Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

God and the Cosmos: Finding the Right Metaphor

In this short essay, I’d like to address a profound philosophical question: what is the most appropriate metaphor for expressing the relationship between the cosmos and its Designer (whom I shall assume, for the purposes of this essay, to be God the Creator)? From an Intelligent Design standpoint, a suitable metaphor would have to encompass the following facts, at the very least: (a) the objects within our cosmos are not parts of God, but are really distinct from their Creator; (b) the objects within our cosmos are not abstract forms but concrete entities, with their own characteristic causal powers; (c) any object existing within Nature – especially a living thing – possesses immanent finality: that is, its parts have an Read More ›

Cell duplication, biocybernetics in action

John von Neumann, in his mid-1950s ground breaking studies about the mathematical theory of self-reproducing automata, argued that self-replication basically involves: — import of materials; — symbolic description/instructions; — memory; — constructor; — controller. He developed his theory before the discovery of DNA and the cellular machinery based on information processing. Here I will deal a little with the relations and similarities between such cybernetic theory and the biological process of cellular duplication. First, we must keep in mind that the biological cell is a natural living thing, a true whole, something characterized by a far higher degree of integration and unity compared to any artificial automaton. This is the reason why in cell division (and in general all what Read More ›

Not Unbroken

I am broken. I am not alone though.  You are broken too.  In fact, the whole world and everyone in it is broken.  We recognize that there is the way things are and there is the way things should be and the two are not the same. What shall we make of this universal awareness of our own brokenness in particular and the world’s brokenness in general?  Denying the awareness exists does no good.  It is there.  It is glaring.  It stares each of us in the face every day.  Denying it is foolish because such a denial is not only false; it is obviously false and convinces no one. So there it is; our awareness of our and the Read More ›