WNYC's production of "Radio Lab" had a podcast that faithfully introduced the science of Emergence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Would it be fair to say that Emergence can be a bundle? It gives me the feeling that it's trying to connect the dots between God and Evolution?
Emergence, simply put, is the philosophy/science of random acts that combine to form a pattern. It's something like cooperation without intent. Radio Lab makes the example of ants who are not bright (understatement) but find method to survive and evolve through random acts. Their evolution and survival rate, according to this program, has exceeded those of humans.
On a personal level, they looked at the experience of the philosopher Francis Galton who believed that breeding had everything to do with class & society. Lower classes, he believed, had no voice in the important decisions in politics and policy making. Wisdom came only to those, he thought, who were bred by intelligent people.
Galton went to a stock & poultry exhibition (keep in mind he liked the topic of breeding and it was a historically boring era) where they were having a contest to guess the weight of a specific ox. After the contest among these so-called lower class individuals, Galton asked the man running it if he could have all the entries.
When Galton averaged out the entries, he found that collectively their guess (1,187) was only one pound away from the answer. This contradicted his thought that the average would show how way off this could be. This changed his philosophy slightly to hedge his view of the poorer population. He consigned in an idea where they could combine their talents to build a superior, logisitical system without leadership.
Or is it?
C.S. Lewis once claimed that the world shares a common morality. He calls this the Universal Morality of Natural Law. He also claims that people know what these law are and they break them. "Moral Law is simply a herd instinct." He claims that someone or something must be behind such a universe of principles. These principles (continuing this concept of Moral Absolutism) are inherent to the laws of the universe, the nature of humanity, the will or character of God or some other fundamental source.
Is Lewis hinting that the idea of Emergence clues us into what/who God is? The patterns that emerge from chaos evolve and make us moral beings? As a person or as a province, do patterns naturally emerge from chaos as part of a more holy process? Then should I look at chaos as the beginning of something very special?
If that's the case, then my poor swimming skills have a lot of God behind it.
