The Picture of Reality in Contemporary Science (The Hermeneutic Dimension)Introduction The hands of “space-time" have moved forward and ahead! As one scientist quipped: "Science speeds on unabashed!". Once dominated by inspirational mythical accounts of origins and clockwork mechanistic ideas of the universe, twentieth-century science has undergone striking changes in focus.

In the so-called postmodern or contemporary period, not surprisingly, what has begun to emerge was quite another sense of reality.

Scientists, philosophers, thinkers, artists, mystics, social activists and theologians have started to realize that the old dominant technological view of what was real sold short the full scope of both human and cosmic truth.

Today, contemporary science imagines reality in a far more inclusive, open, expanding, and participative manner.

As Mary Jo Nye observed: Much of recent research has explored 19th- and 20th-century science, especially the genetic and behavioral sciences, with new emphasis on the sciences of animal behavior, ecology, and environmentalism, as well as on nuclear and high-energy physics.

Ian Barbour outlines the twentieth scientific paradigm on nature by differentiating it from the Medieval and Newtonian.

Among the significant elements found in this contemporary scientific picture of reality are: 1) evolutionary, historical, emergent, 2) law and change, structure and openness, 3) relational, ecological, interdependent, 4) systems and wholes, organismic, 5) multi-levelled, and 6) community.

While it is true that for the theologian "attempting to cross disciplines is a risky venture," I would say that it is an endeavor worth risking because a progressive overview, that is, a view which scientists find generally acceptable "will provide a meaningful perspective for contemporary theological reflection.”

This section will proceed thus by presenting the "fresh data" of natural science adapting what has been called by some authors as “a new sense of things" or a new story”.

There are at least three general, but meaningful, aspects by which we can experience this "new sense of things" in creation as furnished by contemporary "reflective" scientists, namely, A. The Enormity of the Universe, B. The Intelligibility of the World and C. The Balance of the Cosmos.

A. The Enormity of the Universe At the outset one can say that contemporary natural science has widened the scope of space and time considerably which presents the universe as remarkably enormous. Its incredible vastness and eons of time are difficult to imagine.

If we, for example, say that our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains between ten billion and one hundred billion stars and measures about 100,000 light years in diameter, our minds will be lost in the counting.

As Rahner wrote, in the face of the vastness of the cosmos, we will be feeling “dizzy". Saying is different from imagining. Seeing is different from understanding.

In a Time article entitled “Cosmic Close-ups", Michael Lemonick describes the stunning new photos of stars from the Hubble Space Telescope in the following:

They look remarkably like great towering thunderheads, billowing high into the evening sky as they catch the last rays of the setting sun.

They are so sharp, so startlingly three dimensional, that the mind wants to domesticate them, to bring them down to earth, to imagine them rising on the horizon or just beyond the wings of an airliner.

These are no ordinary clouds, however. They stand not 9,000 m but almost 10 trillion km high. They are illuminated not with ordinary earthly light but with searing ultraviolet radiation spewing from nuclear fires at the center of a handful of newly formed stars.

And they're 7,000 light-years from Earth more than 400 million times as far away as the sun...The momentous sights revealed by the Hubble can stir anybody's imagination.

These are rare glimpses of the outer boundaries of physical reality, and of the field cataclysms in which nature perpetually regenerates itself...

The enormity of the universe is a first contemporary scientific datum that needs to be examined more deeply because of the implications it has for theology and life.

There are at least three significant observations according to present scientific consensus which will illustrate what this first aspect manifests and implies:

1) An Enigmatic Awesomeness, 2) A Comparative Magnitude, and 3) An Ever-Increasing Complexity.

1) An Enigmatic Awesomeness

Consciously or unconsciously, we inhabit a planet circling an undistinguished galaxy among the thousand million galaxies of the observable universe.

The galaxies are too awesome and too enigmatic to comprehend in the events that have unfolded in the course of time.

This is the first observable manifestation of an enormous universe: its enigmatic awesomeness. Of course, it would be a foolish error to confuse size with significance.

