“We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God.”

— Freeman Dyson

Progress In Religion (2000)
Context: My personal theology is described in the Gifford lectures that I gave at Aberdeen in Scotland in 1985, published under the title, Infinite In All Directions. Here is a brief summary of my thinking. The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence.

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Freeman Dyson 90

theoretical physicist and mathematician 1923

Donna VanLiere (1966) American writer

Source: Finding Grace: A True Story About Losing Your Way In Life...And Finding It Again

“It would seem the incoming Trump administration plans to handle its affairs — domestic and foreign — in a manner that meets the dictionary definition of a “rogue state” as one “that conducts its policy in a dangerously unpredictable way.””

Dana Milbank (1968) American journalist

Trump’s one consistent policy: Chaos https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-one-consistent-policy-chaos/2016/12/06/f1a5a5ae-bbf7-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?utm_term=.f664c9ebc888, The Washington Post (December 6, 2016)

“Jesus says God isn't like a gumball machine; he's more like the wind: unpredictable, uncontrollable, no more containable than wind in a bottle.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

“The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.”

Stanley Fish (1938) American academic

Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 6, The Additive Style, p. 62

“Let's break free from artificial relationships with unfeeling, uncaring, unloving institutions that cannot contain the unpredictable wind of God's Spirit, and focus instead on building soulish connections with real people filled with the breath of God.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

“One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. Great works of art seem to look different every time one stands before them. They seem to be as inexhaustible and unpredictable as real human beings.”

Ernst Gombrich book The Story of Art

Source: The Story of Art (1978), p. 33.

“We are the gods of the atoms that make up ourselves but we are also the atoms of the gods that make up the universe.”

Manly P. Hall (1901–1990) Canadian writer and mystic

Think on These Things (1998), compiled by Clarke E. Johnston, p. 22
Other quotes

“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Si je me tue ce ne sera pas pour me détruire, mais pour me reconstituer, le suicide ne sera pour moi qu’un moyen de me reconquérir violemment, de faire brutalement irruption dans mon être, de devancer l’avance incertaine de Dieu. Par le suicide, je réintroduis mon dessin dans la nature, je donne pour la première fois aux choses la forme de ma volonté.
“On Suicide,” no. 1, Le Disque Vert (1925).

“There is much cloudy unpredictable process throughout the whole of the physical world. It is a coherent possibility that God interacts with the history of creation by means of "information input" into its open physical process. The causal net of the universe is not drawn so tight as to exclude this possibility. Mere mechanism is dead, and a more subtle and supple universe is accessible to the providential interaction of the Creator.”

John Polkinghorne (1930) physicist and priest

page 89.
Quarks, Chaos & Christianity (1995)

“When we speak plainly of death we stand equal to it.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

"Complete Hero" (2009)

“We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God.”

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