ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

ORDER OUT OF CHAOS
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nonexclusive view makes it possible for biology and physics to
coexist rather than merely contradict one another.
Finally, yet another profound synthesis is implied-a new
relationship between chance and necessity.
The role of happenstance in the affairs of the universe has
been debated, no doubt, since the first Paleolithic warrior accidently
tripped over a rock. In the Old Te stament, God's will
is sovereign, and He not only controls the orbiting planets but
manipulates the will of each and every individual as He sees
fit. As Prime Mover, all causality flows from Him, and all
events in the universe are foreordained. Sanguinary conflicts
raged over the precise meaning of predestination or free will,
from the time of Augustine through the Carolingian quarrels.
Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin-all contributed to the debate.
No end of interpreters attempted to reconcile determinism
with freedom of will. One ingenious view held that God did
indeed determine the affairs of the universe, but that with respect
to the free will of the individual, He never demanded a
specific action. He merely preset the range of options available
to the human decision-maker. Free will downstairs operated
only within the limits of a menu determined upstairs.
In the secular culture of the Machine Age, hard-line determinism
has more or less held sway even after the challenges of
Heisenberg and the "uncertaintists." Even today, thinkers
such as Rene Thorn reject the idea of chance as illusory and
inherently unscientific.
Faced with such philosophical stonewalling, some defenders
of free will, spontaneity, and ultimate uncertainty, especially
the existentialists, have taken equally uncompromising stands.
(For Sartre, the human being was "completely and always
free," though even Sartre, in certain writings, recognized
practical limitations on this freedom.)
Two things seem to be happening to contemporary concepts
of chance and determinism. To begin with, they are becoming
more complex. As Edgar Morin, a leading French sociologistturned-epistemologist,
has written:
"Let us not forget that the problem of determinism has
changed over the course of a century .... In place of the idea
of sovereign, anonymous, permanent laws directing all things
in nature there has been substituted the idea of laws of interaction
. ... There is more: the problem of determinism has be-