These are two different, though not unrelated, concepts. For there is something chilling and baffling about the vastness of the universe in which we are placed.

Somehow, its "bigness" affects our feeling of "importance”. It was built for them and it was there for them.

From a contemporary scientific picture of reality, Rahner says that one may feel insignificant or lost in the cosmos.

This is when the cosmos is considered as an expression and mediation of an ultimate experience of contingency.

In his own words: Nowadays the Christian has to live on a tiny planet in a solar system which in its turn is part of a galaxy of a hundred thousand light years with thirty billion stars and whereby this galaxy is estimated to be only one of a billion such galaxies in the universe.

In such a universe it is certainly not easy for human beings to feel that they are the ones for whom this cosmos ultimately exists.

In a cosmos of proportions so tremendous that they even defy the power of the imagination.

It is quite possible for human beings to feel they are an accidental, marginal phenomenon, particularly when they know themselves to be product of an evolution which itself has to work with numerous and improbable accidents...

This enigmatic awesomeness of the universe, however, stirs up our minds to reflect on it more deeply, to contemplate on its mysteries, to marvel at its wonders.

This was what the popular scientist Carl Sagan wrote in describing "the shores of the cosmic ocean”.

Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries...

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home...

Consequently, when new worlds in unsullied scales are studied, a number of fundamental concepts that were taken for granted were found to be invalid or at least not very useful anymore.

To replace them, more abstract fundamental concepts must be constructed. One of these fundamental concepts is the "dynamic quality" of the cosmos.

This means that the universe could no longer be understood as static. Expansion is another name for this dynamic feature of the vast universe. The distance between galaxies is growing all the time.

We inhabit an expanding world. The fact that the universe is evolving suggests that the expansion began from an extremely compressed and dense state.

For many contemporary scientists, it supports the idea of an initial explosion. In fact, according to the most common scientific view, the universe had its beginning between 10,000 and 20,000 million years ago with a primeval explosion, known as the “big bang”.

Contemporary science understood this explosion to be the origin not only of matter, but of space and time as well. Time is inextricably linked to space.

As space stretches so does time. The expanding universe is not seen as matter exploding through space, so much as space-time itself stretching and inflating.

The discovery in 1965 of background microwave radiation throughout the universe has lent further support to the “big bang” theory over "steady-state" and other theories of the universe.

It was believed that this microwave radiation survived from the radiation era of the big bang, so that scientists can describe the universe filled with this radiation as "bathed in the afterglow of the big bang.”

The temperature of this cosmic afterglow, three degrees above absolute zero, was a remnant of the intense heat of the fiery origin of the universe. Below is its brief account according to John Polkinghorne.

In the beginning was the big bang. The earliest moment in the history of the world that science can conceive is when the universe was concentrated into a single point.

As matter expanded from this initial singularity it cooled and successive regimes decoupled from thermal equilibrium.

Thus after about three minutes the temperature had dropped to a thousand million degrees. That was cool enough for deuterium to form.

The arrival on the scene of this stable composite of a proton and a neutron helped to fix the global balance of hydrogen and helium in the universe for the rest of its evolution.

The ratio of three to one then established is what we still observe today. After that, nothing of great significance happened for several hundred thousand years. (This is the first phase: the evolution of matter.)

By then the temperature had fallen sufficiently for atoms to be able to form, and this had the consequence of decoupling radiation from thermal equilibrium with the rest of the universe.

That same radiation, in a form cooled by further expansion, is observable today as the universal 3K background radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965, a re-echoing whisper from those far-off times some fifteen thousand million years or so ago.

The universe continued to expand. Gravity took over and condensed matter into galaxies and the stars that compose them.

In the nuclear cookery within those stars new heavy elements formed, such as carbon and iron, which had not occurred before. Dying stars, in super-nova explosions, scattered these new elements into the environment.

When second generation stars were formed by recondensation, their planets could be made of materials which permitted the next big development in the universe's evolution. (This is the second phase: the evolution of life).

