volume II: Synopsis
section V: Applied Divinity
page 38: Design
The effectiveness of our work depends heavily upon design and and technique. In a dynamic system like our world, the whole and the parts are continually influencing one another to iterate toward an optimal system. Our question is how do we optimise design? Design - Wikipedia
In traditional theology, design is already optimised by an omniscient and omnipotent God. The defects that we now see in the world are alleged to be the result of Original Sin, and will be remedied at the end of time. If the Universe is divine, on the other hand, it designs itself. Council of Trent: Session V: Decree concerning Original Sin
One of the traditional arguments for the distinction between God and the world is the argument from design:
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, 2, 3: Does God exist?
This argument loses force if the Universe can consistently design itself. We believe that Aquinas is mistaken when he claims that natural bodies lack intelligence. He was not to know about quantum mechanics. From our point of view, the Universe is a living network of communication rooted in the pure act of the initial singularity. The theory of evolution describes an algorithm for self-design. Our intelligence sometimes enables us to do better than evolution by natural selection since we can model designs before we construct them, thus saving resources. We see, nevertheless, that technological designs evolve just like natural design. We have had motor transport for about two hundred years now, but the system still seems far from the optimum.
Christian physicists have long believed that our divinely designed universe is in some way optimal. The principle of least action entered the scientific literature with Maupertuis and has matured into Hamilton's principle of stationary action which is central to physics. Maupertuis' principle - Wikipedia, Hamilton's principle - Wikipedia
Effective religion makes life better for its adherents and encourages the search for better ways to treat one another and to make and do things. In traditional religions the criterion for goodness is to act in conformity with the 'will of God', usually as defined by the priestly establishment. Believers in a divine universe might be seeking a decision process to rank designs by their conformity with the conditions for humanity, sustainability and peace.
History shows that science and all other forms of knowledge proceed by trial guided by error, a form of natural selection. Given a certain amount of knowledge, however, trial and error can move to another level, and one can move more directly toward a target. Nevertheless the future is uncertain, and radical innovation often occurs in technologies once thought to be mature. An example is the path taken by lighting, through candles, oil and gas lamps, incandescent lamps and fluorescent tubes to light emitting diodes. Even intelligent design evolves, since each step is the foundation for the next step. Fortun & Bernstein: Muddling Through, Popper: Conjectures and Refutations
The most magnificent panorama of trial and error on Earth is the evolution of life by natural selection. Every creature that is born is a trial. Some succeed, and reproduce. Some fail and die childless. By the logic of evolution, their genotype is not reproduced, so there is continual pressure, from generation to generation, toward the modelling of creatures fitted to survive. Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species, Steve Jones: Almost like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated
If we study the history of any area of design, from cooking utensils to power plants, we see evolution guided by whatever science is available. In the design of heat engines, the original foundation for industrialization, the Carnot cycle guides us toward more efficient engines by defining an ideal engine as a possibility toward which designers can work. Carnot heat engine - Wikipedia
The first element in any design process is a catalogue of goals and constraints. An ancient definition of good shows the way: bonum ex integro, malum ex quacumque causa: goodness comes from integrity and blocking all potential failures. Engineering, like evolution, is built on the history of failure. A lot of steam boilers exploded before adequate design rules were formulated to guarantee their safety. We want a transport system which serves everybody equally and cheaply. Research on traffic volume shows that there is no way a dense city can have enough road space to allow all transport to take place by personal vehicle. Public mass transit is essential. This observation was ignored for a long time until traffic jams and pollution turned communities toward public transport.
Our mental exploration of the world yields possibilities for action. Because the world is so complex, however, there is generally a wealth of detail to be dealt with before a bright idea becomes a practical reality. Prototypes and testing reveal failure modes that are often not immediately obvious. The same is true of every task from cooking to space travel. The devil, as they say, is in the details. It is the designer's job to master all the details, often building on many years of personal and collective experience in a particular industry.
We expect good designs to be safe and easy to use, environmentally friendly, easy to manufacture and recycle, attractive in the market place and in every way perfectly fitted to their task. This is not easy, and every designer is continually faced with compromises.
