Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 30 Apr 2016 11:31:34am
Sand falling through a crack in a rock forms a pyramid. Desert dunes are the result of wind and gravity, and the the ripples in fossil seabeds form via similar principles. The solar system is a highly ordered set of eight large amazingly perfect oblate spheroids, orbiting in close to circular orbits around a very large sphere, all in the same plane, with a variety of interesting mathematical relationships (for example, Trojan asteroids and Kepler's laws).

And all of them the result of simple rules applied to simple matter. All of the ordered behaviours I just listed are driven primarily by a simple inverse-square attraction law.

It's not that difficult to get order as an emergent outcome of simple laws.

You're still hung up on 'life' as having some inherent meaning, of life being special. But you can't even define life. Again: Does a virus count? A prion? What about a computer virus? What about a replicator in Conway's Game of Life? Why do you draw the line where you draw the line?

I agree that no inherent law of physics 'leads to life' in the sense 'the nth law of physics is that life will exist'. What I argue is that 'life', however defined, is allowed by the laws of physics and chemistry and requires no special laws of its own, and as far as we can tell is readily an output of those laws.

Yes, even Shakespeare. Ultimately that's an emergent outcome of the laws of physics. Weird, isn't it? But so is the highway in Langton's Ant, and nobody argues that that's magical.