On at least one planet and perhaps on millions, conditions of temperature, chemical environment, radiation, and the chance congregation of simple atoms, permitted the coming into being of quite elaborate molecules with the power of replicating themselves in that environment.

In a remarkable interplay of contingent chance (to get things going) and lawful necessity (to keep them going) there had begun a process by which systems of ever-increasing complexity would evolve. On our planet this eventually led to you and me. (This is the third phase: the evolution of consciousness).

Thus, this “big bang" in which astrophysicists now believe our universe was born ten to twenty billion years ago was illustrative of an evolutionary pattern. It was hardly the chaos that has often been pictured.

This galaxy and all the others exhibit uniformities and regularities that make them amenable to scientific observation.

As described by contemporary science, the expansion of the universe is one of the observational mainstays of the Big Bang model.

Newton's static cosmos has been turned into an expanding, restless space convulsed by violent but creative events.

2) A Comparative Magnitude A second observable point on the enormity of the universe is its magnitude "compared" to previous conceptions. The emphasis here is on the "comparison" that one can make from what was to what is as far as the features of the observable universe are concerned. In the first place, the universe that we survey today is much larger in space and time than that conceived of by earlier writers.

Secondly, fifteen billion years is indeed a much more respectable age for the universe than is seven thousand years. And thirdly, fifty billion light years, which is the approximate radius of the presently observable universe, is much more reasonable than the few light hours that would have been the distance to the farthest of the visible Aristotelian spheres.

In other words, we are learning to see the world in an entirely different way from what our ancestors saw on account of the sheer size of the universe put before us by twentieth century science.

Denis Edwards gives the following concrete examples. For instance, we now know that the Sun is one of than two hundred thousand million stars that make up our galaxy, the Milky Way.

This Galaxy of ours is so wide that light, traveling at three thousand kilometers a second, takes a hundred thousand years to cross it. Our Sun is a star of average size, situated about 27,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy near the edge of one of the spiral arms. The Sun, with its solar system, travels in a circular orbit around the galaxy at a speed of 210 kilometers per second It takes about 250 million years for the Sun to rotate around the galaxy and in its lifetime it has probably made this journey about 20 times.

The size of the Milky Way is beyond imagination. Yet we have come to know that there are many galaxies far larger than the Milky Way.

It was only in 1924 that the American astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrated that our galaxy was not the only one in the universe.

There are many other galaxies and even possible universes. Speaking of possible extraterrestial beings, Trinh Xuan Thuan aptly described:

The certain knowledge that we are not alone will give us fresh insight into how our species fits into the scheme of things.

The universe will seem a less hostile place, for we shall have learned that it is home to other beings with the capacity to marvel at the beauty of the cosmos.

Astronomers now tell us that the observable universe contains more than a hundred thousand million galaxies. With this new scientific world-view, the enormous size of the universe began to matter.

The cosmos needed to be as big as what we have at present in order for life to emerge within it. Otherwise, a smaller system would have to run its course too swiftly.

Time (whatever that may be) is needed in which to make human beings. The story of our evolution is certainly a special one with its competitive replacement of one species by another.

A further interesting illustration of this comparative magnitude of creation as contemporary science describes it is given by Siu in the following:

Scientists peep into their private familiarities and delight in detailed descriptions in lectures and papers…If the natural bits are too small, science joins them together into larger units...Not satisfied with man's mundane three-dimensional world, science conjures up four and six-dimensional phantasms.

If we go back to Barbour's comparison of the scientific paradigms on nature among the medieval, Newtonian, and twentieth century thought, we find striking and qualitative differences… In all these illustrations. We can only marvel and wonder in awe at creation's capacity to grow into a more complex reality.

3) An Ever-Increasing Complexity

A third significant manifestation of an enormous universe is an "ever-increasing complexity” of the cosmos from both its microscopic and its macroscopic perspectives.

The vastness of the universe both galactically and sub-atomically makes it much more complex than it was before. The following points will help illustrate this journey of the universe to greater complexity.

