Before Galileo, the bedrock was theological: Aristotle held sway in the temporal world, the scholastics held the key to the spiritual, and somehow they managed to dovetail together. This world view needed deity or deities to co-ordinate everything and generally manage what was going on in people's lives.

Then came the flurry of intellectual activity that was the Renaissance. The new idea was that the natural world goes on according to its own laws and regularities and doesn't need to be supervised on a day-to-day basis. The obvious successes in the search for these regularities led to the rise of scientific materialism, the philosophy that the material world is all there is, and that our mental and spiritual experience must be some kind of as-yet-unexplained by-product. Newton's Laws of motion - classical clockwork - became common currency. The whole thing had become an inexorable mechanism.

For four centuries matter was assumed to consist of ever-tinier little solid balls in space with various kinds of force fields regulating what they do with one another. The 'problem of freewill' was born. How can we have free will when the inexorable laws of physics govern everything, down to the nerves in our brains? A conundrum indeed. Either we flout said laws every time we make a choice, or our mental life is somehow independent of them. Not surprisingly, there was widespread alarm at the apparent inability of the Church to zip up the gaping chasm. God had become redundant in the day-to-day running of things, and by the same argument our own freedom to make choices was becoming an incoherent idea.

At the turn of the twentieth century, classical clockwork developed a wobble. Absolute (that is, rigid and fixed) space and time gave way to Einstein's relativity, and at about the same time the 'miniature solar-system' model of the atom began to give way to a cloud of probabilities and jerky discontinuities. Relativity theory replaced solid balls of matter with warps and kinks in time and space and stitched it all together with the speed of light, and quantum theory found a deep unpredictability at the subatomic level and gave up trying to visualise it all in everyday terms. Whatever the state of the debate about the Ultimate Nature of Reality, one very distinct impression that comes out of all this is a sense of a universal interconnectedness, where everything in the Universe has a relationship to everything else in a seamless web of dislocations in the void. What we call gravity is curvature of space, what we call energy is a form of matter which follows the curvature like a satellite in orbit, what we call matter is a form of energy with gravity. We're learning, gradually and not without difficulty, to do without the need to visualise ultimate reality. Speculation abounds, and the orthodox interpretation is that there is no interpretation: that reality simply can't be modelled any more. The equations fit the data, and that is all we can say.

It even feels like a spacewalk, and moreover, one where we can choose whether or not to feel sick.

Systems, chaos and complexity

For some decades there has been a deep unformed puzzlement about how 'the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts'. What was just a jumble of bits and pieces can become components of another entity, a system, which behaves entirely differently. Being an idea whose time had come, several different new disciplines were invented at about the same time, with names like General Systems Theory, and Cybernetics. There was considerable excitement, because the system concept seemed to be applicable to just about anything.

The system concept is usefully applied to complex machines, and to natural phenomena from molecules to the body to the weather. It also works pretty well when applied to groups of people. The family, the economy, the company, the team, the local community, the nation, and even (or perhaps especially) the individual personality, can all be treated as systems. Systems thinking is a way of looking at the whole business of complexity. The individual parts may come and go, but the whole system retains and evolves an identity of another order. The focus of enquiry in this field is not on how individual events are caused, but on patterns in the way these complex entities behave. The idea is: if system X does Y when you do Z to it, then we can treat it like other systems that do Y if we do Z to them. We can say: this is complicated, but for the present purpose what's relevant is that it does this and this. We already know intuitively that there are as many alternative ways of looking at the world as there are moments in the day; now we've got a terminology for it. A system is completely different from the sum of its parts (otherwise, it's just a heap). Any entity can be seen as a system, or as a component in a system. The system doesn't have to be designed: natural interconnectedness just happens that way. Where physics tries to understand the basic nuts and bolts, the other sciences from chemistry upwards deal with the behaviour of entities whose internal structure is someone else's bailiwick.

Fractals and complex adaptive systems

Mathematics is a system (e.g. of operations on numbers), and numbers themselves reveal weird and wonderful behaviour of their own. A fractal, such as the Mandelbrot set, appears when a computer goes for a romp with a certain simple mathematical operation repeated over and over again. The characteristic self-similarity - that the image looks similar on all scales from as large as you like to as small as you like - and the quality of beauty of fractal images comes from an extraordinary leap of thought - fractional dimensionality. We know about one, two and three dimensions from Euclid; we can extend the idea to infinitely many dimensions if we want to specify more details about an object. What Mandelbrot pioneered was the idea that some objects can be thought of as having dimensionality in between the whole numbers. To cut a long story (well told elsewhere) short, this allows such mathematical monstrosities as an infinitely long line taking up a finite space. The feeling of liberation is helped a lot by the way the fractal image is coloured, which makes it seem somehow more concrete, but the sense remains that if we can have fractional dimensions, we can do anything.

