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Originally Posted by W. M. Jeremiah 51:15 (KJV) says: "He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heaven by his understanding."
Fractal formations are natural formations found everywhere, from coastlines to snowflakes, from the edges of leaves to the edges of clouds. prevalent examples can be found in a book titled Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos by John Briggs which focuses on the correlation between computer-generated fractal patterns and many natural occurances. Between the pages of that book lie many photos of natural phenomenae, such as blood vessels branching out, sandstone bubbles, Jupiter's giant eye, and moss on rocks.
Therefore, if God made the Earth, and if nature harbors a seemingly infinite plethora of fractal formation, then they are indeed one form of God's primary representation. |
Thanks for the book recommendation, it sounds very complete. The book on fractals seems quite interesting too. Just kidding.
There is a problem, underlying what you say. Do the same rules of logic apply as normal here? Because we have established that mathematics can MECHANICALLY generate the shapes and forms so very similar to nature, surely God is superfluous as an explanation of how the marvellous forms got there. (Now life itself is a separate riddle, consciousness, and the nature of beginning and end, but some of the simpler fractal shapes cited above seem to be ones that a team of graduates at a good university might win a Nobel prize for designing (or Slartibartfast in H2G2)...)
Secondly there is a psychological or cognitive aspect to this. Possibly our brains are hardwired to see particular patterns that flow more easily through the neural networks in our brains, so whatever is really out there, we see similar shapes and designs here and there in places where the co-incidence seems extraordinary and therefore esoteric. However, we cannot rely on human cognition to truly see nor recognise all that is "out there" or "real". Clearly cognition and the mind work by difference and sameness, so the only things we can perceive are actually first "known" because they are similar to something else, or sometimes very "different" to something else. For example when Captain Cook arrived in a remote island, the natives could not see his ship - they apparently scanned the horizon and saw nothing, so maybe the form of the ship entered their cognition and was dismissed - incredible as that seems - as a cloud, or an island. This curious aspect of human cognition has been found over and over in many tests - we are literally blind until we are sort of introduced to anything. Captain Cook's men actually made models in the sand and pointed to the rowing boat and kept going and finally, one by one, then en masse the tribal people were surprised to see this strange thing - they had only tiny boats themselves you see.
The original question here is logically weak. I was teasing to reverse it in my previous post here because look - the question says ASSUME God exists, can we then compare fractals to GOD and what do we conclude...
In my own view FRACTALS are the natural MATHEMATICS of nature, not the maths we learn at school at all. And because fractals are obviously the fabric of nature, just as the tribal shaman saw the fabric of nature and created tribal myths and religion and so on, fractals are just normal.
But perhaps what we call normal mathematics is a window that represents deeply esoteric and almost godlike qualities such as infinity and zero, such as dimensionless points, parallel lines that never touch, and so on. Each of these are ideas that require blind faith, belief, and cannot be seen felt nor heard, mathematics itself is proof that beyond this reality there is more.