 |
| 
still_unsure
Registered Member
Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 54
| Posted 2/14/2002 8:11 AM (GMT -6) |   | Hi Dr. Boyd:
I have been re-reading Prigogine's book The End of Certainty, his popular(I wish he'd write another and dumb it down a bit!) introduction to thermodynamics and nonequilibrium physics.
He talks about the impact deterministic chaos would have on Laplace's demon. Unless the demon knew initial conditions with infinite precision, he could no longer make trajectory descriptions of future or past states. Simple enough, God could certainly have such precision.
Unfortunately Prigogine claims there is an even more powerful instability that leads to the destruction of predicable trajectories NO MATTER WHAT the precision of knowledge of initial conditions. This instability he calls "Poincare Resonances". It is these resonances that give rise to novelty in the universe. This troubles me as he contends that future states of the universe are not implicit in it's present or past states. This seems to be supreme indeterminism! It's not just a choice between two or more POSSIBLE trajectories, but rather simply NEW trajectories, completely unpredictable. Have I misread his ideas? This would seem to render a temporal God amost blind as to future states of the universe. Do I perhaps need to assume God is not limited by these implications or is this Process-like reality compatible with Open Theism? Like you, I don't feel a "timeless God" is a resonable alternative. How much "novelty" did God intend? Were humans, in our present form, necessarily His intent? Or was the Universe's goal simply "intelligence"? Am I staying to far from scripture and classical ideas? Magneton, have you studied any of this?
Rob
| | Back to Top | | |
 |
still_unsure
Registered Member
Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 54
| Posted 2/14/2002 2:51 PM (GMT -6) | | Sorry Dr. Boyd, seems I have misunderstood Prigogine. He doesn't advocate an arbitrary universe but one with definable probabilities. I will have to read him again more carefully for he also claims genuine novelty occurs. It's hard for me to reconcile these concepts.
Blessings
| | Back to Top | | |
| Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 4:31 PM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|