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Wednesday, November 19, 2008 12:00 AM

God enough

We should see the ceaseless creativity of nature as sacred, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman, despite what Richard Dawkins might say.

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  • Wednesday, November 19, 2008 04:43 AM

    From Plato on

    The central, tugging, ineffable and ineluctable point of generation itself is, if not an empirical truth (how could it be, when it must be beyond capture and apprehension, and therefore comprehension), a truth of consciousness. If we are never going to know, through sense data, the truth of falsity of any proposition relating to genesis (in the customary sense of the word), then I go back to Gerard Manly Hopkins: (From the Poetry Foundation http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173664, but copyright free these days)

    Glory be to God for dappled things—

    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

    Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

    All things counter, original, spare, strange;

    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

    He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

    Praise him.

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