Predicting what will happen next based on what is happening now, as clever as it seems on paper, does not even work when it comes to the practical reality of a simple system, like trying to predict where the balls on a billiard table will end up a few shots into the game. Put two pendulums in tandem, one dangling from another. Set the bottom one swinging in one direction and the top in another. With such as the case, it is impossible to predict the position of the lower pendulum.
In more complicated systems this uncertainty rapidly compounds. The physicist confessed, "We understand the interactions between two electrons. But not between three. The idea of building up an understanding of the whole from an understanding the individual parts or particles is fallacious, because new properties (e.g., super-conductivity) emerge when vast numbers of particles join together."
Reductionism, the scientific method, asserts that knowing the parts reveals the whole. Holism counters that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Something new emerges from interaction. Unity yields surprises.
This dichotomy was illustrated for me in a recent phone call I made to a potential advertiser. The local business owner said that his decision would all come down to metrics, to the numbers; show him the cost per view on Lokkal and he would compare it with the cost per view he is getting on Google Ad Words. But to my thinking, context is important, the two views are not equivalent. A view of his ad on Lokkal is worth much more than a view of his ad in a column of Google search results.
The ancient Greeks had many schools of philosophy. Plato taught that there is a realm of ideals that informs our physical world. The Materialists held that matter was blind, undirected, uninformed. Our orthodox science, for reasons that were and are surprisingly political, has followed the Materialists.
But, even in hallowed scientific halls, idealism is making a comeback. Everything is just too complicated. How does the tiny brain of the Monarch butterfly perform the advanced trigonometry necessary to migrate (and this over a cycle of three generations)? How can the lowly flatworm know which 12 of 20,000 genes need to be turned on or off, turned up or down in order to adapt to a new environment?
To account for the overwhelming sophistication of even the simplest living systems (and even some inert systems) level-headed, prestigious scientists, including Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose, postulate quasi-spiritual guiding ideals. And here we are face to face with a quasi-divine realm of direction, plan and design, far from the blind, random matter, of Materialism.
At the time of the Exodus, Egypt was the world's most advanced culture. Even today we are dumb before some of their achievements. But the rabbis tell us that their world-view was false: their magic was black, their religion was perverse, their science was corrupt.
The Jews were enslaved to the Egyptians, not just physically, but spiritually. Physically leaving Egypt was one thing, but liberating oneself mentally from the Egyptian world-view was a bigger trick.
Passover was, and is, the breaking of that dominant messaging. The true Exodus from Egypt is a shedding of that technological, urban chic. It is a breaking of indoctrination: a washing clean by passing through the Sea; an awakening from the evil spell by true Revelation in the purity of the desert; leaving the illusion of Egypt for a closer relationship with the actual World.
Today, our materialistic science and our dominant Existentialism leave us without meaning or purpose; "Everything is an accident." "Everything is relative; there is no truth." It is a deadening world-view that leaves us depressed, quite literally a philosophy of nothing enslaving our society.
The evil of Determinism denies not just Penrose's scientific ideals, but the ideals that hold society together, that make life worth living: Beauty, Truth, Excellence, Tolerance, Honesty, Honor, Sacrifice, Family, Friendship, Sportsmanship... and Freedom.
Passover commands us to regard ourself as though we have personally come out of Egypt. Not just a commemoration, the holiday is a reenactment of liberation. The commandment is to actually free ourselves... and then have a bite to eat; "Aunt Florence's matzo-balls are always very good... oh, so light."
A certain mythology held that the world was supported on the back of a giant turtle. When asked what supported that turtle, the answer came back. "It's turtles all the way down."
Today our microscopes glimpse miracles more complicated than the Ten Plagues, more wondrous than the Splitting of the Red Sea; miracles that are happening every instant in every part of our bodies. The atmosphere's composition shields us from harmful radiation and provides the perfect level of oxygen for controlled fire. The wavelength of light allows for a compact eye. System after system displays an exquisite irreducible complexity that Darwin never imagined. And these systems are linked to each other in webs equally complex, necessary and impossible to explain independently; it's turtles all the way down; the plant secretes a chemical to call the wasp to eat the insect that is attacking the plant.
Science reveals the Divine. If you wanted to describe the subatomic, non-material forces that underlie and make possible our physical world, you could do no better, 2,000 or even 200 years ago, than to talk about angels. I, for one, wonder what else the rabbis got right.
Happy Passover.
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