Anthony Bernard Kelly: Understanding the Process of the Cosmos can lead to The Good Society
Previous page | Next page | Page: 4 of 7 |
Jump to page:
Page 4
Subsequent to his Doctorate he continued to push the frontiers of thought, while working as a volunteer at the University of the Third Age. He published his Dissertation in book form as “The Process of the Cosmos: Philosophical Theology and Cosmology” (1999) Dissertation.com. He posted this book on the Web, together with a number of subsequent papers, in which he developed his ideas. These were to be found at http://members.dingoblue.net.au/~abkelly/ . These early papers included: “Milestones in the Search for Meaning: Process Thought in Hegel to Baltazar and Beyond”, “Aristotle, Teilhard de Chardin and the Explanation Of the World”, “A Natural Theology of Emergence”, “The Spiritual Ice Age and the Scientific Paradigm” and “An Evolutionary Christology”;.
Prior to “The Process of the Cosmos”, people had always had an intuitive awareness of the sacredness of human life, but this awareness had lacked a philosophical justification. The only justifications had been religious ones, but these were often disputed. Now, for the first time, a philosophical justification had been provided for the idea that human life was sacred.
The Process of the Cosmos
The argument in “The Process of the Cosmos”; is that the Cosmos is to be understood as an ongoing process, with a purpose. This process has continued through a series of four emergent stages, identified as the Physical or material stage, the Living or biological stage, the Conscious stage, and the Human moral-cultural stage. Each successive emergent stage is distinguished by being subject to new laws of nature, which do not apply to the previous stage. These emergent stages involve both self-organization and evolution, and finally self-creation. Each new stage of the process exercises a greater degree of freedom in its mode of self-organization or self-creation, than did the previous stage.
Each emergent stage of the process has its own laws of nature. The first emergent stage is the physical stage, which emerges from the Big Bang. The laws of the physical stage are deterministic, but the interaction of these deterministic laws enables different outcomes to result from similar inputs. In other words these laws, though deterministic, permit contingency. When these physical laws give rise to planets, for example, it is highly unlikely that any two planets will have the same characteristics. These physical, chemical and geophysical processes eventually produce a planet, Earth, that is capable of supporting life. This is the first stage of the overall process, the stage of the self-organization of matter.
The next emergent stage is that of life. While the development of physical matter is deterministic, life has a greater degree of freedom to evolve. The development or evolution of living matter is opportunistic. The laws of life, which were only beginning to be understood in the early 21st Century, allow life a greater freedom to evolve than matter has to develop. Initially life is instinctive and vegetative.
Previous page | Next page
