Bully's Blog

The Creative Equation

This post might seem irreverent, or stupid, or both, but humour me. It will help illustrate what I want to get into tomorrow.

The documentary on fractals featuring Arthur C. Clarke included some comments that applied the math to theology, which of course got me thinking. [1] The Mandelbrot Set is a simple formula, just like E = MC2. However, unlike Einstein’s equation, the equals sign in the centre is actually a two-way arrow, a to and fro.

A Complex Number

Any value fed into the simple equation instantly becomes extremely, infinitely complex, like video feedback, because every resulting value is immediately fed back into it for a further result. The fractal it creates contains repetition, but the shapes are similar, not identical. The variety is also infinite. [2] This means that reality can be determined yet not deterministic. In the documentary Professor Ian Stewart said,

“When Isaac Newton came up with laws of motion and laws of gravity, the picture that emerged was of a clockwork universe. It was of a machine that ticked on a predetermined course. All we needed to know was where it was now, what it was doing now, and then we could predict the future forever.

Now, there are two challenges to this. One is quantum mechanics, which says, in fact, that there is irreducible chance built into the vary fabric of the universe. You can’t say exactly what it’s doing now. You can’t say exactly what it’s doing ever.

And the other is things that come out of the Mandelbrot set and related parts of mathematics: even in a Newtonian world, in practice you may not be able to predict the future. It can be deterministic in principle but not in practice.”

Then, from Dr. Michael Barnsley,

“This is how God created a system which gave us free will. It is the most brilliant manoeuvre in the univese — to create something in which everything is free. How could you do that?”

Ian Stewart again,

“Albert Einstein refused to accept the idea of a dice-playing deity. He wrote a letter to Max Vaughan in which he said, ‘You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order.’ So, he obviously felt that chance and deterministic laws were not compatible and preferred the deterministic laws.

Now, what the Mandelbrot Set and Chaos and related things have done for us is to show that you can have both at the same time. So it’s not whether God plays dice but how God plays dice.”

What this means is that the apparent disorder of natural forms can be measured mathematically. The shape of storm clouds, the ratio of forest to tree and tree to branch, and even the complexity found within a heartbeat can be reduced to a simple equation. A later documentary (which I also recommend) by Nova covers this in detail. [3]

The is exactly what we see through the Bible as God guides the history and its literature. We see the same basic forms at various levels, but none of the occurrences of the patterns is identical. Far from it. The images are not simple but complex. Yet they all bear the imprint of the same simple formula.

So, tracing this created “law” back to the Creator, the Father and Son are binary, but the very fact that they are distinct calls for Trinity, a Third Person, the Covenant between them. As Jordan observes (or quotes), “All of God does all that God does.”

The Spirit between them is the eternally fruitful “field.” The two dimensional plane suddenly becomes three dimensional. In history, we see Word become flesh, Covenant become history. The Word of the Father never returns to Him void.

Within this field is an infinite cycle of harvest, a perpetual loop of Covenant succession, of delegation and reward, of investment and return, of planting and ingathering. But this is not a pagan loop, a “chronic hysteresis” which never goes anywhere. It is the continuously fulfilled infinite potential of the Godhead. It is Creation and Glorification, Word and Praise, back and forth, to and fro, in a creative constance, a “non-static stasis.” The Spirit is the fulfillment, or “fullness” of the Covenant (Maturity, for those of you who have read Bible Matrix.)

What is interesting about the Mandelbrot equation is that it produces both “white numbers” and “black numbers,” abundance and barrenness. This mathematical binary “Covenant” brings light and dark. As it throws the dice, the Urim and Thummim, it allows some numbers to bloom and others to wither. The positives take on the full spectrum of colour (the Covenant rainbow) and the negatives are thrown into outer darkness. The creative equation is a mathematical “sword of judgment” that brings both life and death.

Man was given binary Word, and to all intents and purposes the result goes either way — or both ways. When God comes to assess, there are always two goats. There is always a remnant. His justice is redemptive, not punitive. It prunes to bring further abundance.

Contrary to pagan and modern (neo-pagan) belief, complexity arises, not from chaos, but from the perfect balance, from the “stationery motion”, of an infinite simplicity.

The “simple” to and fro of the Spirit between the Father and the Son is an eternal complex, an infinite room.

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[1] Quoted from Fractals, The Colours of Infinity, part 6, here.

[2] See Introduction to the Mandelbrot Set for a simple rundown. When it comes to math, I like simple.

[3] Hunting the Hidden Dimension, part 1 here. It is entirely “secular” but worth the watch.

Infinite Room series links here.
INFROOM