Order and chaos, light and dark, ...

Adrian Robert · 02 Jun 2006, 03:55 · from 2006-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: arobert at cogsci.ucsd.edu (Adrian Robert)
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 23:55:52 -0400
Subject: (urth) Order and chaos, light and dark, ...
Message-ID: <3c6a5f235f9f82a3606ff7d0604b137e at cogsci.ucsd.edu>

"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?

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net