The other day I was looking over the books in my library, facing the tremendous difficulty of trying to decide what books I can remove in order to make way for new books.  It’s such a difficult situation, because a person never knows just what thought or fact you would need to review while trying to make sense of things.  It’s the ideas gleaned from many books that provide the explanatory framework around which new facts are analyzed and fitted.

As I often do, I was thinking of the political scene, and wondering which book(s) would help bring understanding out of the chaos.  How can you make sense out of chaos?  Then my thoughts jumped to the more philosophical question – how can you make sense of randomness?

According to the going scientific story, the world is the result of randomness.  The driver of evolution is the mutation of a gene, a mistake that happens randomly, with no outside direction or teleological goal.   When enough of these happen in a right combination, a new organ or even species is presented for our amazement.  But if the world is, in the final analysis, a random collection of mutations that made good, how can it be made sense of?  Doesn’t ‘making sense’ of something require an order, a blueprint, a design by which to interpret it?

Then my mind went back to a short lecture I heard from a Penn professor quite a few years ago.  It was from what they called “The 60-second lecture series,” in which Penn faculty “distill[ed] a thought into an eloquent and brief message” presented to students and alumni.

In a lecture entitled “the Knowable Universe,” Professor Vijay Balasubramanian  (Physics department) said the following.  “The most amazing thing about this world of wonders is that we can understand it.  It is not at all evident why this had to be the case…there is no compelling reason why the inner workings of the universe should be comprehensible to us.”

That’s exactly the conclusion you must come to when you think about trying to make sense of random mutations.  Of course, you can follow the Existentialists, and decide there truly is no order, so therefore we, as humans, must impose some type of order on the world.  But that obviously doesn’t cut it; even a two-year old knows you fall when you jump off the bed.

Prof. Balasubramanian continued his thought.  “But it (understanding) is the case, and there are two reasons why.  First, underneath all of the immense complexity and apparent randomness of the natural world, there seems to be an intricate order…What is more, the human mind can apparently understand the underlying structure in the universe…there is no compelling reason why the inner workings of the universe should be comprehensible to us.  But they are.  The human mind apparently apprehends the abstract patterns within the universal weave.”

He went on to give an example.  “We can give a complete description of the physics of light in four short equations that would fit on a T-shirt.  Nature is replete with such miraculous orderly relations.”

Without the underlying order, there simply cannot be an understanding, a comprehension of the world around us.  Randomness, on a grand scale, yields chaos, not understanding.

Every one of the books on my shelves, the philosophy, the economics, the history, all attempt to make sense of the universe by applying theories of order, of design, of logical connections.  Naturalism, the current version of our scientific worldview, simply destroys their foundation.

Only the Christian worldview, which sees the world as the result of a logical mind, provides a firm foundation for understanding the world.

(The 60-Second Lecture Series copyrighted 2007 by Univ. Of Penn Trustees)

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