Order and disorder in nature, science, and religion

Abstract

Astrophysics and nuclear physics are describing a universe "fine-tuned" for life, although physics has also found a universe with indeterminacy in it. Meanwhile evolutionary and molecular biology seem to be discovering that the history of life is a random walk with much struggle and chance, driven by selfish genes, although they have also found that in this random walk order is built up over the millennia across a negentropic upslope. Recent accounts do not make the genes out to be blind and random, so much as a problem solving process. Earth's natural history attains the most complex and highly order phenomena known in the universe, such as ecosystems, organisms, and, most of all, the human mind.