First of all, we have the example of "atoms". In those days atoms were small hard balls. Now they are worlds, enormously rich in complexity, displaying the fantastic possibilities of quantum mechanics and quantum chromodynamics.

Many of these phenomena are not well understood. The simple reason for this is the continuing conflicting interpretations of the so-called quantum theory. The debaters have not come up with a common understanding or interpretation.

As Polkinghorne said: “the greatest paradox about quantum theory is that after more than fifty years of successful exploitation of its techniques its interpretation still remains a matter of dispute.”

Secondly, we have the physicist Heinz Pagels who recently explained the range of the very complex features existing between the macrocosmos and the microcosmos:

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.

Complex systems include the body and its organs, especially the brain, the economy, population and evolutionary systems...

Scientists, in a new interdisciplinary effort, have begun to meet the challenge of complex systems and, remarkably, are understanding how complexity can emerge from simplicity.

Some aspects of our moral behavior that either reflects or constitutes our moral values seem extremely complex, but conceivably they arise from simple elements that can be understood.

In other words, there is a comparative point of similarity between the galactic world (macrocosmos) and the quantum world (the microcosmos): complexity.

Thus, the field of complexity was considered at best, inchoate but fruitful and, at worst, inchoate and sterile. But Wright included that the field is also populated and taken seriously by some people who are not viewed with suspicion, thereby making this field respectable and credible.

Finally, various scientists were pondering the prospect that a basic physical law lay waiting to be discovered, that is, a law defining the circumstances under which systems infused with energy may become more complexly structured.

On this aspect, Arthur Peacocke has this to contribute: In their accelerating expansion the natural sciences have been giving us a picture of the world as consisting of hierarchy a series of organization of matter in which each successive member of the series is a 'whole' constituted of 'parts' preceding it in the series, frequently said ... to run from 'lower' to 'higher' as the complexity increases...

This was also one of the reasons that drove an emerging interdisciplinary field known as "complexity”. Robert Wright noted that this has been the subject of two books published in 1992, namely, Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop and Artificial Life by Steven Levy.

Earlier, also in the same line of thinking, one of the few biologists who talked out loud and at length about the growth in organic complexity was John Bonner of Princeton.

Wright said that in Bonner's 1988 book, The Evolution of Complexity, Bonner showed that more intricate organisms can arise from natural selection alone, without seeking help from Bergsonian forces.

Thirdly, one of complexity’s key words is "self-organization” - lifeless physical systems, such as air and water, faced with increasing disruption, sometimes grow more structured.

Air becomes more turbulent until it finally turns into whirlwinds, tornadoes, hurricanes. Water molecules heated from below grow wilder in their gyrations until they finally snap into a sweeping circular motion known as a "convection".

A number of complexity theorists thought that "self-organization" was so basic a principle as to account for the origin of life. They have even sketched out "autocatalytic" scenarios, animated them with computer simulations, and published papers.

Citing one example, Wright said that Stuart Kauffman (of the University of Pennsylvania medical school) thinks that the probability of life is very much higher than anybody thought. Wright then went on to describe the field's epicenter, a fledgling think-tank called the Santa Fe Institute.

According to him. this had a suspiciously trendy locale and the term "self-organization" cropped up with suspicious frequency in New Age circles. Furthermore, Wright added that Kauffman and Prigogine have reputations for hawking their wares aggressively in a suspicious manner.

These four “complex" points (the atomic level of complexity in the quantum world, the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels of complexity, "self-organization" as a key word for complexity, and the complex hierarchical structures) provide us a good grasp of what the enormity of the universe implies in this epic journey towards ever-increasing complexity.

B. The Intelligibility of the World A second aspect through and in which contemporary science offers a fresh view of the world is its intelligibility. Having been mentioned quite repeatedly in the modern scientific ideas, this intelligibility of the world calls for a special explanation in the light of contemporary science.

On this point, Eric Mascall offers us this preliminary comment: The point is that though the physicist knows the objective world only through the mediation of sensation, the essential character of the objective world is not sensibility but intelligibility.

