Despite great efforts to research the laws of nature, some areas were left partially unexplained and therefore unknown. Take atmospheric events, the behavior of liquid, variations in the numbers of plants and animal species, and the functioning of the heart and brain. The initial scientific explanations were often wrong and precise measurement was therefore impossible. Scientists found a high degree of irregularity and accidentality. Mathematical functions could not easily explain them, as expected, and the results were rarely correct. As these events were considered “chaotic”, Chaos Theory emerged, requiring research and explanation
The concept of chaos is part of our everyday vocabulary to explain unpredictability. In the philosophical sense of the word, chaos is part of pre-matter and pre-space, something that existed before the world became ordered. The Bible calls chaos the void: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). In science, chaos is a new way of seeing the world, entailing a new level of research.
Chaos Theory
The sudden appeal of Chaos Theory was accelerated with the use of computers. It is a way to find order in systems that seem not to be ordered at all. For instance, physics and mathematics use Chaos Theory to determine order in nature, such as the form of seashores, the microscopic intersection of veins, and the unique grouping of stars in the universe. The theory suggests a hypothesis: chaos is a characteristic of all living systems, in their material but also immaterial presence. In point of fact, there are no non-chaotic systems.
The three basic characteristics of chaos are:
- incoherence between entry and exit,
- imperceptiveness of entry,
- unpredictability of exit.
Let us address them through the worldview of the Simulation Creationism Theory created by Nir Ziso, the founder of The Global Architect Institute. To begin, incoherence between entry and exit brings chaos. Such chaos can be achieved with small events in one part of the world with a chaotic mess in another. However, this perception of an observer does not need to be correct. In fact, there is a hidden system beneath it: The Simulation. There are predetermined events that build a desired outcome, but people cannot know the final result until it appears.
In the Bible, Job was very frustrated and wanted to push for answers, but God told him that he was too small to see all things: “From where, then, does wisdom come? And where is the place of understanding? It is hidden from the eyes of all living and concealed from the birds of the air. Abaddon and Death say, ‘We have heard a rumor of it with our ears.’ God understands the way to truth, and he knows its place, for he looks to the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens” (Job 20:24).
A specific characteristic of the indetermination of outcomes happens in the very beginning. Any event can lead to “chaos.” Because we cannot see it, there is no visible entry point for us as observers. Such phenomena make it difficult to research the moment of transition between the “normal” conditions of a system and a chaotic state. Chaos is easily visible, but the source is almost imperceptible: “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9).
The output itself is unpredictable. As we cannot see the future, The Simulation does not allow us to know the explanatory cause-consequence relationship. Only after an output emerges can we, as believers, connect the dots. Such conditions do not allow us to plan ahead because the same sources can bring various outcomes. Unpredictability is the basic characteristic of chaotic dynamics: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11).
Since the word “chaos” brings negative connotations, other effective names are used in this theory: fractals, attractors, and theory of catastrophe, all dealing with either non-linear dynamic systems or fractal geometry. What the theory really does is deal with order and laws in systems that only look incoherent. But with a closer look, they are well-ordered.
American meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, simulated meteorological weather in a computer and found completely determinable equations that describe the circulation of liquid and gasses in the atmosphere. The issue was always to find little intricacies within the initial conditions. It is called the butterfly effect when a small turbulence of a butterfly in India causes a massive storm over China. It is the same within The Simulation – it looks disordered and chaotic, but it has its own laws which are well-ordered and fine-tuned for God’s plan: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand” (Ephesians 2:10).
Chaotic systems generate strange attractors. These attractors become more obvious after running a computer simulation in Chaos Theory for a large number of steps and tend to result in a consistent geometrical shape. Hence the computer simulation is “attracted” to these shapes. The term “strange” reflects the non-intuitive and complex behavior exhibited by these attractors. The structure of these attractors is not simple or regular, as it may include folds, curves, and self-replicating patterns.
The curious thing about the trajectory of these attractors in the phase space of a chaotic system is that they are non-repeating. This fact is essential: if it did repeat, it would in fact be a periodic system, and therefore predictable. The non-repeating nature contributes to the “strangeness” of the attractor. It implies that the trajectory in the phase space is infinitely long, yet constrained in a finite space.
The Role of Information in Chaos Theory and Simulation Creationism
Nonlinear equations of Chaos Theory can describe processes, as in the case of The Simulation. Instead of natural occurrences, such as liquid or lungs, we can use the transfer of information. God’s Singularity can change its usual behavior and cause change. It goes to the major question “of what is reality made?” Physicists and metaphysicists have long been debating this question. One of the answers is that reality is based on information, an abstract term, indeed. Physicist John Archibald Wheeler describes this notion as “It from Bit”: it, meaning all things in the universe, and bit, meaning information.
