Order vs. Chaos

A Radiolab podcast that I happened across a few weeks ago presented the work of certain scientists to the effect that there are probably no overriding principles of order to the universe, and that, in general, “chaos reigns,” as they say.

Let’s take a look. First, if you’re a monotheist, there is nothing troubling here, because it simply isn’t true.  An omnipotent God willed all this into existence, and manages it according to His wits, thus every phenomenon has God’s fingerprints on it.  If that’s not clear to you, that’s your problem.

For everyone else, this may be an interesting finding, but I’m not sure how much that changes things.  One woman, pretending to be hysterical, exclaimed that this implies that own lives are meaningless, and there is no imperative for us to act in any particular way.

But how does that make sense?

Even though it’s hard to conceive of any experiment that could possibly confirm this one way or the other, let’s suppose that the scientists are ultimately correct and that we live in an immutably chaotic universe.  Yet even thought order doesn’t exist external to our planet, it’s obvious that there is plenty of it here on Earth.

Ever since the planet was formed 4.5 billion years ago, it has received 173,000 terawatts of power from the sun every day.  That’s more than 10,000 times the world’s current total daily power consumption, but more to the point, the accumulated energy has enabled a great deal of evolution of life here.

Regardless of the lack of a cosmic scheme, we confer meaning onto our lives via conducting ourselves according to best of our wits.  Our time on Earth passes, and we do our best to make the most of that in terms of what we perceive to be good for ourselves and our fellows.

I’m not sure how the existence of some sort of cosmic order makes that any different.