God, Bucky Balls and Intelligent Design

Just to give some Introduction to this. During the height of the ID debates last year I was challenged to find any "real scientists" who believed in Intelligent Design. (we had agreed to keep the discussion purely theoretical and not specifically about "christianity versus darwinism" the discussion was could there be ANY serious looks into an Intelligent Design theory and had anyone ever done a serious study of it. I knew that the best hope lay in Mathematics and then I remember Buckminster Fuller. The NOBEL PRIZE winning mathematician and inventor who was always talking about how everything was OBVIOUSLY Designed. So I mentioned him surprisingly nobody else had heard of him. I mentioned Geodesik domes and they had all heard of these but not the man who invented them LOL. Ok so here was the actuall question I submitted to the Buckminster Fuller Institute. A well respected organization and the response I got is pretty conclusive wouldn't you say?


from Gethsemenerose on December 27th, 2005
Question: Design Science vs. ID

A few of us where having a conversation and the work of Buckminster especially the statement on what "Design Science" was from Cosmography to wit "Design Science is a problem solving approach which entails a rigorous, systematic study of the deliberate ordering of the components in our Universe." this statement along with a quote from SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN BEINGS "That we have that kind of capability, despite our absolutely negligible magnitude physically, that we can we deal with our minds in such magnitudes and do so quite reliably gives us a hint that human beings must have some very great significance in the scheme." and "I think we are apparently coming out of some common womb of designedly permitted ignorance." from Big Picture Thinking led some to believe that Buckminster while obviously not saying anything about a "GOD" still believed in something that in this day is being called Intelligent Design. Would someone at the institure care to comment on this?

Answer from Jay Baldwin:

I have been working on this very matter recently and will report soon. I'm currently working with the Synergetics Dictionary, where he has lots to say about what is now called ID. On the other hand, he certainly was not anti-science, as most, of not all ID folk are, and he, like most educated persons, agreed that fossils are remains of beings that actually lived. etc. He did have an interesting idea about apes and men, though: he suggested that primates might not be our ancestors, but instead were devolved humans. (Bucky thought that humans had arrived on Earth pretty much as we are today, probably first in Polynesia rather than Africa because there were too many predators in Africa and none on the islands where surviving is relatively easy. He wrote a book about this called NAGA, but it has not been published. More later on this. JB


Please keep in mind that my very choosing of the quotes inevitably represents an interpretation of Bucky's ideas, but, as did E.J Applewhite, I have tried to keep my own preferences and beliefs out of this inquiry. For more on God and the role of humans in Universe, I recommend that you read all of Cosmology and Critical Path. Then, if you have the patience, you could tackle Synergetics or read it again. I learn more every time I do, and still have a long way to go. As I age into geezerhood, I am increasingly inclined to understand and agree with (most of) Bucky's insights. I am not alone in this: When I started writing BuckyWorks in 1995, a web search for Fuller, Geodesics or Synergy revealed just four listings and no links. Now, ten years later, you get thousands. — JB


RBF Definitions:

Evolution:

* “Evolution let us spend the first million years or so just inventing words.” — (SD. Vol. 1, pg. 690)
* “All systems alter other systems: this is the essence of evolution.” — (SD Vol. 1 p. 691)
* “You mustn't think of evolution as something outside of man. Evolution is man, man in his universal aspect, man functioning as part of universe. . .” — (SD. Vol.1 p. 691)
* ... “It is easy to breed out metaphysical intellection characteristics, leaving a residual concentration of purely physical proclivities and evoluting by further inbreeding from human to monkey. (Witness the millions of dollars society pays for a “prizefight” in which two organisms are each trying to destroy the other's thinking mechanism. This and other trends disclose that a large segment of humanity is evoluting toward producing the next millennia's special breed of monkeys.)” — ( Syn 1, cite 229.00 Principle of Synergetic Advantage : 229.04) [I recommend that you read the entire 229 section to see the reasoning behind Bucky's astonishing suggestion that monkeys are devolved humans instead of the Darwinian view that we descended from monkeys.]—JB

Atheism:

* “There could be no atheism if you knew about synergy.” — (SD Vol 1 p 104)

God:

* ” . . . It would be much closer to actual Universe to think of ourselves as an absolutely continuous complex process. We are quite possibly the most complex of the problem-solving challenges of the invention that is eternally regenerative Scenario Universe. In this way, each of us might be a department of the mind we might call God.” — (Syn. 2 cite. 311.14)
* “Since each of the only-mathematically-statable , scientifically generalized laws of physical Universe constitutes a statement of truth, and since science has discovered a plurality of observable and ever redemonstrably operative truths—all of which are always omniinteraccommodative—it may be said that truth is complex. It is mathematically hypothesizable that all of the truths are potentially integratable and that the resulting integral truth constitutes the cosmic integrity that humans intuitively sense to be in governance of universe and speak of to one another with the inadequate sound-word god.” — (Syn 2 cite. 311.16)
* “Formal religions have been organized to attend to otherwise inconvenient, constant recognition of God, while humanity gives six-sevenths of its time to rendering service to the exclusively selfish dictates of human power structures.” — (Cos, pg. 2)
* “I constantly ask myself, “Do you have any experientially evidenced reasons to assume a greater intellect to be operating in Universe than that of humans?” I answer myself, “The only-by-mind-discovered generalized principles of science that can only be expressed mathematically and mathematics are inherently intellectual.” I found that I was overwhelmed by the experiential evidence of a cosmic intellectual integrity at work in the design of Universe. Thus, when I said in 1927 that I was going to try to find out and support what the great cosmic intellectual integrity was trying to do , I committed myself as completely as humans can to absolute faith in the wisdom of the eternal intellectual integrity we speak of as God.. . .” — (Cos. pg. 259)
* “Design is both subjective and objective, an exclusively intellectual mathematical conceptioning of the orderliness of interrelationships.
“Since all the cosmic-scale inventing and designing is accomplishable only by intellect, and since it is not by the intellect of humans, it is obviously that of the eternal intellectual integrity was call God.” — (Cos. pg. 261)
* “The greatest mistake we have ever made is to assume that the supreme authority governing life and Universe is not God but either luck or the dicta of the humanly constituted and armed most-powerful socioeconomic systems and religions. . . .” — The entire last chapter (Chapter 7) of Cosmology presents Bucky's final say on the role of humans in Universe and our relationship to the laws governing Universe. (Cos pg. 261)
* “The aggregate of generalized principles derived from the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated special-case experiences can be said to express most exactly and economically what we mean by Universe.” — (Cos pg. 64)
“To qualify as principles, they must be exceptionless. When stated positively, exceptionless means eternal.” — (Cos pg. 64)
* “. . . Experience is inherently terminal, partial, differentiable: the antithesis of eternal integrity.” — (Syn.1 cite 502.25)