The output of design is capital, that is systems that make elements of life easier. Le Corbusier pointed out that "a house is a machine to live in". The form of every human artefact has elements of design, whether it be a novel, a tool, a toy or a city. Like life, good design tends to survive and bad design dies out. Le Corbusier - Wikipedia
Design does not apply to physical objects alone. Spiritual structures, including religions, are technologies subject to design in the light of the science of theology. Reflective and critical religion has a clear role to play in its own design. We profit from beliefs that move us toward the goals of peace, justice, equality, freedom, goodness and beauty and away from violence, injustice, inequality, slavery, evil and ugliness. As part of the divine system, we are responsible for creating our own heavens and annihilating our own hells.
Every design has a history. We have been designed and constructed by the Solar System, and are learning to trace our history back to the big bang. The traditional religions have played a large part in the development of humanity by establishing divine constraints on our behaviour and motivating us with hope for a better future if we respect these constraints. Solar System - Wikipedia
Many of us however, see defects in traditional religions. The principal source of these defects seems to be what we might call historical momentum. We evolved in Africa and our distant ancestors left that country and spread around the globe in waves, starting about 2 million years ago. Modern humans (Homo sapiens) began to leave about 200 thousand years ago and spread over the planet to form a large number of relatively isolated groups. These groups continued their genetic and social evolution to form the enormous racial, linguistic and cultural diversity that we now find around the world. Beth Blaxland & Fran Dorey: The first migrations out of Africa
The principal bonds in small groups are family ties and we can imagine that competition for resources led to territorial conflict at their boundaries. The general tendency in such cases seems to have been for stronger groups to overrun the weaker, leading by slow degrees to the development of nations and empires. The well documented history of the Roman Catholic Church gives us some insight into this process. Christianity began as a number of "Jesus-movement groups" which were eventually subsumed under the aegis of Roman Christianity. In the time of Constantine, Christianity became the religious foundation of the Roman empire. Roman Christianity continued to influence the development of religion, politics and culture in Europe until quite recently and is still very powerful in the New World. Robert Crotty: The Christian Survivor: How Roman Christianity Defeated Its Early Competitors
The scientific, political industrial and economic developments of the last few centuries have completely changed the milieu in which Christianity operates. The telegraph, telephones, electrification, antibiotics, smart phones and the internet have taught us that ten years is a significant period in technological development whereas a century is a relatively short time in theology, religion and politics. This has led to a profound mismatch between religion and society. Many religious functions like education, health care and social security have been taken over by secular organizations designed on corporate and economic principles, leaving traditional religions behind as a conservative load on human development.
The fundamental defect arising from this history is lack of universality, resulting in conflict between different belief systems. While ideas and technologies spread around the globe in decades, religions, as signified by their ancient texts and monumental buildings move slowly. They look to a world of their own creation rather than to the dynamics of the real world. This problem is made worse by the deeply ingrained belief that we are alien pilgrims in as defective world of flesh and sin which is due to be demolished and rebuilt in some not too distant future.
This attitude of conflict with our natural environment is very wasteful, however, and reduces fitness. What we need is religion and spirituality designed with reality in mind, rather than ancient dreams of sin and salvation. The first step toward this reformation, scientific theology, is based on the supposition that the natural world plays the role traditionally attributed to god.
Perhaps one of the greatest breakthrough of civilization is that evils are not caused by malign spirits but by simple physical and biological causes that can be dealt with by designing societies along the lines similar to living bodies. Our bodies comprise a complex of organs which completely covers all the systems necessary for life: locomotion, information, nutrition, protection, waste removal, immunity from pathogens and the ability to communicate with our peers to cooperate in the solutions of problems that are to big for an individual.
How do we optimize social design? We might work on the principle that necessity is the mother of invention. As the definition of goodness suggests, peaceful life in any group is possible if all human necessities are met, removing the incentive for conflict. The rational motivation for this approach is that the cost of conflict generally exceeds any benefit that it may yield. The high economic, social and political cost of the military investment necessary to protect the wealth of the rich against the desire of the poor makes it more cost effective to distribute resources equitably. It is a sign of disfunction when the military budget exceeds the budget for social security. Human Security Report Project, Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
The best application for religious energy would appear to be designing out our sources of conflict with one another, designing out our conflicts with nature and doing this with a clear scientific appreciation of the value of social capital.
