Order and Disorder Nature in Nature, Science, and Religion (1993)

"Order and Disorder in Nature, Science, and Religion," by Holmes Rolston III. in Shields, George W. and Mark Shale, eds., Science, Technology and Religious Ideas: Proceedings of the Institute for Liberal Studies, 1-14. Frankfort, KY: Institute for Liberal Studies, Kentucky State University, 1993. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/70408

Astrophysics and nuclear physics are describing a universe "fine-tuned" for life, although physics has also found a universe with indeterminacy in it. Meanwhile evolutionary and molecular biology seem to be discovering that the history of life is a random walk with much struggle and chance, driven by selfish genes, although they have also found that in this random walk order is built up over the millennia across a negentropic upslope. Recent accounts do not make the genes out to be blind and random, so much as a problem solving process. Earth's natural history attains the most complex and highly order phenomena known in the universe, such as ecosystems, organisms, and, most of all, the human mind.