I'm pretty new to the debate of whether or not the universe is ordered or chaos, I'm sure this topic has already been covered(i couldnt find any threads) so please feel free to post links to threads already covering this topic.
So I have a few questions:
1. Is there order in the universe? Or is it chaos?
2. If the universe is ordered, then does that imply the existence of an orderer?
3. Could you guys give me any good links for learning more about the subject of chaos vs order?
And if you could also explain "why" for your answers I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
1. Ordered chaos.
Crazy stuff happens. Stars explode, an enormous black hole lies at the center of our galaxy, asteroid impacts interrupt the flourishing of life on planets and cause mass extinctions, lions hunt buffalo, volcanoes erupt, particles can at best be described as probability waves rather than clear "things", most of the universe is empty dark cold space, children die of cancer or miscarriages, I'm eating chocolate right now and it tastes good, the observable universe is not observed to be symmetrical and looks like a heterogeneous set of clusters of spirals, etc.
But all of it seems to follow rules. The birth/death cycle of stars, the operations of a black hole, asteroids, and basically everything is describable with mathematics and science, with increasing degrees of accuracy. So it's not a completely illogical system, although there's not an agreed upon discernible purpose, point, relevance, or value to anything in it.
2. No. The watchmaker analogy is flawed in the sense that it answers nothing. If a watch is found, a logical assumption may be that it had a maker. But it must then be logical to assume the maker had a maker, and so on, in an infinite loop. If it's argued that the maker can make itself, or require no maker, then the watch could be argued to have that same description. If the universe is complex and in some way ordered, and it is therefore implied that something more complex and ordered, like a god, therefore must have created it, then the next question of course would be, "then who is the maker of this god, if complex and ordered things must have makers?"
Snowflakes can form fairly complex and subjectively beautiful shapes by means of simple laws. Less complex systems demonstrate complexity through repetition- simple rules to build complex and pretty shapes. Orderliness need not imply that something more ordered than itself indeed ordered it.
And if anything, our universe is less like a watch being found with participants wondering whether there's a watchmaker, but more like finding a Jackson Pollock painting:
and trying to figure out where it came from and what the heck is going on.
I really can't see much of the universe from here, but from the pictures I've seen of our Solar system, and others, it seems to be a controlled chaos. It seems from the tiniest atoms, which have electrons circling around, it seems that the whole thing is circling around and around. People can't help but notice that atoms look an awful lot like a miniature solar system.
Atoms don't literally look like the Bohr model used in textbooks. That's a simplification to get early points across. Atoms only look like little solar systems when they are purposely described as a little solar system to provide a basis for understanding.
More accurate models of atoms are probability clouds with complex orbitals, rather than little spheres circling other spheres, and have little or nothing in common with solar systems.
What Do Atoms Really "Look Like?"
