FRACTAL CHAOS - Crashes in the Wall Between Science and
Religion
By Ralph Losey
At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in
time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
The rapidly accelerating discoveries of Chaos are overtaking our worldview. They teach
us that Newton, and indeed almost all of the pre-chaos scientists, were dead wrong in their
basic view of the Universe. They thought that there was a predictable cause and effect for
everything, and that everything happened according to fixed physical laws. They believed in
certainties, not probabilities. Their fundamental image of the Universe was a big clock. The
presence of a divine being was only necessary to make the clock and wind it up. After He
created the Universe, all “God” had to do was sit back and watch. The laws would operate in a
predictable causal fashion.
Old science actually used to think that if you only knew all of the initial conditions, how
the clock worked, you could predict what would happen at any point in time. Science assumed
that everything could be known and eventually predicted. The Universe was ruled by a detailed
system of unchanging laws. Cosmos and causality reigned supreme. There was no room for
chaos and so it was conveniently swept under the rug. The inevitable outcome of the ordered
machine view was the complete winding down of the clock, the end of time in complete entropy
- the second law of thermodynamics where everything tends to breakdown, to dissipate. This
big picture of science naturally spawned the "God is dead" philosophies, nihilism, the life
nausea of existentialism, behavioralism, communism and the like. Now with the Chaos theories
this paradigm is itself dead. A whole new scientific view has been born, one much more in
accord with an organic view, the common law, and philosophies of hope and spirit.
The cosmic clock image of establishment science first began to crumble at the turn of
the century when physicists found that at the nuclear level the causal laws of physics didn't hold
true. The behavior of the atom and individual electron could not be predicted. Still, even in the
face of incontrovertible evidence of quantum physics, old ideas die hard. The static civil law
mind set would not die easily. Even Einstein could not believe that “God” would play dice with
the Universe. He searched in vain for a unified field theory that would explain away the chance
and unpredictability so obvious in the subatomic world. Science struggled to maintain its
centuries old view. The belief in a causal cosmos was now on shaky ground because it lacked a
subatomic foundation. Still it prevailed because the rest of the world of physics seemed to follow
linear, orderly and predictable clock like processes. Besides, no one had articulated a different
view to replace it. The subatomic world was considered an insignificant anomaly, an exception
that proved the rule.
