(urth) Order and chaos, light and dark, ...

Adrian Robert arobert at cogsci.ucsd.edu
Thu Jun 1 20:55:52 PDT 2006


"The Increate maintains all things in order surely; and the theologians 
say light is his shadow.  Must it not be then that in darkness order 
grows ever less, flowers leaping from nothingness into a girl's fingers 
just as by light in spring they leap from mere filthiness into air?  
Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe. 
  Perhaps, indeed, it is this lack of order we perceive as darkness, a 
randomization of the waves of energy (like a sea), the fields of energy 
(like a farm) that appear to our deluded eyes -- set by light in an 
order of which they themselves are incapable -- to be the real world."

(Shadow, chap. 24)


Can any of the wise folk on this list lay hold of antecedents for this 
gem.. some musings of St. Thomas, perhaps, or some other of those 
remarkable intellects of Christian theology little known today?  Yet 
connecting so beguilingly with the physicist's conceptions of entropy 
and measurement?




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