This is from Holmes Rolston III’s essay “Science, Religion, And The Future.”

“…evolutionary and molecular biology seem to be discovering that the history of life is a random walk with much struggle and chance, although they have also found that, on this seemingly random walk, over millennia, order is built up a negentropic slope, attaining in Earth’s natural history the most complex and highly ordered phenomena known in the universe, such as ecosystems, organisms, and- most of all-the human mind.”

I have always, instinctively, rejected the idea that order has somehow come about randomly, and the more I learn about the history and philosophy of science the more I think randomness is something science falls back on when it can’t understand something; moreover, it seems science must believe in randomness, as if there is something driving the development of the universe, it would be outside of science’s purview. We have really been under the heel of positivism too long; it is time we start thinking more imaginatively, more comprehensively.