Order and chaos, light and dark, ...

Bob Miller · 05 Jun 2006, 13:28 · from 2006-June.txt.gz

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From: bob_bageera at hotmail.com (Bob Miller)
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 08:28:58 -0500
Subject: (urth) Order and chaos, light and dark, ...
In-Reply-To: <BAY101-F850932E3231A88ED6EC4FC3940 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <BAY103-F40E63B3611ED873194A13488940 at phx.gbl>

I deny wisdom or knowledge of Wisdom; however, as a science fiction fan the 
thought that came to mind when I first read this 20 some years ago was, "Ah, 
this man reads Roger Zelazny, too."  Who, of course robbed his from earlier 
texts (as you were subsuming of Wolfe) such as the Upa nishads or Hindi 
mystical writings drawn from several of the Vedas (Max Muller's translation 
only one I've dealt with).  And, of course, we may thank Ms. Wolfe's 
creativity for going on from there.  And, btw, I have read passages of the 
BOTNS in Bible study class to share insights.

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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