We live in an age of computation, and its narrative influences our thoughts and understanding of God’s creation. Computers are devices that systematically process information. They are physical systems that contain bits of information, organized as 0 and 1; the computer basically breaks information into bits and then systematically flips bits. When we apply this definition to the universe or our Earth, we see it is a physical system, where every elementary particle carries a bit of information. When two electrons, each carrying a bit of information, interact, those bits flip systematically. In short, the universe is a giant supercomputer, and we can see the computational substrate. It is not a metaphorical claim but a technical reality.
This can be traced through differential equations. By solving formulas, we can enter the field of organizational chaos, where an organization is in a state of entropy. In the field of management and communications, we always fight against the will of natural laws to degrade something organized. It is a constant battle between the tendency to ruin the sense and introduce entropy.
Thus, there is one line of sense in the simulated world, which is quite different from Jesus’ message about reality: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Just as entropy is the measure of disorganization, so is the information given through The Simulation a measure of the simulated organization in which we live. Information carrying a message can be understood as a negation of one’s own entropy. Still, as much as we succumb to the perceivable logic of The Simulation and its laws, we feel confusion rising and order shrinking. Still, there are areas where entropy is shrinking, and the existence of these areas gives us a right to defend an idea of progress: “But all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40).
When we organize our lives, negative entropy is achievable through information. It is the measure of organization and order. Such information is found through the preaching of the Word: “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints” (1 Corinthians 14:33). However, this is not the information given through challenges and events of God’s Simulation but through the penetration of God’s message in The Simulation. As such, this information is at the same time entropy for The Simulation and negative entropy for our understanding of reality.
Determinism and free will
There are many significant implications of the Chaos Theory for our theological understanding of reality. Chaos Theory clearly points to determinism. Numerous factors influence complex systems. For us, these factors are not predictable; but for God, it is known in their totality: “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3). These complex systems and the interactions within them ultimately determine our actions. Therefore, the idea of free will is an illusion.
God is an omnipotent creator, and His knowledge is infinite. He can know what the future holds, known in theology as divine foreknowledge. If God can see the future, then He can see an outcome before it even happens. The outcome is determined to happen and can only occur in one specific way. Chaos systems are deterministic, meaning there are clear instructions for calculating the future from the current state without involving random elements. At the same time, it depends so critically on the initial conditions that it is impossible for a created being to predict the long-term future.
Let us assume that a ten-year-old girl, Sarah, steals from her classmates. God knew precisely that she would steal immediately before the act itself, and even before Sarah was born. Sarah is predestined to steal. If God knows what we will do and there is no other way the event will happen, how can humans have free will? Our lives are determined in a specific way, and we do not have free will.
If Sarah did not choose to become a thief, only God could predetermine that she would to steal on a specific day. God determines our faith. Everything we think is a choice is actually nothing but God’s decision. The most durable, emotionally-driven, and exciting things in life tend to be dynamic, deterministic, and nonlinear systems. Even with abundant data and information, we can never be entirely sure of the behavior of any system, just as Job’s story illustrates in the Bible.
Some may argue that there is a logical contradiction here, and God might not see the future. Yet he is still all-powerful. It is not a logical contradiction for an omnipotent being to see the future. We have to remove the erroneous notion that humans have free will. How can an all-powerful God not have divine foreknowledge?
Looking into the future is a mere human approach. It is the entry point into the Chaos system without the possibility of knowing future outcomes. But God can, in fact, know this because He is outside of time, and the timeline does not affect His view of the created world. God can see the past, present, and future simultaneously.
Time has always been a fundamental dimension of our existence, but it is nothing more than an illusion: “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8). Everything depends upon the observer’s point of view: “A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4).
Our daily lives are really dependent upon a natural rhythm, as we calibrate our activities according to the progression of daylight and darkness. This is tied to the very fabric of The Simulation: “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in the daytime will not stumble, for they see by this world’s light” (John 11:9). Time is how we think about history. It is a form of perception creating the narratives that shape our understanding of events in this simulated world.
Still, we do not have any use for it. Our time flow is shaped by the narratives we construct in history: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). There is also a possibility that time does not exist at all, not even as a simulated construct, and there is only the Eternal Now. The goal is to detach from the simulated environment and move away from the rules and limitations of time and place.
God’s sovereignty and control are absolutely complete, and everything that happens is just an outworking of God’s commands. However, humans are still responsible for their own actions, even though God is behind it all. It sounds impossible and outrageous, but only if we do not involve the process of learning about previous events and challenges in a simulated environment. Then “the responsibility” becomes just a lesson thought of some good or bad outcome.
