Systems -- Part I

This is Part I of a two-part post on God's use of systems in our world. Part I focuses on science, Part II on how it effects my personal theology. If you want to read Part II, click these magic words (or scroll down, possibly). If you want to see an absurdly cool picture, click those blue words.

   Most of my theology is formed by CS Lewis. Well, pretty much all of it that isn't explicitly clarified in the Bible is formed by CS Lewis. I'm in the process of reading That Hideous Strength, which I have found extremely boring, but assume the 120 pages spent watching some guy waffle on his job has some great meaning in the long run.

     In The Magician's Nephew, the sixth book in The Chronicles of Narnia no matter what chronological order they come in, Aslan is on a completely barren planet. He walks along this planet, slowly, roaring. He doesn't take a breath. The constant roar grows louder and louder as he walks closer to the two children, horse and carriage driver, and queen that are watching on this planet they've stranded themselves on. As he is roaring, plants start to grow, streams start to flow, animals begin to frolic, and the evil queen throws a metal pipe at Aslan. This pipe hits him in the forehead, falls to the ground, and immediately grows into a working lamppost from our time and world. Aslan continues on, roaring without any pause.

     Systems. Don't you get it? It's all about systems, you see.

     Now I'm going from memory here, and I haven't read this part of this book since middle school, so show a little grace: The carriage driver, while talking to Aslan, wants to return to his home and bring all sorts of things to "plant" into this new world. He'll grow shoes and hats and, I dunno, have a literal money tree, and he can't wait. Aslan clearly states that the magic of life and growth happening on the planet won't last forever, only at this moment of creation. Once that time passes, things will be born, live, grow and die like they do in our world right now.

      Aslan essentially creates a new world, sets up some systems, gives them a headstart and says "go" to Narnia, and it takes off. That's how our world is too. It's a whole bunch of systems that are in motion, but once had a beginning.

     "Science is man attempting to figure how God does what He does." -Grant Gilchrist

     One of my goals is to be one of those people who just gets quoted to prove points. Like Henry David Thoreau, whoever that is. I'd love to appear on a cross stitch or some throw pillows. But that brilliant quote above is honestly how I view science: getting evidence of whatever the heck happened or is happening. The Bible says God spoke and the universe came into existence. Sure, I have no problem with that. But there's got to be some residue left lying around that explains what was really going on. Scientists find that residue and come up with a Big Bang theory, that is really very elegant, simple, and completely absurd, except for the fact that God simply speaking something into existence sort of sounds like a giant explosion occurring in the middle of literally nowhere. Like, non-existence into existence.

     There's a crapload of animals in the world. Did they all come about through evolution? I doubt it. Evolution is a beautiful theory that has some gaping holes when you look at it in the extremely BIG picture (can it result in all life from a single-celled organism? Maybe, but not without the help of some all-powerful being) and the extremely small picture (the argument of irreducible complexity, which again can be glossed over with the notion of some Godly assistance). Did all dogs evolve from one original dog? I think so. That's pretty much what the story of Noah's Ark is asserting. Did one of those dogs evolve into the dolphin, like I learned in The Voyage of the Mimi in 5th grade? I don't think so. I'll probably explore this some other time. I think the system of "evolution" was set up that lets animals and plants adapt to each other, and it got a head start at creation.

     God had this experiment in mind He wanted to run. The human experiment. He lets all these planetary bodies and stars form and group up. One planet in particular he wants to put life on, and there's all sorts of systems on this planet. Convection in the mantle leads to currents in the ocean and shifting tectonic plates. Heat from the sun leads to pressure systems and more currents in the ocean. Pressure systems and currents in the ocean lead to a water cycle and weather patterns. The planets are all rotating about a star, leading to seasons. A moon orbits a planet, making tides. These tides and water cycles make it easy for the evolution of plants and animals to occur. God basically sets up an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine and watches it unfold. (Ha! You thought I was going to link this one, didn't you! You don't know me!)

     It's this belief that lets me be an intelligent Christian. Is the universe billions of years old? I don't care! It might be, or it might just look that way because when Aslan was first roaring about, things grew faster than they do now. Did we evolve from monkeys? I don't think we did, but if we did, okay. Neither of these ideas refute the existence of God or my beliefs in the Bible, they are simply a way for us try to understand what's going on around us at a factual level. They don't have to be conflicting, as everyone wants to make them.
    All this leads me to believe that the more we learn about the world around us - science -  the more we are learning about God. And God LOVES being learned about. It's pretty much why we are here. But it leads me to some other conclusions as well.
     IF the world really is just a bunch of systems that God put in place, there is one thing that is constantly governing these systems: mathematics. There are rules and laws being followed, and we are able to understand and track these rules through mathematics, which leads us to physics, which then leads us to chemistry and then biology. We start analyzing our purely mathematical world (a result of a purely mathematical God) and things start to make sense. What appears the most? Probability. It's probability that is governing our world. That's the system God has in place. He rolls the dice and watches to see what nature's going to do.
     So when an earthquake happens, or a tsunami or a hurricane, I am of the opinion these are not acts of God in the sense that He is in Heaven saying "now!" These are acts of God in the sense that He put all of this in motion. So hurricane Katrina wasn't meant to punish a town that has gay people in it, it was simply the result of some high and low pressure systems mixing in a way that is very common for that area.
     I have no recollection of anything "normal" happening in the Bible, nature-wise, and it being attributed to a miracle. Battles weren't won because people prayed and an earthquake swallowed the Philistines. Sure, there was a flood that featured more water than the earth has today, a river was stopped, a sea was parted, fire fell from heaven a few times, people went blind, one time a jacket was wet and one time it wasn't, but God never was like "Here's a rainstorm!! Use it!!" Those normal things are just part of the system. Anything fortuitous about the timing of an event was simply based on the probabilities of it happening and it being advantageous at the same time. People love to say "The Lord moves in mysterious ways," which He certainly does, but I think He mostly moves through probability.