Notes

1. . See T. F. Torrance, Determinismus und freie Schöpfung aus der Sicht der Theologie, Sonderbeilage zum ibw‐Journal, Dezember 1979 (Dortmund: Deutsches Institut fur Bildung und Wissen). Cf. also Michael B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” Mind 43 (October 1934): 446–68; 44 (October 1935): 439–66; 45 (January 1936): 1–27, for a helpful analysis of Greek conceptions of God and nature and un‐Greek elements needed for the rise of empirical science. Unfortunately Foster does not touch the all‐important patristic contribution or deal with the notion of contingent intelligibility.
2. . Immanual Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, pp. B 289–90, A 766–B 794.
3. . Max Born, The Bom‐Einstein Letters (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 221–28 (letters 115 and 116).
4. . Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), p. 243.
5. . Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Souvenir Press, 1954), pp. 233, 240.
6. . Victor Weisskopf, “The Frontiers and Limits of Science,” American Scientist 65, (1977): 405–11. Weisskopf does not elaborate the point that neutrons and electrons have no “memory” of their past but shows that with the nucleus there is a part record of its history embedded in it–e.g., a gold nucleus, like that of other heavy elements such as silver and lead, discloses on analysis that it was produced during a supernova explosion. Crystals yield more information, and self‐reproducing structures most of all. The brain, which is the last step in the self‐producing line, contains the history of all its predecessors but also incorporates the history of its contemporaries by communication.
7. . Ilya Prigogine and A. Babloyantz, “Thermodynamics of Evolution,” Physics Today 25 (November 1972): 23–28; G. Glandsdorf and Ilya Prigogine, Thermodynamics of Structure, Stability and Fluctuations (New York: Wiley‐Interscience, 1971); Ilya Prigogine and G. Nicolis, Self‐Organization in Non‐Equilibrium Systems (New York: John Wiley Ic Sons, 1977); Ilya Prigogine, “Time, Structure and Fluctuations,” Science 201 (1978): 777–85; idem, “The Metamorphosis of Science: Culture and Science Today,” Abba Salama 9 (1978): 155–83. See also idem, From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1979).
8. . Cf. Stephen Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (London: André Deutsch, 1977), pp. 45ff., 52ff., 64ff.; Bernard Lovell, In the Center of Immensities (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 97ff.; Paul Davies, The Runaway Universe (London: J. N. Dent, 1978), pp. 31ff.
9. . Victor Weisskopf, “Of Atoms, Mountains and Stars: A Study in Qualitative Physics,” Science 187 (1975): 605–12.
10. . Any judgment as to whether the universe is expanding at a sufficient rate to resist any possible gravitational collapse back into an “original” dense state would depend on the knowledge, which we do not have, of the mean density of the matter in the universe. But speculation as to the possibility of an endless series of alternative movements of expansion and collapse, i.e., of a so‐called oscillating universe, would have to reckon with a number of questions such as these. Why, e.g., is the fossil radiation from die big bang only 2.7°K which from the inevitable necessities of a cyclic universe would be arbitrary? Why, if there has been (and will be) endless cycles of collapse and expansion, is the universe not far hotter than it is, as one would expect from the increase of entropy through such infinite processes? What value could we seriously give to the contingent nature of the universe upon which all our physics depends if the ultimate necessitarianism of a cyclic or oscillating universe would have the effect–as indeed it would–of having to necessitate all the processes down the line, making us regard contingence in the impossible Kantian way as only under the condition of necessity? In other words, speculation as to an oscillating universe would imply connections in thought that would destroy the foundations of physics we actually work with and invalidate all the results on the ground of which we speculate in this way! It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there are types of minds which want to get rid of singularities and contingence at any price.