270318: premise 1) the universe is generative explicit and implicit order on all scales, all beings, all perspectives... premise 2) science in its historical project has best explored, understood, worked creatively to uncover this truth... premise 3) as a secular ground science is offered as a technique to creatively order all our universe and worlds...
hypothesis: read this book and all will come clear...
result: well i give it a five, possibly sentimental, as this argument of order and creativity seems like how i would once have thought, as son of a scientist, as deeply indoctrinated in values of this perspective, as a youth convinced science could ultimately explain everything,... this is not technically a philosophy text (lacks footnotes etc...) but more a philosophically-inclined reading of our human project primarily in western sciences, and for this noble thesis and though not convinced i feel this gives certain insight of the way the universe and worlds are to those thinkers embedded in science, not as particular ‘beliefs' but as process, and the productive tension between current order perhaps rigid and static and the new thinking beyond this current scientific order...
there are interesting examples of creative transcendence of old modes of thought- the Newtonian absolute space to relativity space of Einstein, the later conflict of quantum physics between Einstein and Bohr. Bohm contends that the model of 'paradigm shift' is true but 'scientific revolution' is mistaken, that the work of 'normal science' is in fact always incorporating new insights, that some ground of the new is actually the continuance of the old 'order'... this goes as much into psychology and sociology of scientists and their world, as into unquestioned success of new 'order'... i believe i have read that all scientific theories go through three stages that can be summed-up in one word each: 1) that's (nonsense!) 2) that's true but (trivial!) 3) that's (obvious!)...
the authors here extend the changing order of science together with changing order of arts and society and religion... if you want a 'grand narrative' you have it here: the world is order and order is science and art is expressed creativity of this order and inspiring future order... and then the heartening assertion is that 'creativity' is a natural, universal, human aptitude, and what we have to do, on individual, educational, social, scales- is to remove 'blocks' to its function in our universe and our worlds...