Its objectivity is not manifested by observers having the same sensory experience of it, but by their being able, through their diverse sensory experiences, to acquire a common understanding of it.

Again, we may say that three ensuing observations will reveal this intelligibility of the world, namely, 1) A Pervasive Aesthetic Structure, 2) An Ultimate Criterion of Reality, and 3) A Potentiality to Awareness.

1) A Pervasive Aesthetic Structure A first observation on the intelligibility of the world is a pervasive aesthetic coherence of the structure of matter. There is the harmonious way in which the properties of previously “elementary" objects like protons and neutrons find a natural explanation in terms of their new constituents.

Repeatedly and with reason, in natural science, we find that it was the orderly structure of pure mathematics which provided the clue to understanding the world. As Paul Dirac, one of the pioneers of the famous quantum statistics says:

It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment...because the discrepancy may be due to minor features which are not properly taken into account and which will get cleared up with further developments of the theory...

It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has a really sound instinct, one is on a sure line of success.

In other words, success is measured instinctively by the "beauty'" of the mathematical equations. In fact, it is a recognized technique in fundamental physics, for example, to seek theories which have an elegant and economical mathematical form, in the expectation that they will prove the ones realized in nature.

These are drawn from artistic, cultural and contemplative experiences. Experiences of beauty create a relationship of some kind to the person, animal, or object found beautiful. The initial sensation of these experiences is love that issues forth in the desire to preserve beauty.

2) An Ultimate Criterion of Reality A second observation considers intelligibility as an important and ultimate criterion of reality. In the quantum microworld mechanical objects do not possess visualizable properties like position and momentum, but merely the potentiality for such quantities.

Where objects yield on experimental interrogation not a certain location 'here' but only a probability to be 'here" and a probability to be 'there' in such a world it seems that intelligibility remains the sole criterion of reality. This is the thesis of Polkinghorne.

He puts it in these words: However strange and unexpected the discoveries of quantum physics have proved to be, it is still the case that the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics...continues to operate as a guide to the pattern of the physical universe.

Indeed, I have argued that it is this very intelligibility of the quantum world which is the guarantee of its idiosyncratic reality.

Perhaps that is the most important conclusion, for it allies physics with theology in a common endeavor to understand the many-leveled structure of the universe that we inhabit. For the reality of elementary principles, the appeal is not to sensation but to understanding.

This appeal to understanding in quantum physics is what is called the "superposition principle"… And the ultimate guarantor of this reality is intelligibility.

Again, in the words of Polkinghorne:

It seems to me that the view of quantum theory I am espousing encourages the position that it is intelligibility which is the ultimate guarantor of reality.

My endorsement of the reality of the quantum world...arose from the conviction that the rationally beautiful and transparent patterns of that world must be taken with utmost seriousness. They cannot be downgraded into mere ways of speaking…

Natural science ultimately makes its claim to be dealing with the way the world is on the ground of intelligibility. In fact, this intelligibility convinces one that natural science is investigating the way things are. This brings us to another important dimension of intelligibility.

3) A Strong Potentiality to Awareness A third observation of this intelligibility of the world refers to the potentiality of the universe to awareness of itself and beyond.

If we look at the great picture being painted now by twentieth century science, we find the following three illustrations:

a) a world all but destined to create platforms for life; b) a still unknown but increasingly suspected physical law that all but destined some of these platforms to be populated by little living specks; and c) an evolutionary process that was almost destined, given enough time to turn those particles into thinking, wondering beings.

Suddenly the world seemed almost designed to yield to creatures that read articles about how they came to be here.

In the new creation story which Thomas Berry has often related, this is expressed in the following: Contemporary reflective scientists believe that evolution was very likely, given enough time, to create a species with our essential property: an intelligence so great that it becomes aware of itself.

The story of the universe is the story of the emergence of a galactic system in which each new level of expression emerges through the urgency of self-transcendence. Hydrogen in the presence of some millions of degrees of heat emerges into helium.

