Creation: Order & Disorder in Physics & Biology

— Middle Tennessee State University 1990

"Creation: Order and Chance in Physics and Biology." Henry Harrell Memorial Lecture in Religion. Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN. April 19, 1990.

Online at: https://hdl.handle.net/10217/235465

The relations between physics and theology are surprisingly cordial at present; the relations between biology and theology are more difficult. A key to understanding the interrelations of all three: physics, biology, and religion lies in examining the concept of order and disorder. 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 biology 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, attaining in Earth’s natural history the most complex and highly ordered phenomena known in the universe, such as ecosystems, organisms, and, most of all, the human mind.