chavez@harvard.UUCP (R. Martin Chavez) (03/17/84)
The Greek philosopher Democritus wrote: "All that exists in the
universe is the fruit of chance and necessity." Jacques Monod, the late
French molecular biologist, gave priority decisively to chance: "pure
chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous
edifice of evolution." Is everything, then, due to chance? Wherein
lies the distinction between free will and quantum indeterminacy? Recent
discussions in net.religion have brought forth the (unsound, therefore
dangerous) proposition that quantum mechanics undoes the strictures of
determinism. Maybe this excerpt from <<Das Spiel>> ("The Game"), by
Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen, will suggest a more correct approach to
our discussion of determinism:
"Only by thinking in systems can we see the strategy
of genesis. Gigantic systems of hierarchically organized
internal and external causes interact on one another. In
all this, genesis operates with the supremely ambivalent
antagonism between necessary contingent and contingent
necessity. Through all its strata it preserves what
begins as chance, as indeterminism, but ends as creativity,
as freedom. And there is continual growth of what emerges
as necessity, as determination, but ends as law and order,
as a sense of direction, as the meaning of possible evolution.
Until finally a meaning without freedom for us is meaningless,
just as a freedom without meaning would not be freedom.
..."A world resulting from this strategy is neither
a pure product of chance, nor is it planned in advance; man
is neither meaningless, as Jacques Monod with the existentialists
asserts, nor was he aimed at, as Teilhard [de Chardin] with
the vitalists thought. He neither failed to acquire meaning
because of the freedom of evolution nor did he lose freedom
by the growth of laws. And the harmony of the world is neither
a fiction nor is it prestabilized. Its harmony is poststabilized;
it is a consequence of its growing systems. When it emerges,
its meaning is a consequence of the strata of the conditions of
its form. This world is neither deterministic nor indeterministic,
neither materialistic nor idealistic. And consequenctly
materialism cannot cure idealism, nor can idealism cure
materialism. Half-truths as they are, they could not do more
than become entrenched in the incompatibility of the ideologies,
divide the world in the middle and bring it to the state in
which it is today."
Excerpted from Hans Kueng, \\Does God Exist?//, pp. 644-666.
Trans. Edward Quinn. New York: Random House, 1981.