We are in effect capital. From an economic view, our enormously complex bodies are the result of a large populations of like minded cells (that is cells sharing a genotype) working together for their common good by investing in the means of social cooperation. Design for collective peace and prosperity began about three billion years ago with the origin of multicellular creatures. It is physically founded on shared belief, that is shared genes
The next steps in our design for sustainable life on Earth are relatively clear: population control, consumption control, pollution control, equality, individual freedom, education, justice and social security. Human creativity has already established pockets of good government around the world. A will to seek best practice through communication seems to be all that is required to move the world further along the path to peace outlined by the most ancient of all religious commandments: love god (= reality, the way things are); love one another. Mark 12:30-31: Love the Lord your God
This project began as a theory of peace developed for an anti-war movement. A theory of Peace. We are making the transition from designing society for war, suffering and instability to designing a society for trade, security, satisfaction and relaxation. This is a cooperative effort to improve our fitness by eliminating the losses arising from bad design. From a religious point of view, we may achieve this by encouraging the correlation between good design and profit, both financial and spiritual.
(revised 7 April 2020)
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Further readingBooks
Crotty (2017), Robert, The Christian Survivor: How Roman Christianity Defeated Its Early Competitors, Springer 2017 ' The book puts the current interest in historical Jesus research into a proper historical context, highlighting Gnosticism’s lasting influence on early Christianity and making the provocative claim that nearly all Christian Churches are in some way descended from Roman Christianity. Breaking with the accepted wisdom of Christianity’s origins, the revised history it puts forward challenges the assumptions of Church and secular historians, biblical critics and general readers alike, with profound repercussions for scholarship, belief and practice.
About the Author
Robert Brian Crotty is the Emeritus Professor of Religion and Education at the University of South Australia. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge University. Professor Crotty was educated in Australia, Rome and Jerusalem. He has research degrees in Ancient History, Education, Christian Theology and Biblical Studies. He is an Élève Titulaire of the École Biblique in Jerusalem. In Rome and Jerusalem, he studied under some of the great scholars of early Christianity, including Ignace de la Potterie, Marie-Émile Boismard and Pierre Benoit and studied Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Syriac in order to further his intimate understanding of biblical texts. He has authored or edited some 33 books, multiple book chapters and journal articles in the areas of Theology, Biblical Studies and World Religions.'
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Darwin, Charles, and Greg Suriano (editor), The Origin of Species, Gramercy 1998 Introduction: 'In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species has not been independently created, but has descended, like varieties, from other species.'
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Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, Penguin/Pelican 1996 Preface: '[Darwinism] is, indeed a remarkably simple theory; . . . In essence it amounts simply to the idea that non-random reproduction where there is hereditary variation, has consequences that are far reaching if there is time for them to be cumulative . . . '
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Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene , Oxford UP 1976 Amazon: Editorial review: 'Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel's work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that "our" genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven't thought of evolution in the same way since.' Rob Lightner
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Dawkins, Richard, Climbing Mount Improbable, W. W. Norton & Company 1997 Amazon editorial review: 'How do species evolve? Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most eminent zoologists, likens the process to scaling a huge, Himalaya-size peak, the Mount Improbable of his title. An alpinist does not leap from sea level to the summit; neither does a species utterly change forms overnight, but instead follows a course of "slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants" -- a course that Charles Darwin, Dawkins's great hero, called natural selection. Illustrating his arguments with case studies from the natural world, such as the evolution of the eye and the lung, and the coevolution of certain kinds of figs and wasps, Dawkins provides a vigorous, entertaining defense of key Darwinian ideas.'
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Fortun, Mike, and Herbert J Bernstein, Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the Twenty-First Century, Counterpoint 1998 Amazon editorial review:
'Does science discover truths or create them? Does dioxin cause cancer or not? Is corporate-sponsored research valid or not? Although these questions reflect the way we're used to thinking, maybe they're not the best way to approach science and its place in our culture. Physicist Herbert J. Bernstein and science historian Mike Fortun, both of the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies (ISIS), suggest a third way of seeing, beyond taking one side or another, in Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century. While they deal with weighty issues and encourage us to completely rethink our beliefs about science and truth, they do so with such grace and humor that we follow with ease discussions of toxic-waste disposal, the Human Genome Project, and retooling our language to better fit the way science is actually done.'
