The God of physics part 3

Dave sends these thoughts on the difference between physics and biology by Joseph Wood Krutch from his 1949 book The Twelve Seasons.

I can understand how an astronomer may conclude that God is a mathematician. The planets seem to know where they are going and what they are about. Theirs is a formal, unvarying dance with moves in accord with an abstract scheme of delightful regularity; and the mathematical physicist seems to have discovered that the microcosm is, despite the disturbing presence of certain principles suggesting indeterminacy, a good deal like its big brother of heavenly bodies.

But the world of living things exhibits no such cooperation of part with part, no such subordination of the unit to the whole. The God who planned the well working machines of atomand solar system seems to have had no part in arranging the curiously inefficient society of plants and animals in which everything works against everything else; and the struggle between, let us say, the mouse which would continue its species and the owl which would feed its young goes on inconclusively, millennium after millennium.

No one, it seems to me, who has ever watched the contest between two weeds for a few square inches of soil; no one who has seen the intricate history of the one, from seed to leaf, come to nothing -- can possibly suppose that so wasteful a game of cross-purposes was deliberately devised by the astronomer's mathematical God, or indeed by the intelligence which knew what it wanted. If God made a world of atoms and suns, then perhaps life intruded itself unexpectedly upon unity, through some will of its own, multiplicity on unity, conflict on balance. The individual plant or animal is no doubt marvelously contrived to achieve its purposes, but the society of living things is an anarchy in which events may work themselves out to this conclusion or that - but over which no unity of purpose seems to preside.

Krutch was not only a keen observer of nature, but also a literary lion of his time. He wrote the introduction, for example, to the 1934 Random House edition of Proust’s epic Remembrance of Things Past. There’s an interesting biography on this site devoted to pantheism: http://home.utm.net/pan/krutch.htm