Does Chaos Tell a Story?

Abstract

Steven Weinberg, in Dreams of a Final Theory, asserts that ‘we’ are not likely to find an ‘interested God in the final laws of nature.’ The laws are more likely to lead inexorably toward a ‘chilling impersonality.’ It is better to avoid the cheap consolations of religion by courageously embracing the resistance of science.¹ Where the Christian theologian encounters the world as gift, others believe that the determinist laws of nature promote resignation to the reality principle. Within the impervious cycles of nature, creativity and the availability of a hopefully different future appear impossible. It is an ‘almost irresistible temptation to believe’ that there must be ‘something for us outside,’ beyond; ‘The honor of resisting this temptation is only a thin substitute for the consolations of religion, but it is not entirely without satisfactions of its own.’² To Weinberg’s credit, a humane stoicism may be the only authentic alternative to religious piety in our postmodern world.

But in those days what did I know of the pleasures of loss,

Of the edge of the abyss coming close with its hisses

And storms, a great watery animal breaking itself on the rocks,

Sending up stars of salt, loud clouds of spume.

Mark Strand, from XLIV, Dark Harbor