After the stars take shape as oceans of fire in the heavens, they go through a sequence of transformations. Some eventually explode into the stardust out of which the solar system and the earth take shape.

Earth gives unique expression of itself in its rock and crystalline structures and in the variety and splendor of living forms, until humans appear as the moment in which the unfolding universe becomes conscious of itself.

The human emerges not only as an earthling, but also as a worldling. We bear the universe in our being as the universe bears us in its being. The two have a total presence to each other and to that deeper mystery out of which both the universe and ourselves have emerged…

In fact, many biologists have long believed that the coming of highly intelligent life was close to inevitable. The intelligibility of the world is concretized in human beings.

Of the countless plant and animal species that evolved on earth, the very one capable of marveling at the beauty and harmony of the universe is the human race. There are various reasons by which natural selection might favor this trend.

Behavioral flexibility, for example, is good explanation for survival and reproduction for humankind. Behavioral selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool.

But it is by far the best tool we have, self- correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules: First, there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.

We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is and how we wish it to be. The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true. Humans everywhere share the same goals when the context is large enough. And the study of the Cosmos provides the largest possible context. Human beings are the most flexible organisms around.

That is why we are still around, and that is why we are conscious enough to wonder why. In yet another view of what the evolution of human beings as cosmos come to consciousness has effected, we have the following ideas.

First, ever since Darwin, the idea of survival of the fittest as an inexorably progressive force has been misused to justify poverty, genocide and suffering in general.

Second, the idea of progressive evolution encouraged some spacy thinking that biologists find highly annoying. The French philosopher Henri Bergson believed in an elan vital - a life-force, an immaterial essence - pushing evolution ever upward.

Third, biologists insist on a strictly physical scenario: genes that aid survival and reproduction are preserved and those that do not, are not preserved (following the principle of natural selection).

All told, this talk about evolutionary progress seemed to have yielded more pain and confusion than it was worth. The privilege of intelligence and awareness exacted their price for humankind: responsibility.

But the fact remains that over time evolution has pushed the envelope of complexity and intelligence outward, the trophies for most intricate species and smartest species being awarded to the human species.

C. The Balance of the Cosmos The third aspect of contemporary science's fresh insight on the cosmos is the realization of the balance required for its continued existence.

In a similar vein, we can make the following three observable points:

1) Chance and Necessity, 2) the Principle of Entropy, and 3) the Anthropic Principle.

1) Chance and Necessity In the first place, the processes of the world seem to depend for their productivity on an interplay between chance and necessity.

A random event (an aggression of atoms, a genetic mutation) produces a new possibility which is then given a perpetuating stability by the regularity of the laws of nature.

Without contingent chance, new things would not happen. Without lawful necessity to preserve them in an environment whose reliability permits competitive selection, they would vanish away as soon as they were made.

It is this interplay between randomness and law that the sources in the evolution of complex systems occur.

From another perspective Jacques Monod, in his book Chance and Necessity, explains their interplay by picturing the evolution of life arising from the chance aggregation of simple molecules complexes replicating themselves (chance) and by portraying these replicating molecules as rapidly reproducing themselves through the regularity of their chemical interaction with the environment (necessity).

In his own words: When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective “teleonomic” performances of living beings, from bacteria to man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at utter random...

The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out.

Monod came down on the side of “chance" and ended on a sad note: “We are alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity" out of which we emerged only by chance. This view tilts the balance of the cosmos.

We have to see the order by which the universe is governed by some underlying creative force. For the life and the heart of our cosmos relies on the balance between chance and order.

On this point, S. Paul Schilling wrote: If randomness alone were in the saddle, the horse would gallop in all directions, or remain in the stall. If chaos is to be averted or overcome there needs to be some unitary principle, some overall order, some ground of stability, within which new species emerge and development takes place.

Utterly unrestrained chance could not account for the connectedness, the interrelationships, or the dependable order of the world we know. That world exhibits determinateness as well as uncertainty, law as well as randomness.

