Agency and Information: Non-material Realities

Rod Nave, Ph.D., Dept of Physics and Astronomy, Georgia State University

The materialistic worldview postulates that matter is the primary reality and that everything is composed of matter, with mind emerging from matter. The worldview is typified by Sagan's "The cosmos is all there is, was, or ever shall be." The mechanisms of materialism are chance and necessity. Here, necessity contains the laws of nature which describe how matter behaves, given the initial conditions.

This session will explore the assertion that laws do not cause anything: agency is necessary to provide the impetus to action, and then laws describe the behavior. We will also explore the assertion that complex specified information is necessary for the origin of life, and that information is, like agency, a non-material reality. Neither agency nor information can be generated by undirected natural processes.

The existence of essential non-material realities encourages the view that there is mind behind matter.

Agency and Information: Non-material Realities

Rod Nave

Agency and Information: Non-material Realities

Paley Revisited?

A neat quote from Fred Hoyle notes that Paley is still in the running.

"It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner... Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific."