As a devout Christian, I have to admit I see the appeal of Taoism. Taoism stresses opposites: male and female, hot and cold, good and evil, order and chaos. As a Christian, however, I don't agree that chaos is just as prevalent as order. After all, chaos is intelligible. Since intelligibility presupposes order, it follows that there is order behind allegedly chaotic events. It's not as if chaotic events are intelligible, and then suddenly unintelligible. Moreover, it's not as if "chaotic" events violate the laws of logic.
Order, therefore, appears more fundamental to reality than chaos. They're not equally eternal, so-to-speak, as Taoism teaches. Chaos is subordinate to order, which is just one reason I could never be a Taoist. As a Christian, I believe that the universe exhibits order because God created the universe, and the universe exhibits the order that God has imbued it with.
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I've always been led to understand chaos as nothing; thus the comparing of order to chaos is as being to nothing. This yields the same sort of analysis as yours (i.e. being is more fundamental than nothing).
ReplyDeleteThat's a good way of looking at it. I don't think total chaos is even logically possible. Some things may or may not be random, but they're still highly ordered.
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