More Thoughts from Deeper than Darwin

Haven't posted much lately.  Work has been so demanding.  My mind in the off moments has settled on the superficial.  In some brief moments, however, have been savoring . . . slowly . . .  the book Deeper than Darwin by John Haught.  Here are some quotes that jump out or me.

This is for the new atheists:

Only cosmic literalists will claim to have read the world all the way down,  and what they take for ultimate depth sooner or later turns out to be merely  surface.

....

Speaking of Alfred North Whitehead

Physical reality in an evolving universe is  made up, he observes, of moments, events or occasions, not chunks of spatialized stuff.  It is an illusory abstraction to assume, as old-fashioned materialists  do, that the fundamental units of nature are particles of lifeless  matter. If nature is a process of becoming, then its reality is temporal; and  time, logically speaking, is composed of happenings, not atoms. What we  think of as mechanisms or bits of matter are not concretely real, but at best  useful scientific abstractions. If nature is in evolution, then its fundamentally  temporal character can be broken down concretely only into events, not materialized monads.

As one trained and entranced by science and in particular physics, where one goal is the study and the pursuit of the understanding of the tiny bits of matter that constitute everything, it is little wonder that some of us would see the world as mechanism.  But that is not the whole story.  The book his helpful in seeing that.