I learned something today I would never have guessed: there's a
thing called the “Informal Federation of Anarchists”. Who would have thought?
Anarchists need organisation; apparently anarchy has its limits! They might rail
against society, hierarchy, order, rules and the rest, but it turns out they’ve
formed their own society (of sorts), and probably even have an implicit, if not
an explicit, hierarchy. They have an order, and they consider some things to be
acceptable, and some things not to be. They set boundaries, and have rules that
you contravene at your peril. Indeed, I learned about the Informal Federation
of Anarchists in a news story reporting that they had claimed to be behind the
vadalisation of a car belonging to a person they accused of being a “snitch”. This
is apparently behaviour beyond the pale, warranting action. A line had been
crossed that they had drawn. Thus they have at least one rule (“snitching is
bad”), and had taken action to enforce it. They don’t want no order, just not
the kind of order they object to. Anarchism isn’t necessarily anarchy it would
seem.
None of this is really such a great surprise, because the
universe in which we find ourselves is ordered. Order is woven into its fabric,
and into the fabric of every human being. It’s so much a part of us that we
find it difficult to conceive of a different state of affairs. Mind you, the
big advantage this brings is that because of this order, and because we are
attuned to it, the universe and what it contains can be understood. It is
knowable. And once we know enough we can manipulate and control it (at least in
part) and make things more pleasant for ourselves. This is formalised in
science, but it’s actually something we depend on every day. It allows us to
make predictions and plans. It allows us to ignore whole swathes of regularity,
and just concentrate on tricky and important decisions and alternatives. If we
have to think carefully about everything we do, then we’d probably run out of processing
capacity. As it is, we’ve got brain power to spare.
We take all this so much from granted that we rarely, if
ever, think about it. Why are things like this, and not like something else?
And what proof do we have that it really is like it is, has always been this
way, and always will be? For a long time these were all non-questions. But some
began to be troubled that we took so much on, well, faith. We just trusted that
the sun would rise in the morning, we didn’t look for proof. Such rules as we
did come up with to explain many of the regularities (like Newton’s laws) were
descriptive. The processes which were used to establish such explanations seemed
also to rest of foundations that were still implicitly about trust. Like
trusting that things operated the same way everywhere (the principle of the
uniformity of nature). They were not themselves provable.
It dawned on cosmologists and others that things have to be
really finely tuned to allow life as we know it, including this kind of ordered
life in an ordered universe. And it’s worth remembering that before that point
it was rather assumed that life as we know it would exist in lots of places.
All you needed was a planet rather than a star. Then it was noticed that said
planet would have to be a certain distance from a certain kind of star. Then it
turned out it would have to have a particular cosmological history and composition.
And right down to the finest details of certain physical constants, things need
to be tuned just so. It turned out that all of this had occurred; everything
had been tuned up in one place, our little corner of the universe. But why?
Well it could all just be an entirely accidental series of
coincidences. And that this is all so highly improbable that it has only happened
in one place over one period time. So even if you could find some places where
some things happed (like a planet with the right kind of orbit around the right
kind of star), other things would not be right for life (either any form of
life, or the kind of life we’re used to). Try as we might, life is so improbable,
that it has only developed in one place (this is the sort of thing the
eponymous Professor Dawkins has suggested). There is an alternative. Suppose
that there is a God, who is a God of order, who brings into being a universe
that reflects His character (this too is not a notion original to me). He
continually acts to sustain that order both in the physical realm and beyond
(eg in the social and moral realms). Such a God need not necessarily be
knowable in and of Himself. But His activity would leave indelible
fingerprints on the Universe. It would have that character of order and knowability.
But precisely because it is knowable, He would therefore be knowable in at
least some ways. At least we would know about Him. But it also strikes me as
reasonable to expect that He might actually want to provide additional means
such that He might not just be knowable in this passive and distant sense, but
to be known. He might reveal something about Himself, so He could be known in
the sense of relationship.
It turns out that order may be really significant. The Informal
Federation of Anarchists tells us something pretty basic about me, you and the
Universe we find ourselves in.
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