Proportionality is best known in its use as a word in Law; Statute Law. Most of us know that rule on which our law is based and which was parodied by the operetta-makers Gilbert and Sullivan, who said;’ Make the punishment fit the crime’. This making the punishment fit the crime is an example of proportionality. Another example is a saying my wife uses about people who overreact about solving a problem. She says that they ‘use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut’. Another proverbial saying is the one which we use to accuse people of making too much fuss over an event; ‘Making a mountain out of a molehill’. Both too much fuss and over-reactive remedies are disproportionate as answers to the problems for which they are chosen to solve. So by now you should be getting an idea of what the word ‘proportionality’ means and how it is used.
Now let’s look at magnitude; which deals with the relative sizes of things we meet with in with life; and the example of the importance of magnitude is given in the story of Goldilocks and The Three Bears. Papa Bear’s chair was too big; Baby Bear’s chair was just right. Papa Bear’s bed was too big; Baby Bear’s bed was just right; both were just right for Goldilocks because she too, like Baby Bear, was a child, and so she was smaller than her parents were; just as Baby Bear was smaller than his parents were.
Goldilocks found a chair and a bed of the appropriate magnitude for herself; but magnitude isn’t only about the size of objects. Goldilocks’s found Papa Bear’s porrage too hot and found Mama Bear’s porrage too cold; she also found Mama Bear’s bed too soft, and Papa Bear’s bed too hard. And so magnitude can be about hot and cold and about comfortable and uncomfortable as well; and it can also be about lots of other things that have a spectrum with an extreme at either end. North and south; east and west; beginning and end; wet and dry; and so on.
So we have these two ideas; proportionality and magnitude; with which we can look at nature and at the world in which we live.
It is an argument of some vintage, one which is time-honoured, which has applied these two ideas of proportionality and of magnitude to life and to nature. The argument has gone on to use the evidence having arisen from this application to support a claim that God has made our lives and has made nature itself to be proportionate, just right, for us to live in; because all things we meet with are always of a suitable magnitude for us to live with.
The same argument is often used today as a basis for proposing an Intelligent Design for life, the universe and everything; God being the Intelligence whose Design of things is our world and ourselves. Everything just right.
Now in a general sense I guess everything is just right for life and existence. Yet we see people who are extraordinarily tall or extraordinarily short; giants and dwarves; living considerably shorter lives because of their lack of proportionality; because of their extreme magnitude; than do people who are around average height. We can conclude that around about average height is good to be at and so things have been made just right in this respect.
(Let’s leave the circularity of this argument for a few minutes and come back to this objection to it soon)
But yet we do see that giants and dwarves are born and do die early in general; and so for these people life is not proportionate, not just right; and because their magnitudes are too extreme. How does our understanding of God making things all proportionate and of just the right magnitude bear up in the light of these unfortunate people and their lives?
We can extrapolate this example of dwarves and giants to all kinds of small minorities of events, people, phenomena, which do happen, or do exist, or are observed, and all of them give the lie to the idea that everything is always just right and that God has made it just so. And these exceptions to proportionality and to the right magnitude are those evidences used by people who disaprove of the arguments for Intelligent Design, and who wish to deny that such a thing exists. Often these people will want to deny Intelligent Design in order for them to deny God also; whereas those people who want to assert Intelligent Design as a fact usually will want to assert it in order to uphold their belief in God.
Yes we do see horrendous weather; storms, floods, tsunami, and we see violent earth movements; volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, landslides, avalanches; and we see accidents happen in which people die or are severely injured or maimed; we see stillbirths and non-induced abortions, miscarriages, we see diseases which take a toll; and of course there is death, which is an utter disolution of one’s mortal frame; hardly just right and scarcely proportionate or of appropriate magnitude as a universal life-event?
So whenever one is looking at particulars then there are almost always exceptions to proportionality and to appropriate magnitude; and only as a general truth in practice can one uphold with any reasonable grace an idea that God is the Intelligent Designer behind all things. Those against God would add perhaps that God has also to be held responsible for these unfortunate particular exceptions; so as to counter whenever anyone tries to give Him any credit for the general truth of the rule of proportionality and of appropriate magnitude. Yet the weirdness of such arguments which blame God for the exceptions to the norm which occur; is that they do assume that God exists – so where does that leave those who argue thus?
But let’s look at the items men and women over time have observed to be behind the occurrence of phenomena; of events; of life; let’s look at those items which we call names like ‘scientific laws’ or ‘universal principles’; and which belong to pure science as opposed to applied science. These are things which look more like things in which we might find no exceptions to their generality of proportionality and of appropriate magnitude. They include things like Newton’s Laws of Motion, and his Theory of Gravity; and there are also Euclid’s Laws of Geometry, and there is The Periodic Table and the Laws which govern chemical reactions, and the structure and composition of atoms and molecules and so on. These things tend to have a better prognosis for universality in what they predict and presume.
We need to remember as we are looking at these laws and universals that science as a discipline is a work in progress; and so we have seen come into being other geometries than Euclid’s, and which make sense and become useful; we have seen Einstein modify and amend Newton’s Laws; and scientists have made chemical elements utterly new to the earth, along with materials and compounds and configurations of structures of atoms which never yet had existed naturally, so far as is known presently.
Science being a work in progress is a very different thing from that inevitability of there being always exceptions to proportionality and to appropriate magnitude whenever one is looking at objects and events in the world in particular. Because science has yet no firm and certain universal rule or rules which are able to explain the government of all things, by God, or else in the course of nature, this does not mean that there are no such rule or rules to be found; and thus were there such a rule or rules necessarily there would be and could be no exceptions to their outcomes or their applications.
Those exceptional events like accidents and extreme weathers all adhere in their scientific analyses to the rules of science as far as we have these and know these rules, and without any exception.
Only our knowledge of these rules as we have them is imperfect in itself.
Now of course there is Quantum Physics and there are certain other parts of physics which appear at least presently to abide by and to adhere to no known rules; and thus for science presently these areas of physics manifest themselves here and there in outright logical contradictions and even in presumed impossibilities. One might ask legitimately then how one might have rules and order and universal laws which always apply when there exists such a thing as Quantum Physics which seems to give the lie to order and to rules and to universal laws?
But for now let’s escape such a perplexity and resort back to Newton and Newtonian physics and to our old friends proportionality and appropriate magnitude. It is an accepted fact that Newtonian physics is useful and necessary in order to do science within the spheres of proportionality and of appropriate magintude under which life on earth subsists. This means that Newton’s Laws are a good fit, are just right, for our everyday needs, at those magnitudes at which human life subsists, and so proportionately, Newton’s Laws are those we have found to be most workable within these limits.
To be continued...
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