The Religion of a Complex Systems Scientist

I’m dropping the following, lightly edited excerpt from the preface of my dissertation into this site in order to tell you about my spiritual beliefs. The dissertation was on a simple model originated by my advisor and a previous student and designed in part to give insight into words we use without knowing their meaning in any detail, words such as “time,” “space,” “mass,” “energy,” and “momentum.”

         Some pains are taken below to convince the reader that the contents of this dissertation will prove interesting and useful to them. The insightful, or suspicious, reader might have wondered, after having been assured of the value to themselves of the present work, exactly what is in it for the author. While I would not ordinarily confide something of such personal import, I am sensible of the fact that the survival of our civilization in the face of the climate crisis depends on the ability of nonscientists to trust the pronouncements of scientists. Though this work is on a different topic and is unlikely to fall into the hands of people outside science, I shall follow the supposition that complete candor is most conducive to fostering trust in general and reveal that among other things, scientific research is, to me, a way of worshiping God.

         An example may convey my meaning best. At one time, I lived in a small urban area surrounded by agricultural land. Large flocks of birds would settle at times within the cities. One wonders if their numbers are still as great. Occasionally, a flock would take flight from the trees, wheel, soar, swoop, and continue to maneuver for a minute or two before alighting again. For me, the remarkable part of watching this was the seeming coordination of the whole flock across distances that were large, due to the number of birds. The sight forcefully made me feel the presence of God.

         This feeling arose in me in great part from my knowledge that the coordination could be an emergent property, due to a small number of simple rules governing the action of each bird relative to its fellows [Reynolds:Flocking]. That is, a model in which each bird obeys three rules produces the same quality of behavior. To quote from [Reynolds:Flocking],

Stated briefly as rules, and in order of decreasing precedence,
the behaviors that lead to simulated flocking are

                                 1. Collision Avoidance: avoid collisions with nearby flockmates

                                 2. Velocity Matching: attempt to match velocity with nearby flockmates

                                 3. Flock Centering: attempt to stay close to nearby flockmates.

         More complicated models [Delgado-Mata:Flocking] [Hemelrijk:Flocking,2011] are possible, as well. All the models produce complex behavior from simple, easily stated instructions.

         To mention another example, I worked on a team that found a model for the evolution of the trait of synchronization of flashing in certain species of firefly [Arnold:Fireflies]. Even such a simple result concerns a matter of complexity. That vast numbers of events in the lives of fellow beings can be understood in any useful way with a few weeks' effort by a few people is testament to the fact that we ourselves have come into being through a process that leads us to function in harmony with the very principles we study.

         Since at least my early teen years, I have believed on empirical grounds, as they were presented to me under the heading of science, in the ability to understand my experiences as arising from remarkably simple principles, applied to enormous numbers of things that exist around me and of which I consist. For examples I knew of then, computers can be programmed by mere humans to predict the weather reliably as probabilities of various outcomes, while the motions of planets can be predicted far more reliably, as can, in a less unalloyedly satisfying way, the trajectories of artillery shells. These principles and many others from various fields of study, taken together, are God, in my view, if no other God exists. A smaller set of underlying principles may give rise to the various ones useful in limited contexts, but whether a pithy representation of God is to be preferred to one that is less so depends on one's purposes. Furthermore, I do not possess faith in any other God.

         The principles give rise to everything, including myself and those I love. Thus, everything is an expression of God as I believe in God. I simply experience God as an abstraction, one that stirs my emotions and sustains me by giving me an abundance to experience and contemplate. From the tradition of my ancestors, Heaven is sometimes described as the state of contemplating the face of God. To me, that is life and, in the form in which the nature of the contemplation is most obvious to me, doing science. My ancestors said that God was everywhere; I believe that everything is an expression of God. I was taught that God is an omnipotent and omniscient Person, as well as an omnipresent One, a Person Whose intentions cannot be understood by humans. I hope not to offend by writing that such a Person is an Abstraction to me, certainly to a greater degree than people in the minuscule tend to be. The longer I live, the more I see my beliefs as compatible with those of various religious traditions concerning the Nature of God, the differences being less in the Nature of God and more in the mental image of God in the believer.                    

         I've found in explaining these ideas on various occasions that misunderstandings often arise. To reduce the risk of this, it might help the reader to know that I am making a statement against interest. While no one has ever told me in precisely those words that they were persecuting me for my beliefs, it seems unlikely that I have not suffered to a significant degree for openly espousing them, or at least for not pretending to believe in other things. Thus, I have no expectation of profiting personally from writing openly of these things.          

         As one's spiritual beliefs motivate, in part, one's scientific efforts, the study of science can further inform one's understanding of God. From Ariel Caticha [Caticha:entropic,2012], I learned that randomness is an expression of ignorance. For example, we say that a fair coin has probability 1/2 of landing as heads and 1/2 of landing as tails, the equal probabilities meaning that we know nothing that would lead us to expect one outcome over the other. Likewise, for most purposes, people who say that life is random and people who say that life is governed by a plan that we cannot understand are saying the same thing, insofar as both statements are expressions of ignorance of what is to come.  

         The difference between the two possibilities can be detected in long-term trends. To the extent that history indicates development, rather than mere oscillation, the plan hypothesis appears to be favored. However, the development could be expected to emerge from models containing simple human inclinations at work in multitudes of people, each acting on myriad occasions. Some of these inclinations might be identified as those to treat people well, whatever we feel about them at the time, to act for the benefit of strangers despite manageable loss to oneself and those one loves, and to safeguard the natural world against the excessive zeal with which some people pursue the first two inclinations, to the ultimate harm of multitudes of people, or even our entire species, thereby doomed to live through ecological degradation or collapse. In any case, God can be seen at work. What differs among the people looking is the mental image of God each holds. One can even apply the principle of dualism, adopting one mental image in some circumstances and another in others [Weaver:1975].

         Where will the contents of this dissertation lead? God only knows, but in my view, trying to figure it out is pious, salubrious, great fun, and possibly of benefit to other people. That we live in a universe where such investigations can bear fruit is cause for the utmost gratitude in me, both in itself and through what it brings about.