Clocks or Clouds

Jonah Lehrer posted on his Frontal Cortex blog some info from an earlier article of his in Wired magazine.

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, "highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable." The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

Interesting. Lehrer is talking about the desire to get to the root of all things human- the genetic sequencing that will give us all answer to all things. He is saying that this comes from the old "clock" idea. Somewhere at the heart of all things, the "clock" idea says, is a fine-tuned instrument that always runs like "clockwork." But in many ways we know that this is just not so.

It is also interesting when you apply the same thoughts to the ideas about God. There was a time when the theo-philosophers saw God as a great Clockmaker in the sky. he put it all together and then just let it go. That gave an orderliness to it- the universe went like clockwork. But as we have come to see a more chaotic world where things don't seem to always fall into place, perhaps it is time to see God in the universe of clouds.

God- unpredictable? You bet. Just take a look at the Bible. He always does what is least likely to be expected. Choosing a nobody people. Having his Son die. Resurrection. Nah- that's not a clockwork God. It is a God who cares.

Which may be at least something that we can- and should hang on to.