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July 26, 2004

the kindness of chaos

Yesterday I had 5 hours of driving to do, and I somehow began musing on chaos. "A butterfly flaps it's wings in Brazil, and there is a tornado in Texas." Small variations in initial conditions produce large variations in outcome. This concept of chaos theory has been demonstrated by the lovely and talented Lorenz Attractor. However, the natural world is not as simple a system as the Lorenz Attractor. One of the more amazing things about chaos in nature is that it frequently tends toward states we perceive as proximal order. Most of us "chaos ignorami" don't get the finer points of Mr Lorenz' butterfly, but nonetheless instinctively understand this. Butterflies flap their wings in Brazil frequently, with utter disregard to those resilient Texans, and we have no effective way to prove it does or doesn't make any difference. We could kill all the butterflies in Brazil, but tornados in Texas would probably continue, for if a butterfly can cause a tornado, why not a fruit bat? For that matter, could not a particularly flatulent longhorn steer in Texas return the favor to Brazil?

So, most of us are content to approximate, in our down-home earthy wisdom, a theory of chaos which could be summed up thusly:

And despite the utter lack of academic discipline in our proofs, we are generally right. Talk about chaos.

Much of the energy spent in developing the world's major religions has been motivated by the need to cope with that "no guarantees" part of the equation. Given a moral system handed down by an omnipotent and all-knowing God, if we behave as He dictates we should, why do bad things happen to us? Why does He send rain on the righteous and the unrighteous? Isn't He trying to encourage a certain type of behavior? How better to do that than by offering us guarantees for our own well-being?

Humans dislike this uncertainty inherent in our own existence, and Christians generally seem to join adherents of other major religions in assuming that this uncertainty factor is a bad thing; a force of evil in the world.

But it's not a bad thing. Chaos is a good thing, a needful thing. The existence of chaos manifests God's love and His kindness to us. How can this be? What about a busload of schoolchildren careening into a ravine? What about SIDS, leukemia and acts of terrorism? Kindness?

The reason chaos manifests God's love is that chaos is the fundamental ingredient in a mutable universe. God means for us to exist as mutable free agents in a sandbox of mutable playthings. If the universe weren't created to be mutable, everything would be predictable. Not only the things that happened to us, but even the things we could do would inevitably be completely predictable. No free will. No surprises. No fun.

But a mutable world, now that's an interesting world, and one worth living in. Puny little creatures like human beings are able, by exerting relatively minute differences on their environment, to bring about significant changes. And in an infinitely mutable, deeply complex chaotic world, each puny human being is presented with myriad choices every moment. The vast majority of those decisions bear utterly no significance and are, for all intents and purposes, completely irrelevant. But without vast numbers of insignificant events, how could there be any events with significance?

God created us to be Brazilian butterflies (or Texas longhorns, if you prefer). But we can't be free to introduce our amazing little variations in initial conditions outside of a universe which won't allow those minute changes to result in big outcomes.

The kindness of chaos is this: God has created a universe that is soft enough to let us move about with freedom.

Posted by joel at July 26, 2004 11:38 PM

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