Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
We are bound to acknowledge therefore that holism challenges
the principle of the objectivity of nature which implies that matter
is inert. Through reintroducing the idea of creative activity it once
again dons a principle of internal movement, which is a character-
istic of animism. The majority of holists may indeed reject the idea
of a supernatural God, but they do so in order to immerse Him
deeper in the very heart of nature. They may not support the idea
of Creation as a separate original action, but they do not do so in
order to reintroduce it more effectively in the form of continuous
creation. For them, God is no longer external to the world He is cre-
ating but is immersed in it, and emergence is just the manifestation
of His presence.
We shall now investigate whether these theories could help
resolve the problem posed by the non-specificity of molecules, but
first, several points that will facilitate this investigation need to be
discussed.
Emergence can be understood as having a weak or a strong
meaning. It indicates the creation of totalities which have non-
predictable properties. However, this non-predictability could be
subjective if it only depended on the imperfections of our cognitive
capacity and not on the appearance in nature of properties which
are really irreducible. For example, we cannot analyse certain
processes because they involve too many parameters, so we say
their properties are emergent. In this case, the concept of emergence
only highlights the limits of our knowledge. It may be that with the
development of research we will be able to go beyond those limits
and that in the future, we may be capable of predicting and
explaining these properties that have previously been considered
irreducible. If that were the case, there would be no creation of rad-
ically new properties but simply an effect difficult to predict owing
to the multiplicity of causes. This weak meaning of the concept of
emergence presents no problem because it does not call into ques-
tion the classic cause and effect relationship. For the holist, how-
ever, emergence means the creation of radical novelty (a structure
or a property) corresponding to an objective reality in nature. With
this strong meaning, it is a question of real creation
ex nihilo
and
