Chaos = 42.

Interesting program on chaos last night. Hard to know where to start. A steady progress in maths from Turin to Mendelbrot has produced equations that mimic chaos and show that chaos produces both predictable and unpredictable behaviour. Before this our Newtonian physics was only interested in the predictable clockworkings of our universe. And I guess before that we were caught up in the unpredictable Gods who needed the odd sacrificial virgin from time to time. Who figured that one out I’ll never know. I’m guessing the logic was women are less important, and those that don’t put out are even less so and aggravating to boot. So we figured out the unpredictable, then we figured out the predictable, then we seem to have figured out that they both come from chaos, not as random unrelatedness but chaos that is strictly governed by simple underlying rules. That life, the universe and everything has its own built in drive for predictability and unpredictability. OK so what does a combination of predictability and unpredictability give you? Complexity. Predictability gives rise to repartition not complexity, unpredictability and randomness give rise to confusion, not complexity, but the two together do. So in the fabric of everything there is an inbuilt drive towards complexity arising from a combination of predictable and unpredictable behaviour, both of which stem from simple underlying relationships that drive chaos. Interesting.
So back to our awareness of God. First we thought ‘they’ were unpredictable and needed appeasing, then we thought there was only one and that ‘he’ was predictable, if mysterious, and on our side, be it Muslim, Christian, American or Vietnamese. Now we learn that the driving force of everything is chaos, both predictable and unpredictable giving rise to ever increasing complexity; mystery that is both within and far outside our meagre understanding. Is this God? Fits the bill for me. It does not reduce my awe for its majesty and is far better than the anthropomorphic God my ego comes up with. Does this make me a Christian? I think so.