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II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

3. The Book of Naturome: A New Translation

Haught, John. Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. Noted more in Religion and Science, here we enter its chapter on “A Reading Problem.” A first section muses that Moby Dick can be experienced in diverse ways by a dog, chimpanzee, child, teenager, or astute adult. Human beings have similarly tried to encounter and interpret a greater reality and creation, which we would do well to appreciate its ordained textual, narrative nature, a “cosmic literalism.” Alas, physical science and evolutionary theory seem intentionally to obscure and deny any such depth, but adds Haught, with a spiritual imagination and insight an essential, palliative meaning might yet be availed.

Hess, Peter. God’s Two Books: Special Revelation and Natural Science in the Christian West. Peters, Ted and Gaymon Bennett, eds. Bridging Science and Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. A succinct survey from the time of Augustine to the mid 19th century. The metaphor was forgotten in the secular 20th century but could well be reinvigorated.

Howe, Christopher, et al. Manuscript Evolution. Trends in Genetics. 17/3, 2001. On the remarkable parallel between mutations in DNA and changes in a hand copied text. Whereas linguistic analysis has been used to elucidate the molecular code, here programs for genetic studies are found to similarly apply to revised versions of a medieval manuscript. The consequence would be to appreciate the textual essence of DNA sequences, the genetic nature of human language and in an expanded sense, the cosmos as a readable testament.

Howell, Kenneth. God’s Two Books. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. A scholarly study of the pervasive tradition of dual modes of revelation - given scripture and found nature - at the early modern period of the Copernican revolution. But its prime focus was to illuminate a Divine Creator, rather than to imagine an intrinsic value for this earthly and human realm.

Jorink, Eric. Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575-1715. Leiden: Brill, 2010. A Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences historian chronicles this period of Christian Huygens, Jan Swammerdam, Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, Gisbertus Voetius, and others, as a prime exemplar of Renaissance science and philosophy. As similarly for Galileo, Paracelsus, Newton, Bacon, and contemporaries, a motive was the study and decipherment from bacterium to comets of the second book of God’s created works as so revealed on earth and in the heavens. Upon such promise, Pastor Friedrich Spanheim published his sermons in 1676 as The Atheist Convinced. May we imagine from our vantage 400 years on, in view of a drawing of the Leiden University library in 1610 (61), a single human endeavor to decipher and divine this natural existence? But that earlier age was betwixt a mystical, organic, textual milieu, and a waxing Cartesian turn to a mechanical materialism, a paradigm that still reigns. And as we know, “atheism” has won the day, not only is God gone but any sense of greater reality or creation is also abandoned.

Kay, Lily. In the Beginning Was the Word?: The Genetic Code and the Book of Life. Biagioli, Mario, ed. The Science Studies Reader.. New York: Routledge, 1999. A historian of science observes how a worldly creation long perceived as textual in kind has become now readable in part by means of the DNA double helix.

Thus, from ancient times to recent years nature has always been textualized; its aporias have challenged even religious practitioners of science. And apart from the theological conundra, the synchronic meanings of writing and the Book of Nature also changed with time: they were reconfigured within the regimes of signification of changing epistemes and cultural experiences: ancient, medieval, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, romanticism and twentieth-century modernism. Thus in the punctuated history of the Book of Nature the metaphor has had a remarkable endurance but was always (re)historicized with complex and overlapping layers of old and new meanings. (227-228)

Lample, Guillaume and Francois Charton. Deep Learning for Symbolic Mathematics. arXiv:1912.01412. We cite this entry by Facebook AI Research, Paris mathematicians here because at this frontier of computational studies, it refers to “Mathematics as a Natural Language.” The paper merited a news note Symbolic Mathematics Finally Yields to Neural Networks by Stephen Ornes in Quanta (May 20, 2020). While densely argued, the paper assumes a discernible legibility which resides deeply within natural creation. Some 400 years later, Galileo would be pleased.

Neural networks have a reputation for being better at solving statistical or approximate problems than at performing calculations or working with symbolic data. In this paper, we show that they can be surprisingly good at more elaborated tasks in mathematics, such as symbolic integration and solving differential equations. We propose a syntax for representing mathematical problems, and methods for generating large datasets that can be used to train sequence-to-sequence models. We achieve results that outperform commercial Computer Algebra Systems such as Matlab or Mathematica. (Abstract)

Lee, Sang Hyun and Allen Guelzo, eds. Edwards in Our Time. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Even into the mid 18th century the premier theologian on American soil, Jonathan Edwards, lived the metaphor of two books. Scripture and Nature, as both Divinely conceived, are necessary for full edification.

Louth, Andrew. The Theology of the Word Made Flesh. Sharpe, John and Kimberly Van Kampen, eds.. The Bible as Book. London: British Library, 1998. An essay on the thought of the Byzantine theologian St. Maximus (580-662) who dwelt upon a scriptual nature as a source of revelation.

Scripture is a cosmos, as we have seen; the human person is a cosmos, a little cosmos, micro kosmos, from which the philosophers of the Renaissance coined the term ‘microcosm’; and the relation of text to meaning is found in any cosmos, for it is an ordered whole, the order (text) being an expression of its inner meaning. (227)

Lowe, Bryan. Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2017. hile western Abrahamic adherents are referred to as peoples of the book, a Vanderbilt University professor of religious studies illumes how a presence and significance of carefully crafted, copied, and revered sacred writings similarly distinguishes East Asian religions.

Marcus, M. Computer Science, the Informational and Jewish Mysticism. Technology in Society. 21/4, 1999. A University of Pittsburgh professor contends that information exists independently of physical realms, which is then seen to affirm the Kabbalistic teaching that our world is most of all a dynamic scripture still in preparation. As a microscopic image of God, a person can actively participate in this sacred transcription. When writing computer programs, the author imagines he is contributing to the on-going writing of a cosmic Torah.

Markos, Anton. Readers of the Book of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Following on Galileo’s famous statement about the grand book of the universe, a biologist explores the utility of considering organic nature as a literal text, whose interpretation then becomes a more valid approach than mechanistic reduction. As a result, a holistic approach through linguistic metaphor to the study of life is gained as the sense of reading an inherent message. Markos goes on to say that this perspective implies a planetary superorganism with its own developmental ontogeny.

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