Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

ower-level entity has a repertoire of behaviours, one of which will be selected due to its relations to the rest of the system and to its environment. In fact, ant behaviour, when extracted from its environment (its colony), is a good visual model: drop an ant on the table and it runs helter-skelter. It can be coerced into going one way rather than another (context-free constraints), but in the colony it responds to context-sensitive constraints that entrain its behaviour to that of other ants in ways sensitive to history and higher levels of organised context. From this point of view, the 14 Journal of European Baptist Studies genetically imprinted rules in the individual ants’ nervous systems are not (primarily) to be understood as causal laws; they are receptors of information regarding such things as the density of the forager population. The holistic property of the system, forager density, increases the probability that a given forager will encounter more than three other foragers per minute, and thus increases the probability that the ant in question will return to the nest. It is a non-forceful constraint on the ant’s behaviour. Note that the reductionist’s question is: if you take all the components and place them in exactly the same positions in the environment and allow the system to run again, will the entire system follow exactly the same path? The reductionist assumes that it must do so unless there is some source of genuine indeterminacy involved at the bottom level. The systems theorist asks a different question: given that no two complex systems (e.g., two ant colonies) are ever identical, why is it the case that, starting from so wide a variety of initial conditions, one finds such similar patterns emerging? That the world is full of such phenomena is now a widely recognised fact, but it is counter-intuitive on a bottom-up account. I claim that the fact of higher-order patternedness in nature, patterns that are stable despite perturbations, and despite replacement of their constituents, calls for a major shift in our perceptions of (much of) the world. Alwyn Scott, a specialist in nonlinear mathematics, states that a paradigm change (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense) has occurred in science beginning in the 1970s. He describes nonlinear science as a meta-science, based on recognition of patterns in kinds of phenomena in diverse fields. This paradigm shift amounts to a new conception of the very nature of causality. 18 Here we see again the connection between this topic and that of the shift from modern to postmodern thought. Stephen Toulmin, in his very significant book, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, wrote in 1999 that we are at the end of an era. There are ideas and beliefs of the passing worldview that have been so taken for granted as to go without saying. He calls these ‘the timbers of modernity’. 19 I claim that reductionism was one of these. Already in the writings