A view that takes account of both features is both more rational and more in accord with the facts. The discovery of "randomness" at the sub-atomic level in quantum mechanics is illustrative of indeterminacy.

This is shown in the famous "principle of uncertainty” discovered by Werner Heisenberg and made public in 1927.

It simply states that: “If I know where it is I do not know what it is doing, and if I know what it is doing I do not know where it is.”

Polkinghorne based this on Heisenberg's explanation that the changes of state within the atom take place in a wholly unpredictable manner.

In fact, Heisenberg recognizes that observable events contain many possibilities and asserts that "the transition from the 'possible' to the 'actual' takes place during the act of observation.”

In short, a quantum mechanical system cannot at the same time have both an exact velocity and an exact position.

However, this randomness or chance is limited by the structure of law in a dependable physical order.

Once true randomness is allowed within an overall order, the enigma of the occurrence of events (especially the negative ones, like suffering, evil, or death) will be overcome.

And the balance between the variety of chance events and the purposive ones in an orderly structure will be obtained in the cosmos... It will bring to a third insight on this interplay between chance and order: creativity.

This is provided by Peacocke in the following: During the last decade it has become increasingly apparent that it is chance operating within a law-like framework that is the basis of the inherent creativity of the natural order, its ability to generate new forms, patterns and organizations of matter and energy.

If all were governed by rigid law, a repetitive and uncreative order would prevail: if chance alone ruled, no forms, patterns for organizations would persist long enough for them to have any identity or real existence and the universe could never be a cosmos and susceptible to rational inquiry.

It is the combination of the two which makes possible an ordered universe capable of developing within itself new modes of existence.

In other words, creativity is a fruit of the balance between chance and necessity. And there is reason to rejoice at the meaningfulness of the universe through the creative acts of "consciousness" and "intelligence" being produced in this interplay.

2) The Principle of EntropyA second observable point in the balance of the cosmos is the principle of “entropy.” As contemporary scientists and writers observe, this is one of the most general and widely accepted trends in nature.

In fact, Peacocke says that it constitutes one of the pillars of modern physical science, namely, that there is always an increase in the quantity (entropy) which measures disorderliness in natural processes in isolated systems, systems across whose boundaries no matter or energy passes.

The 'disorderliness', or 'randomness', referred to here is a precisely defined quantity (the entropy) which is related to the number of possible dispositions of matter over the available energy states.

He wrote:

This is the second law of thermodynamics concerning energy which points to a certain degradation. Hawking discussed this second law in connection with the thermodynamic arrow of time.

The second law of thermodynamics results from the fact that there are always many more disordered states than there are ordered ones. For example, consider the pieces of a jigsaw in a box.

There is one, and only one, arrangement in which the pieces make a complete picture. On the other hand, there are a very large number of arrangements in which pieces are disordered and don't make a picture.

Suppose the pieces of the jigsaw start off in a box in the ordered arrangement in which they form a picture. If you shake the box, the pieces will take up another arrangement.… So the disorder of the pieces will probably increase with time if the pieces obey the initial condition that they start off in a condition of high order...

To put it in another way, the second law of thermodynamics states that "in any conversion of heat energy to useful work, some of the energy is always degraded to a more dispersed and less useful form. Thus the quality of energy decreases in such conversions.

The quantity remains the same but the quality is degraded. As a result, a system of matter subject to energy conversions tends toward increasing randomness or disorder.

The principle of entropy measures the degree of disorder of a system. This reality of disorder is found in our common experience when we, for example, leave things to themselves.

As Hawking again graphically remarked on this reality, “one has only to stop making repairs around the house to see that.”

Even if we say that this principle of entropy moves to the direction of increasing disorder, among living things, they succeed in producing their own order at the expense of exporting disorder into the environment.

For example, in a house that is rusting, one can paint the house to make it look orderly. However, this requires expenditure of energy which decreases the amount of ordered energy from the environment.

