusing on Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer (2000), this paper argues that, as Snyder once put it, art is not so much “an imposition of order on chaotic nature, freedom, and chaos;” rather it is “a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world,” of revealing “the way [wild] phenomena actualize themselves,” including within a wild ecopoetic language. Resumen      La ecopoética constituye una expresión humana de las naturaculturas que nos dan sustento y nos sitúan en relación a una tierra entendida como algo más que un simple medio ambiente. En consecuencia, el ecopoeta funciona como un mediador entre las numerosas voces y formas de vida que configuran la canción del mundo. Abriéndose camino a través de la materia y los textos, sostengo que el lenguaje humano, visto a partir de los nuevos materialismos, proporciona la medida de y busca inspiración en la aparente aleatoriedad y el diseño subyacente que motiva la evolución de los sistemas complejos del universo. Aquí combino diferentes enfoques originados en la ecocrítica y la ecofilosofía anglófona con el concepto de ecopoética (siguiendo la definición de Jonathan Bate y Scott Knickerbocker) prestando particular atención al complejo entramado del texto. La ecopoética de Barbara Kingsolver se basa en la teoría del caos e invita a los lectores a cambiar paradigmas interpretativos, alejándose de las lógicas de lectura lineales y binarias, para integrarse dentro de complejos sistemas de significado. Centrándose en la novela Prodigal Summer (2000) de Kingsolver, este artículo plantea que, como ha señalado Snyder, el arte reside no tanto en "una imposición de un orden en la naturaleza caótica, la libertad y el caos, "sino que representa más bien "una cuestión de descubrir el grano de las cosas, de revelar el caos medido que estructura el mundo natural", mostrando "la forma en que los fenómenos [naturales] se actualizan a sí mismos", a partir de la inclusión de un lenguaje ecopoético salvaje.

Messianic Redemption

1983 ◽  
pp. 142-160
Author(s):  
Byron L. Sherwin
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come

This chapter evaluates Judah Loew's understanding of the nature of the Messianic Era. For Judah Loew, the advent of the Messiah does not represent the abrogation or superseding of the commandments of the Torah of Moses. The commandments, Loew insists, will be in force in the Messianic Age. The messianic advent signifies the actualization of the observance of the commandments, not their abolition. The role of the Messiah is not so much to bring about this conclusion of the historical age but to symbolize that it has been attained. Just as the actualization of the natural world in the Messianic Era is but a prelude to the supernatural world, so the actualization of the Torah in this world is but a prelude to its ultimate return to its completely supernatural form. For Loew, the intrusion of the supernatural entities into “this world”—i.e., Moses, Messiah, Torah, Temple, soul, and intellect—is for the purpose of guiding creation back to its source, back to the totally spiritual realm, back to the World to Come, back to God.

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