We certainly have a new art form. 'Fractal forgeries' as they are called by their makers, can be set up which look remarkably like a coastline, or mountains, or clouds, or the branches of a tree. They look like real life, only cleaner. They are entirely deterministic - there's no element of chance in their construction - and at the same time indefinitely complicated.

The Mandelbrot set shows how numbers can behave in a place between order (straight lines, circles and so on) and chaos (the featureless goop). Fractal forgeries suggest what different forms of matter look like on this 'edge of chaos', and are recognisable as pictures of life. With a bit of help from topology and the idea of 'phase space', and introducing the dimension of time, people can make models of such complicated systems as the weather or the economy.

Enter the butterfly effect: the idea that a difference as small as the flap of a butterfly's wing can, in the right place at the right time, alter a weather pattern completely. Probably the most tangible lesson from chaos modelling is that, however accurately the model reflects the real world, the initial set-up will never be the same twice. Even if you key in the same numbers time and again, you will get different results. There will always be a point where the next decimal place is not specified, and this tiny vagueness has ramifications throughout the model. Weather forecasting is an obvious example of a case where predictability breaks down very quickly. We've all known for years that a weather forecast more than four days ahead is not to be trusted, and now we know why. The most minuscule difference eventually changes the world - in a way that is completely unpredictable. Maybe by combing your hair now, you will switch off the Gulf Stream. Only the view from Eternity would know.

But unpredictability doesn't mean chaos, and this incredibly fine universal interconnectedness has given rise to systems that organise and maintain themselves. A complex system has lots of parts, which interact in ways that are too complicated to track. A complex adaptive system is one that learns - that is, changes its behaviour - as it goes along. The research into these 'non-linear dynamic systems' has led to new insights about how, in certain circumstances that are not yet fully understood (and maybe never will be), systems can adapt to their environment and organise themselves. The process is deterministic but essentially unpredictable because of the butterfly effect. It works best on the edge of chaos, where there is enough order to keep the thing together, and enough shaking up to get it out of any ruts.

Probably the most obvious example of a complex adaptive system is the evolution of life. Heredity, mutation and an environment on the edge of chaos have given rise, inexorably and spontaneously, to systems like thee and me.

The Great Designer?

In summary, physics now points to a universal interconnectedness, and has also shown that it is possible to obtain clear experimental results even where the experimenters themselves can't visualise what they are testing for. Systems thinking demonstrates interconnectedness on the everyday scale. Chaos theory suggests that the interconnectedness can be so finely balanced that anything we do can make a real difference in the world. Complexity theory has inspired computer models which show how it's in the very nature of some types of system, in a reasonably stable and suitable environment, to organise themselves. Meanwhile genetics and the theory of natural selection has given us a satisfying model of how life has evolved and diversified, even to the extent of producing such wonders as eyes and wings, just from the jostling for progeny. The need for a Great Designer seems to be vanishing quite satisfactorily. The Universe is doing these marvellous things all by itself.

This is where we find ourselves asking: What kind of faith gets shaken by a successful set of theories of the temporal world? The marvellous interconnectedness we are seeing everywhere points to the divine Oneness, and by no means contradicts the ideas of detachment and emptiness. The only aspect of traditional 'faith' that is threatened by this wonderful world is the idea that the Divine cares about our day-to-day sufferings and is monitoring everything to make sure that everything comes out for the best in the end. It is the belief in the Eternal as a benevolent Person.

This is again the result of the confusion between the Eternal and the temporal world. The wonderful, impersonal beauty that the physical sciences have shown us could be loosely described as the 'workings' of the Absolute, but to call It a Person in the context of observation which is intended to be impersonal is bound to be confused. As before, the theoretical edifice is something that we have brought in to replace the ineffable Grand Design, to get our heads around what's going on. Whatever the Grand Design is, it has no more to do with the discoveries of science than it has to do with values. The sciences, like our values, are firmly in the temporal world.