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Jones, Steve, Almost like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated, Doubleday 1999 An Historical Sketch: 'The Origin of Species is, without doubt, the book of the millennium. ... [This book] is, as far as is possible, an attempt to rewrite the Origin of Species. I use its plan, developing as it does from farms to fossils, from beehives to islands, as a framework, but my own Grand Facts ... are set firmly in the late twentieth century. Almost Like a Whale tries to read Charles Darwin's mind with the benefit of scientific hindsight and to show how the theory of evolution unites biology as his millenium draws to an end.' (xix)
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Mandelbrot, Benoit B , The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Freeman 1988 Jacket: 'A rarity: a picture book of sophisticated contemporary research ideas in mathematics. Here, it concerns recursively defined curves and shapes, whose dimensionality is not a whole number. Amazingly, Mandelbrot shows their relvance to practically every branch of science.' Douglas R. Hofstadter
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Mattheck, C, and W Linnard (translator), Design in Nature: Learning from Trees, Springer Verlag 1998 Review: '[Claus Mattheck's] habilitation was in fracture mechanics, so he is well placed to see that the shapes of nature, by eliminating self weight and stress concentrations, represent optimised solutions for engineering design. ... He summarises the computer models he uses, and the reasons for using them, and applies them to growing, damaged and diseased trees and then to bone, claws, thorns, shell structures and bracing. Finally he applies his methods to the design of a variety of engineering structures. I recommend this book to biologists and engineers alike. Julian Vincent: Nature 392: 242 19 March 1998
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McHarg, Ian L, Design with Nature, Doubleday/Natural History Press 1971 Introduction, Lewis Mumford: 'In establishing the necessity for conscious intention, for ethical evaluation, for orderly organisation, for deliberate esthetic expression in handling every part of the environment, McHarg's emphasis is not on either design or nature by itself, but on the preposition with, which implies human cooperation and biological partnership. 'back |
Papanek, Victor, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, Granada/Paladin 1992 Preface: 'In an environment that is screwed up visually, physically and chemically, the best and simplest thing that architects, industrial designers, planners etc., could do for humanity would be to stop working entirely. In all pollution, designers are implicated at least partially. But in this book, I take a more affirmative view: it seems to me that we can go beyond not working at all, and work positively. Design can and must become a way in which young people can participate in changing society.'
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Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Viking Adult 2011 Amazon book description: 'A provocative history of violence—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Stuff of Thought and The Blank Slate
Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world.'
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Popper, Karl Raimund, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1972 Preface: 'The way in which knowledge progresses, and expecially our scientific knowledge, is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism; that is, by attempted refutations, which include severely critical tests.' [p viii]
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Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature, Bantam 1984 Foreword: 'Order Out of Chaos is a brilliant, demanding, dazzling book -- challenging for all and richly rewarding for the attentive reader. It is a book to study, to savour, to reread -- and to question yet again. It places science and humanity back in a world where ceteris paribus is a myth -- a world in which other things are seldom held steady, equal or unchanging. In short it projects science into today's revolutionary world of instability, disequilibrium and turbulence. In so doing, it serves the highest creative function -- it helps us create fresh order.' Alvin Toffler, xxvi
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Stewart, Ian, Life's Other Secret: The new mathematics of the living world, Wiley 1999 Preface: 'There is more to life than genes. . . . Life operates within the rich texture of the physical universe and its deep laws, patterns, forms, structures, processes and systems. ... Genes nudge the physical universe in specific directions . . . . The mathematical control of the growing organism is the other secret. . . . . Without it we will never solve the deeper mysteries of the living world - for life is a partnership between genes and mathematics, and we must take proper account of the role of both partners.' (xi)
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Wirth, Niklaus, Programming in Modula-2 , Springer-Verlag 1989 Preface: 'This text is an introduction to programming in general, and a manual for programming in the language Modula-2 in particular. It is oriented primarily toward people who have already acquired some basic knowledge of programming anf would like to deepen their understanding in a more structured way. ...' page 3
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Links
Aquinas 13 (Latin), Summa: I 2 3: Whether God exists?, 'Respondeo dicendum quod Deum esse quinque viis probari potest. Prima autem et manifestior via est, quae sumitur ex parte motus. Certum est enim, et sensu constat, aliqua moveri in hoc mundo. Omne autem quod movetur, ab alio movetur. Nihil enim movetur, nisi secundum quod est in potentia ad illud ad quod movetur, movet autem aliquid secundum quod est actu. Movere enim nihil aliud est quam educere aliquid de potentia in actum, de potentia autem non potest aliquid reduci in actum, nisi per aliquod ens in actu, sicut calidum in actu, ut ignis, facit lignum, quod est calidum in potentia, esse actu calidum, et per hoc movet et alterat ipsum. Non autem est possibile ut idem sit simul in actu et potentia secundum idem, sed solum secundum diversa, quod enim est calidum in actu, non potest simul esse calidum in potentia, sed est simul frigidum in potentia. Impossibile est ergo quod, secundum idem et eodem modo, aliquid sit movens et motum, vel quod moveat seipsum. Omne ergo quod movetur, oportet ab alio moveri. Si ergo id a quo movetur, moveatur, oportet et ipsum ab alio moveri et illud ab alio. Hic autem non est procedere in infinitum, quia sic non esset aliquod primum movens; et per consequens nec aliquod aliud movens, quia moventia secunda non movent nisi per hoc quod sunt mota a primo movente, sicut baculus non movet nisi per hoc quod est motus a manu. Ergo necesse est devenire ad aliquod primum movens, quod a nullo movetur, et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum.' back |
