Cosmic Creative Propensity

Interesting essay entitled “What Does Our Understanding of Time Suggest About the Nature of Reality?” at Big Questions Online (Templeton Foundation website).

I was especially taken by the first comment (in the discussion in the right hand column) in which the commenter, George Gantz, made the following observations:

The determinism of the Unitary Block falls apart in light of the issues of complexity/ computability and quantum indeterminacy. Moreover, we cannot deny the evidence of our own experience – the Experienced World is where we live every day…The only answer that seems to make any sense to me is that mathematical laws provide the form into which physical laws (behaviors) emerge, driven by a fundamental cosmic creative propensity…

Why atheism entails the possibility of God

The following partial definitions of atheism and materialism are taken from the American Atheists web pages:

Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a life-style and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.

Materialism declares that the cosmos is devoid of immanent conscious purpose…

I think the partial definition of materialism quoted is a denial of the very means by which the author has constructed the definition. That, I think, is the fundamental problem of atheist materialism – it fails to account for the inherent purposiveness and creativeness that its proponents quite deliberately employ in order to formulate and express the principles of their own “mental attitude”.