On this aspect, Carmody added: An immediate illation environmentalists make is that any society expecting to survive on a finite planet must become a low-entropy or sustainable society based on recycling on reusing matter and reducing the use of energy.

The alternative, a society of expanding growth, runs counter to the second law of thermodynamics.

Today as we use more energy to transform matter into products, and then shuffle these products around the environment, we are increasing the entropy, the disorder, of the environmental whole.

The more we try to conquer the earth and subdue it, the greater stress we put on the environment In other words, the balance of nature may be disturbed if we do not maintain low-entropy environment.

In his book, The Closing Circle, Barry Commoner expresses this same idea of the balance of the cosmos in his four laws of ecology: 1) everything is connected to everything else; 2) everything must go somewhere; 3) nature knows best; and 4) there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Again in all these, the main point of this principle of “entropy" is to make us aware that the balance of the cosmos is best achieved when we know how to use energy responsibly and wisely.

3) The Anthropic Principle

A third observation by which we take note of the delicate and intricate balance necessary for the emergence of life is the anthropic principle.

As many contemporary scientists concur, suppose things had been a little different in those crucial first three minutes when the gross nuclear structure of the world got fixed as a quarter helium and three quarters hydrogen, then our world as it is will not even be.

If things had gone a little faster, all would have been helium. This spells catastrophe. For without hydrogen how could water (vital to life) have been able to form?

On the other hand, if things had gone a little slower, hydrogen would have predominated. In that sort of universe, super-novae probably would not explode to scatter the equally vital heavy elements from their interiors into the environment.

Furthermore, if there has been an infinite cycle of initially expanding and then contracting universes, then the fact that we are around in this particular oscillation might be simply due to the fact that in its details it happened to produce the right conditions.

One of the remarkable features of recent reflections informed by contemporary natural science on the relation of humanity to the rest of the cosmos has been a reversal of the Copernican Revolution. Human life appeared to have only an insignificant role in relation to the vastness of the universe.

However, in the last two decades we have witnessed among scientists an increasingly acute awareness of how finely tuned the parameters and characteristics of the observed universe are for us as observers to be present at all.

In other words, the initial conditions and fundamental constants were such that our own species would inevitably come.

As John Haught clarifies matters: “In some way, the beginnings of the cosmos were already oriented toward the eventual emergence of living and conscious beings who would be aware of the universe.

Many other contemporary scientists concur that the early phases of the universe have always held out much more promise for evolving into life and consciousness than earlier science had allowed. We have here what is called the anthropic principle.

This states that in a universe that is large or infinite in space and time, the conditions necessary for the development of intelligent life will be met only in certain regions that are limited in space and time.

The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. In short, we see the universe the way it is because we exist.

This is called by Hawking as the weak anthropic principle. In the strong version of this anthropic principle. the theory is that there are either many different universes or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own initial configuration and with its own set of laws of science.

Only in a few universes, however, would conditions be right for the development of complicated organisms.

Hawking summarizes the strong anthropic principle with this phrase: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different, we would not be here to observe it in another form.

Freeman Dyson expressed this coming of intelligent beings as unavoidable: "It almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”

Elsewhere, Dyson says on the same point: “l think our consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events in our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another.”

This special power of intelligence facilitated the analysis of the environment, of predators and of food resources and the execution through foresight of planned, cooperative action so that the physically relatively weak human beings began to establish itself in every conceivable habitat leading to domination of the earth.

This domination is a consequence of human self-awareness which set the stage on is enacted the human drama of pain and suffering, a sense of finitude and anticipation of death.

At one and the same time, however, our inner awareness and sense of selfhood both enhance our ability to survive as individuals and as a species relying increasingly on socialization for the survival of the species. This realization is, undoubtedly, a result of the balance of the cosmos.

Robert Wright wrote that the - argument over the anthropic principle has gone on for decades now, with little progress. “lts backers,” continued Wright, having accused others of straining to see divinity, “are in turn accused of the reverse -- harboring a deep-seated aversion to the simple religious idea that the universe was designed for our existence…”