Beth Blaxland & Fran Dorey, The first migrations out of Africa, ' The oldest known Homo sapiens fossils outside of Africa come from caves in Israel - Misliya (about 180,000 years old), Skhul (about 90,000 years old) and Qafzeh (about 120,000 years old). These probably represent populations that intermittently occupied the region and it is unlikely that there was direct evolutionary continuity between the Misliya and later Skhul/Qafzeh peoples. Genetic studies also support the idea of earlier dispersals of modern humans out of Africa starting from about 220,000 years ago.' back |
Carnot heat engine - Wikipedia, Carnot heat engine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A Carnot heat engine is a hypothetical engine that operates on the reversible Carnot cycle. The basic model for this engine was developed by Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot in 1824. The Carnot engine model was graphically expanded upon by Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron in 1834 and mathematically elaborated upon by Rudolf Clausius in the 1850s and 60s from which the concept of entropy emerged.' back |
Council of Trent, Session V: Decree concerning Original Sin, ' . . . 1. If any one does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he had transgressed the commandment of God in Paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice wherein he had been constituted; and that he incurred, through the offence of that prevarication, the wrath and indignation of God, and consequently death, with which God had previously threatened him, and, together with death, captivity under his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil, and that the entire Adam, through that offence of prevarication, was changed, in body and soul, for the worse; let him be anathema.' back |
Design - Wikipedia, Design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system (as in architectural blueprints, engineering drawing, business process, circuit diagrams and sewing patterns) while "to design" (verb) refers to making this plan.' back |
Hamilton's principle - Wikipedia, Hamilton's principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In physics, Hamilton's principle is William Rowan Hamilton's formulation of the principle of stationary action . . . It states that the dynamics of a physical system is determined by a variational problem for a functional based on a single function, the Lagrangian, which contains all physical information concerning the system and the forces acting on it.' back |
Human Security Report Project, Human Security Report Project, 'The Human Security Report Project . . . HSRP tracks global and regional trends in organized violence, their causes and consequences. Research findings and analyses are published in the Human Security Report, Human Security Brief series, and the miniAtlas of Human Security. HSRP publications have received major coverage in the international media and are regularly cited by national governments, international agencies, and NGOs, as well as the research community.' back |
Le Corbusier - Wikipedia, Le Corbusier - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 1887 – 27 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier . . .was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, and he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, and North and South America.
Dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities, Le Corbusier was influential in urban planning, and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Le Corbusier prepared the master plan for the city of Chandigarh in India, and contributed specific designs for several buildings there, specially the government buildings. ' back |
Mark 12:30-31, Love the Lord your God , '30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”' back |
Maupertuis' principle - Wikipedia, Maupertuis' principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In classical mechanics, Maupertuis' principle (named after Pierre Louis Maupertuis) is an integral equation that determines the path followed by a physical system without specifying the time parameterization of that path. It is a special case of the more generally stated principle of least action. More precisely, it is a formulation of the equations of motion for a physical system not as differential equations, but as an integral equation, using the calculus of variations.' back |
Paul III - Council of Trent, Decree Concerning Original Sin, '1. If anyone does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he transgressed the commandment of God in paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice in which he had been constituted, and through the offense of that prevarication incurred the wrath and indignation of God, and thus death with which God had previously threatened him, and, together with death, captivity under his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil, and that the entire Adam through that offense of prevarication was changed in body and soul for the worse, let him be anathema.' back |
Solar System - Wikipedia, Solar System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass (well over 99%) is in the Sun. Of the many objects that orbit the Sun, most of the mass is contained within eight relatively solitary planets[e] whose orbits are almost circular and lie within a nearly flat disc called the ecliptic plane.' back |
Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, 2, 3, Does God exist?, 'I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . ' back |
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