Notes

  1. . Daily Telegraph (May 9, 1979), p. 1.
  2. . Ibid., p. 11.
  3. . See my article,“Art, Theology and Religious Systems: A Case for the Inquisition?” Zygon 13 (1978): 329.
  4. 4. 1.1. 23–25:“Chremes, have you so much spare time from your own affairs that you can devote time to other things, and indeed to things which have no real bearing on you?”
  5. . Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), pp. 25–26.
  6. . Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
  7. . Mircea Eliade, The Quest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 6.
  8. . Ibid., p. 61.
  9. . I.e.,“closed” in a systems sense (self‐contained for the purposes of account and explanation), in contrast to “open,” which designates a system which interacts across its boundaries with its environment.“Closed” and “open” are also used in a different sense, not applicable here, in cosmological discussions of the issue of whether, if galactic clusters are separating at more than the escape velocity, they will continue to separate (open universe) or whether, if they are not, there will be a contraction leading eventually to a further “big bang”(oscillating or closed universe).
  10. . See the discussion of this point and this quotation in my The Sense of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 18.
  11. . Pattee, “Physical Theories of Biological Coordination,” Quarterly Review of Biophysics  9 (1971): 260–61.
  12. . Ibid., p. 256.
  13. . Ibid., p. 256.
  14. . Ibid., p. 260.
  15. . For a discussion see my Sense of God (n. 10 above), p. 88.
  16. . The spontaneous rise of constraints is discussed, with reference to the origin of life and the work of Manfred Eigen and Ilya Prigogine, in my article,“Did God Create This Universe?” in Science and Theology in the 20th Century, ed. A. R. Peacocke (London: Oriel Press, 1981).
  17. . Pattee, p. 261.
  18. . Ibid., p. 262.
  19. . Jay W. Forrester, World Dynamics (Cambridge, Mass.: Wright‐Allen Press, 1971), p. 1.
  20. . Ibid., p. 17.
  21. . Ibid., p. 127.
  22. . It is true that what is known as the principle of total evidence advises us to include all the available information about an object under consideration when calculating a probability, but for macroscopic events that is not possible, and in any case it would convert probability into determination. On this point see S. Watanabe (“Time and the Probabilistic View of the World,” in The Voices of Time, ed. J. T. Fraser [London: Allen Lane, 1968], p. 548) who comments:“The usefulness of probability stems from the fact that the description of nature becomes simpler by ignoring intentionally some of the less important factors”–the view adopted here in the discussion of constraint.
  23. . D. J. Lewis, Scientific Principles of Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice‐Hall, Inc., 1963), p. 12.
  24. . See n. 9 above.
  25. . Obviously there are very different ways in which transmission can be secured. Religions do not have to have strong boundary conditions to ensure successful transmission. There is thus a clear taxonomy of religious systems, in which Vatican Catholicism may resemble Iranian Islam, and Anglicanism may resemble Mahayana Buddhism. But it is beyond the scope of this paper to draw up that taxonomy.