Here are a couple of thoughts rattling around my brain at the end of another exhausting work week. If I have any thoughts at all on a Friday night, then it wasn\u2019t really such a bad week.<\/p>\n
First \u2013 I was reading the 150th anniversary issue of The Atlantic, which had a diverse set of essays regarding \u201cthe American idea\u201d<\/a>. Most of the authors seemed to agree that there was and is \u201can American ideal\u201d generally having something to do with freedom. As to what freedom is and what it means, however, the authors start diverging rather quickly. That\u2019s where the discussion gets interesting. However, there was little to no discussion on whether the \u201cAmerican formula\u201d is reproducible. That to me is the 20 million dollar question. Is our nation\u2019s high level of success and prosperity a function of a well-designed political and governmental system that maximizes human freedom? Or is America just a set of unique events and circumstances that came together at the right times and in the right places, and there isn\u2019t much in terms of principle that can be profitably transplanted to other lands? <\/p>\n Second \u2013 I was pondering the matter of entropy in the universe. You know, the second law of thermodynamics. The classic view is that things generally start off with low entropy, which means high levels of organization and much potential for work. Kind of like how we humans are when we are young. But over time, we get more and more disorganized and our potential for getting work done declines. As such, our entropy is increasing. At first it sounds good that something increases with age (other than the number of years, months and day of our lives), but then it sounds bad in that we get frayed and weaker. <\/p>\n In recent years, however, there has been another view of entropy, an informational view<\/a>. According to the informational view, the higher the entropy (the more mixed up a big group of things seems), the more information that can be stored in it. For instance, imagine a book full of letters that just kept repeating the alphabet, a to z and then back to a, over and over. That book would be a lot more organized, but it would hold a whole lot less info than a typical book with its seemingly jumbled-up groupings of letters.<\/p>\n So, maybe thermodynamics and information science say something about the human experience of aging. Something akin to \u201cI\u2019m older but wiser\u201d.<\/p>\n Third \u2013 I just caught up a bit on the tiff going on over British philosopher Antony Flew<\/a> and his abandonment in recent years of the hard-core atheistic views that defined most of his life, toward a clear but tenuous belief in \u201ca God of sorts\u201d. Flew\u2019s God is not exactly the Hebrew Testament\u2019s God of power and might, or the New Testament\u2019s God of love and wisdom. Flew is now a \u201cdeist\u201d, someone who believes in a remote, unemotional, uncaring God, one quite different from the Judeo-Christian portrait of God. Flew doesn\u2019t think that this God gave us souls that will reunite with \u201cHim or Her\u201d at the end of time; he doesn\u2019t believe in an after-life. However, for a philosopher who intellectually denied the existence of God for decades to turn around and accept the notion that the Universe requires something more than what science can provide to make sense of it is rather important. It at least lays an intellectual foundation beneath the more sober portraits of God that some of our church thinkers present (in their better moments; there’s still too much “snake-handleing” and fairy-tale religion in America). <\/p>\n So, no wonder the atheists are taking \u201cthe flight of Flew\u201d seriously. In a recent Sunday NY Times Magazine article<\/a>,one of their supporters claims that Flew\u2019s conversion had a lot to do with his age (over 80) and a group of Christians who befriended him, perhaps in a conspiracy to brainwash the guy in his elderly vulnerability. It\u2019s no secret that the book about his conversion was written by one of these Christians (Roy Varghese), although attributed to his authorship. If you want to take a peak at some of the arguments and the level of urgency being expressed by both sides to this controversy, take a look at the Amazon book reviews<\/a> for his recent \u201cThere Is A God\u201d. I take my hat off to all of them; these people are taking the issue very seriously. Is Flew a victim of entropic thermo-decay, or a beneficiary of entropic information growth? Is Flew\u2019s conversion a reproducible model or just the story of one man? Ah yes, once again I\u2019ve found a common thread (however frayed) between three diverse subjects. Pretty good for a Friday night when I\u2019m ready to zonk out from exhaustion!<\/p>\n Let intellectual freedom ring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here are a couple of thoughts rattling around my brain at the end of another exhausting work week. If I have any thoughts at all on a Friday night, then it wasn\u2019t really such a bad week. First \u2013 I was reading the 150th anniversary issue of The Atlantic, which had a diverse set of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,23,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5521,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/5521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}