Chaos and Christianity

When I was teaching graduate school, one of the courses I taught was Program Evaluation. In it I taught mid-level executives how to assess whether their organization was actually working toward their stated mission goals. All too many organizations create perverse incentives that lead their front-line managers to work against the actual goals of their business.  In that course, I taught a number of theoretical constructs, one of them was an introduction to the basics of Chaos Theory.  It is a powerful concept that, like so many theories, is simply a way of explaining the things we see around us.

The idea of chaos theory is that while the millions or billions of interactions around us seem random they do, in fact, have a natural order or pattern.   The illustration I used was on the biggest scale I could think: space.   I proposed that if one could look at the aftermath of a supernova one would find an uncountable number of individual pieces of debris; some big but most would be far smaller than the size of grains of sand.   The pieces would be scattered randomly and it would be quite like chaos indeed.  

However, invisible to the observer, there would be forces at work to bring order.  Each one of those billions of pieces of debris would be exerting force on all the others.  One might be able to calculate how one individual piece of debris interacts with one other piece; however, there would be no way of calculating the way that all those pieces act on a single piece of debris.  For not only does each other piece have its own forces, those forces will interact with each other to make some new pattern of force.   The complexity of how the billions of conflicting forces act on a single particle is just too great to calculate.

Despite this, we are quite certain that if we wait long enough the chaos will transition through stages to till it becomes first a nebula and then forms gas clusters then stars (or other distinct and organized patterns).  The same pattern of chaos to order would be seen if you put glitter in a tub of water and then shook the tub.  Because within chaos, there are imbedded forces that bring about natural order.

I pointed out that this pattern is true for groups of people, large and small and even to the conflicting beliefs, experiences and values inside a single individual.   The problem leaders have is that when trying to effect change in such an environment, they must remember that nothing they attempt to change is monolithic, rather it is made up of many, many individual parts each with its own gravity and forces.  Thus when a leader uses any method to change the direction of the whole,  the leader is setting in motion a whole series of impacts on a great many things, most of which he is unaware.

The idea of this is called the butterfly effect: how even the smallest action has many and unpredictable reactions. In the right circumstances, the consequences of the secondary effect might greatly outweigh the original action.   Additionally, the greater the action, the greater and more numerous are the reactions.

This might sound dangerous, and indeed it can be.  However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If we choose good actions, we can set into motion secondary positives that are far outside of our reach.  I used the example of the Perry Preschool Project.  In the late 1950’s a group of researchers went into 73 impoverished African-American homes in Detroit and provided an hour per week of parenting training and 3 hours a week remedial assistance to the parent’s 4 &5 year old children for a year.   They then followed those children (and a control group) for 40 years. The difference on events decades later was profound.  Now, 60 years later, not only have those original children been changed, so have their children and grandchildren in ways the original group of researchers could not have possibly imagined.

I know this program well, because I headed up a program that sought to replicate the results.  I recall telling my staff that we would never see the real impact of what we were doing. We just did the right thing, believing by faith that we would change the trajectory of these children’s lives.

Now let me use a different example. Jesus taught a message of love in an unbelievably brutal world control by Rome. In the decades prior to his birth, Rome went through a series of civil wars. In each of these a small group of people sought to control the Roman government, but in this struggle their armies swept through the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Each time a single man (or small group) fought for control, their armies stripped the hard-earned savings of generations of people who lived in those lands in order to feed their war machine. To those who lived in those communities, it seemed like chaos indeed since few of them even knew the names of the players in the struggle. Yet, thousands of years later, we see the sweep of history and the patterns that the people on the ground simply could not fathom.

Into this seeming chaos, Jesus assured his followers that love expressed to others does not return void, but has an impact for good beyond their sight. He taught things such as “blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth,” and the importance of showing compassionate concern to those around you as the greatest good. He did not preach grand social reforms or overthrowing the oppressive Roman government, rather he thought his followers to show goodness in their tiny circle of influence. He taught that it is only by faith that we trust the good we do will have an effect beyond our sight.  His message was chaos theory in action.

We live in a world of chaos.  It seems that nothing good is rewarded and evil prevails.  It is so easy to become discouraged and think that we can never impact the juggernaut of evil that seems to roll forward unceasingly. The thing is our world is infinitely less evil and brutal than the one Jesus inhabited; yet, he told us not to be discouraged. He told us to reward evil with good, hate with love, selfishness with generosity.  As a follower of the teachings of Jesus, this is my lifelong mission. 

We as Christians do not have to see the impact of the kindness we do or of the unceasing love we show; we go forth by faith believing that the butterfly effect is real and that our goodness will change the trajectory of other people or events in ways we cannot see.  This is faith in action.

I write this blog not knowing who, if anyone will read it, but I do it by faith that someone will and it will make the tiniest change to their thinking or behavior and that tiny change will, in time bring results that matter.

No matter what lies are spread about what it means to be a follower of Jesus (i.e. a Christian), this is the crux of the Christian life. It is by faith we sow love with the belief that it will yield a harvest of goodness, even if we don’t see how.

PostScript:

Just today I read an article in ProPulbica ( www.propublica.org/article/inside-ziklag-secret-Christian-charity-2024-election) about yet another group spending millions to undermine American democracy with the ultimate goal of making their vision of a vague but very conservative version of so-called “Christianity” the religion of the USA.