History of the Value Problem
Does "Goodness" exist? We find this a much more tractable problem than whether God exists. And identifying goodness will discover something often attributed to a God.
The Existentialists thought good did not exist . Most religions place its origin in a supernatural Being. Humanists felt it a human invention. Modern bioethicists situate value in all life. A variety of ancient religions looked to the sun as the source of all life and thus good. If not the sun itself, they anthropomorphized the "bright sky" as God. Dark and the night were stigmatized forever as evil and "fallen."
Philosophers have ever longed to discover a cosmic good. Their ideal source of the good was remote as possible from the Earth in space and in time. For Plato a timeless Good was found in Being itself. For his student Aristotle, Good was a property of the first principles that set the world in motion. For Kant it needed a transcendental God in a noumenal realm outside space, time, and the phenomena.
Can we discover a cosmic good? At least identify the source of anything resembling the Good? Yes, we can.
Does it resemble the Good anthropomorphized as a God personally concerned about our individual goods? No, it does not.
But our source of goodness has one outstanding characteristic of such a God. We can say it is Providence, that which has provided for our existence. We have discovered that which provides. It provides the light, it provides life, it provides intelligence.
Again celebrating the first modern philosopher, René Descartes, we name our model for value and Goodness the
Ergo.
We call
"ergodic" those few processes that resist the terrible and universal Second Law of Thermodynamics, which describes the increase of chaos and entropy (disorder). Without violating the Second Law, ergodic processes reduce the entropy locally, producing pockets of negative entropy (order and information-rich structures). We will see that ergodic processes radiate away positive entropy, far more than the local reduction, thus satisfying the Second Law.
We call all this cosmic order the
Ergo. It is the ultimate
sine qua non. All else is chaos.
For those who want to anthropomorphize on the slender thread of discovering the natural Providence, they might call it the
Ergod. No God can be God without being
Ergodic.
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