Throwing Stones

I recently started a pretty interesting book- A Brief History of Everything, by Ken Wilber. More like Eastern metaphysics than anything else, it presents one really curious one, that the world is composed of holons- the word was invented by Arthur Koestler, and means something that is both composed of parts and is itself part of a greater whole. Take as a for example a rock- the rock is composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of subatomic particles, and so on down the line. The rock itself is part of a greater system- let's just say arbitrarily it broke off of a larger rock- the larger rock is part of the regional soil and geologic strata- this in term is part of a larger system contained in the earth, the earth is a part of a larger system of planets, and so on- both directions show both a whole and the component parts. This being the case, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the universe is organized, to some extent. However, to go beyond this enters the realm of speculation.

Consider the old problem of the monkeys- the story goes, if a hundred monkeys sit at a hundred typewriters typing away constantly, sooner or later one of the monkeys will type the complete works of Shakespeare. That's true- there is no such thing as a zero probability. However, the problem with this is time- we do not have an infinite amount of time to do this in. The universe has about 12 billion years from beginning to end, at least that's a reasonable estimation. It would take about 10 times that long for anything really significant to happen once- and under this explanation, we need a whole truckload of really significant things to happen. So out the window goes that argument! Chance alone cannot account for the patterns we see in the universe.

Now comes the fun part- people of a religious bent point to this as proof of God- well, yes and no. It proves that something exists- a pattern underlies everything in the universe, and things happen at a rate that cannot be explained by chance. Does that indicate, for example, that a Hindu god runs the universe? No- merely that a pattern is present. Beyond this, we move into speculation and faith. Faith, of course, being belief in the absence of evidence. (that may sound a little harsher than it's intended) By this, though, we can impose whatever characteristics we may want on this force, and call it God. The problem comes in when we start saying, "I'm right, everyone else is wrong". Apart from being pretty egotistical, it's not really anything that can be proven or disproven, as all we can see is the pattern. The pattern itself is really neither good nor bad, but simply is. What we choose to do with it determines whether it's good or bad.