Finding order in the universe

ANDY CROUCH: We have an innate desire to find order in the world – a kind of ordered beauty in the world – and when we come upon it, we exult in it, we appreciate it, we seek it. And I don’t know how you explain that, but what is really hard to explain is that we actually find it. That as we examine the cosmos – and I’m thinking especially about the most fundamental discoveries about the nature of the cosmos – we find more and more evidence of what you might call ordered abundance in the structure of the world. And there’s no clear reason that the world would have to be that way – the world could basically be just chaos, there are civilisations that actually pretty much believed that is what the world was. And even if the world did have this ordered abundance, why do human beings have this built-in desire to find it, to actually investigate and find it? And yet there’s this incredible mathematical elegance to the world at the largest scales and in some ways the smallest scales, that we are built to seek out. Now where did that come from?