Romans 1:20
"The universe evolves like a life form (Timothy Jackson, iai News, 11 May, 2026). The subtitle is as provocative as the title: “The laws of physics are not fixed, they are evolving.” This is not an isolated speculation.
Biologist Timothy Jackson makes the move explicit in this article, extending Darwinian logic beyond biology and into the structure of reality itself.
This claim serves to mark a cataclysmic shift in the structure of scientific explanation that has been progressively unfolding for many years. Prediction is yielding to retrospective storytelling. Fixed laws
are giving way to emergent patterns. Stability is no longer assumed as the foundation of the universe; it is being treated as a ‘contingent achievement of an historical, evolutionary process.’
To understand how radical this shift is, we have to consider the ancient hierarchy that has governed Western thought for millennia:
For the past two centuries, science has been slowly but steadily sliding from the first row to the second. We are witnessing a transition where becoming takes precedence over being.
This scientific shift closely parallels the absolute idealism of GWF Hegel (1770-1831). In Hegel’s philosophy, reality is not a static arrangement of fixed substances governed by external laws; it is a self-developing process whose intelligibility emerges only through its own unfolding.
Today’s scientists do not invoke Hegel, but they are trapped in his logic. If intelligibility is no longer grounded in fixed, transcendent law, the burden of explanation shifts entirely. The issue is no longer how stable laws govern change, but how stability, law, and meaning can emerge out of a chaotic, mindless flux.
Under this view, what are traditionally considered “invariants” – the constants of nature, the structural rules – are reinterpreted as derivative.
Q: Once you grant that biological stability is just a temporary byproduct of process, the logic presses outward toward the cosmos. If the apparent invariants of biology are products of history, why should the invariants of physics be exempt?
The traditional Western picture of a law-governed universe is dissolving before our eyes. Order is no longer the unchanging framework within which change occurs; order is the temporary outcome of change.
*Science appears to be approaching a fork in the road:
"The universe evolves like a life form (Timothy Jackson, iai News, 11 May, 2026). The subtitle is as provocative as the title: “The laws of physics are not fixed, they are evolving.” This is not an isolated speculation.
Biologist Timothy Jackson makes the move explicit in this article, extending Darwinian logic beyond biology and into the structure of reality itself.
“Darwin’s central insight… was to show how such order might emerge, via natural selection—a principle which can explain, but never predict, the patterns that make up the world.”
This claim serves to mark a cataclysmic shift in the structure of scientific explanation that has been progressively unfolding for many years. Prediction is yielding to retrospective storytelling. Fixed laws
To understand how radical this shift is, we have to consider the ancient hierarchy that has governed Western thought for millennia:
For the past two centuries, science has been slowly but steadily sliding from the first row to the second. We are witnessing a transition where becoming takes precedence over being.
This scientific shift closely parallels the absolute idealism of GWF Hegel (1770-1831). In Hegel’s philosophy, reality is not a static arrangement of fixed substances governed by external laws; it is a self-developing process whose intelligibility emerges only through its own unfolding.
Today’s scientists do not invoke Hegel, but they are trapped in his logic. If intelligibility is no longer grounded in fixed, transcendent law, the burden of explanation shifts entirely. The issue is no longer how stable laws govern change, but how stability, law, and meaning can emerge out of a chaotic, mindless flux.
Under this view, what are traditionally considered “invariants” – the constants of nature, the structural rules – are reinterpreted as derivative.
Q: Once you grant that biological stability is just a temporary byproduct of process, the logic presses outward toward the cosmos. If the apparent invariants of biology are products of history, why should the invariants of physics be exempt?
The traditional Western picture of a law-governed universe is dissolving before our eyes. Order is no longer the unchanging framework within which change occurs; order is the temporary outcome of change.
*Science appears to be approaching a fork in the road:
Path A: Admit that the intelligibility encountered in nature reflects a source of intelligence beyond nature.
Path B: Insist that intelligibility is not grounded beyond the system, but is identical with the unfolding process itself, so that law, order, and meaning are understood as the self-articulation of a fundamentally immanent reality.
What began as an attempt to explain the laws of nature thus returns us to an ancient problem: whether reality is grounded in being or in becoming. By forcing the laws of physics to evolve, modern science has not escaped this question; it has only rediscovered it in a more acute form."
Path B: Insist that intelligibility is not grounded beyond the system, but is identical with the unfolding process itself, so that law, order, and meaning are understood as the self-articulation of a fundamentally immanent reality.
What began as an attempt to explain the laws of nature thus returns us to an ancient problem: whether reality is grounded in being or in becoming. By forcing the laws of physics to evolve, modern science has not escaped this question; it has only rediscovered it in a more acute form."
CEH