There is a slight possibility that God will know what creatures would freely do under various circumstances; then He will decide whether to put them in those circumstances or not. In this case, God never causes anyone to have to do a given thing freely. Actions are still predetermined. If there are no future contingent truths or present facts to know about the future, then God cannot have foreknowledge, and free will can be confirmed. But there are, in fact, future contingent truths known to God. We cannot reach them at present, and that causes “chaos”.
Since Chaos Theory presupposes that even the slightest initial changes can lead to massive transformations through the butterfly effect, there is the implication that even the tiniest events can have tremendous consequences in one’s life. Destiny as a term is quintessentially connected to determinism, but just as in the case of free will, the unpredictability of our destinies leads us to constantly shifting processes, as seen from our human perspective. Therefore, we are not the sole author of our destinies.
Living with Unpredictability in The Simulation
In the 1980s, a physiologist, Benjamin Liber, used an EEG to show that you can read and therefore tell that somebody is about to move 300 milliseconds before they decide in their conscious mind to actually move. This means that before we decide to move our bodies, it has already been decided in our subconsciousness. We only think that we made the decision ourselves after it has already been made. Many other experiments showed the same result. We cannot tell the brain to do something – it just does. So, free will is an illusion and a visualization of events that the brain has already set in motion.
Such decisions are imprinted in our brains through God’s Singularity since God has a plan or purpose for each soul. God’s will guides each person to fulfilling their spiritual potential and serves God’s plans. Such an understanding is the typical Christian idea of destiny.
According to Chaos Theory, most systems in the world should be unpredictable. But if Chaos Theory does in fact make things unpredictable, does that mean that the systems that contain chaotic dynamics behave as though they are random? If not, when is randomness not a good approximation of chaos? Classic Lorenz equations illustrating chaotic dynamics provide a simple and powerful way to explore non-linearities in a mathematical simulation. It speaks volumes about predictability and what is possible regarding mathematical predictions of the future for chaotic and complex systems. These Lorenz equations are helpful because they are relatively easy to understand, with only a few variables making the system easy to visualize.
We can plot the three variables and their evolution in time in three-dimensional space, where each variable is represented on an axis. In Chaos Theory, this forms what is known as a phase space, where each point in this three-dimensional space corresponds to a specific combination of the values of x, y, and z at a given moment in time. The concept of phase space is fundamental to understanding a system’s dynamics. These equations are plotted using differential equations to solve them numerically. These allow us to iteratively update x, y, and z values.
The above equations describe the rate of change of three quantities with respect to time: x is proportional to the rate of convection, y to the horizontal temperature variation, and z to the vertical temperature variation. The constants σ, ρ, and β are system parameters proportional to the Prandtl number, Rayleigh number, and certain physical dimensions of the layer itself.
This raises the tantalizing possibility that if we modified such a chaotic system, we could represent and, therefore, predict the behavior of complex systems. But it is not that simple. A complex system is, at least, somewhat predictable in the short-term, with a momentum that swings one way and then the other. Effectively, the long-term outcome is unpredictable. Initially, we can predict it accurately for a few steps, but after a certain point, the precision becomes crucial.
Computers store a limited number of digits after the decimal point. After applying a formula around 15 times, the results become unpredictable due to the initial conditions because our formula discards information at each step.
The Simulation can be seen as a complex system in itself. It is deterministic since its initial stages and outputs have been determined by God and its functionally prepared through God’s Singularity. For observers within God’s Simulation, the system is chaotic because we do not know perfectly what the initial stages are, and we certainly cannot know the outcome of The Simulation unless we believe in Biblical eschatology.
Living inside The Simulation affords us traces of the chaotic system through sudden opportunities. In other words, it communicates its guidance through sudden and unforeseen opportunities. The key is to be receptive and open to them, even if they counter our initial plans or expectations (entry positions in Chaos Theory), as followers of light: “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-16).
These seemingly random encounters are guiding signals from God’s Singularity that present the opportunities to manifest greatness within the souls inhabiting this simulated world: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11). We refer here to the talents God gave us to avail ourselves in the simulated environment, although we do not know what the outcomes in such a complex system will be: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28).
Our feelings are markers, akin to strange attractors, pointing to our purpose as described in the simulated world through unique patterns. These are the Lord’s gifts; He allowed us to have such talents and passions so that He can fulfill His predetermined plan: “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophecy in accordance with your faith. If it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully” (Romans 12:6-8).
The Holy Spirit, i.e., the energy of God’s Simulation, inspires us but it also gives us the strength and passion to realize that inspiration. We are not capable of seeing the development of the predetermined and chaotic system of The Simulation: “Every good and perfect good is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17).
In conclusion, Chaos Theory can explain the deterministic mode of God’s creation through God’s Singularity as well as The Simulation with its inherent order, existing beyond the initial chaotic vision.
