Order and chaos, light and dark, ...

James Machin · 05 Jun 2006, 12:15 · from 2006-June.txt.gz

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From: jfmachin at hotmail.com (James Machin)
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 12:15:09 +0000
Subject: (urth)  Order and chaos, light and dark, ...
Message-ID: <BAY101-F850932E3231A88ED6EC4FC3940 at phx.gbl>

I don't know about theology, but this passage certainly brings to mind 
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He made a distinction between phenomena 
(things as they are perceived) and noumena (things as they are in themselves 
(“ding an sich”)). His denial that any real understanding of the universe as 
it actually is possible has always made me think about similar schools of 
thought in gnosticism and kabbalism (making the admittedly big assumption 
that the unknowable universe and the unknowable increate are 
interchangeable).

From: Adrian Robert <arobert at cogsci.ucsd.edu>
Reply-To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Subject: (urth) Order and chaos, light and dark, ...
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 23:55:52 -0400

"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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