Towards A Mathematical Model of God

A Hypothesis About God's Will

In mathematics there’s this concept of “attractors.” Without getting overly technical, complex systems have a tendency to drive themselves towards certain endpoints. As an easy example, put a marble inside a large bowl. Now, you can start the marble off rolling anyway you like. You can just drop it, you can send it rolling round the rim, you can give it a little backspin… anything. And, depending on how you start the marble, it will make all sorts of interesting paths and contortions round the bowl. Yet, in the end, it will come to rest at the bottom. In the center.

Why?

Because in this scenario gravity is the attractor. No matter what crazy start you give the marble there’s a constant pull towards an end position. All the time. Now, in more complex systems there might be several end positions. For example, imagine that the bottom of our hypothetical bowl was like an egg carton. We know the marble will end up coming to rest in one of those little cups but, predicting which from the initial conditions of the marble’s roll is a little tricky. Sometimes, it’s actually impossible. In a nutshell complex systems where it is impossible to determine the final end state fall into what is called “Chaos Mathematics.” Interesting field. I believe the Will of God operates like this. I believe God can be mathematically modeled as an attractor, pulling all things towards a final end state, namely, The Eschaton.

This has profound implications.

For one, it is a useful model for conceptualizing the apparent contradiction between Fate and Free Will. Everybody who’s thought about the problem for five seconds has asked the question, “If God knows the future, how can we have real, actual choice. Is not everything predetermined?”

Back to the marble.

Imagine a big bowl. A very big bowl. A bowl large enough for a couple billion marbles to roll around in it all at once. Now, let’s pretend this bowl has two troughs at the bottom. Two potential endstates. Let one be called “Heaven” and the other trough “Hell.” Let each marble be an individual human soul free to chart whatever crazy path around the sides of the bowl that it desires. And they all get that. They all get a true, free choice. Everyone rolling their marble can start it in anyway they please. The choice is real and yet from the outset it is a certainty that every marble in that bowl will end up in one of two places. It’s choice constrained by Fate. Maybe this is how life works. Maybe this is how everything works.

I believe strongly that our choices are real. The strict Calvinist thing where God preordains every single action of our lives and we have no real say in the matter (yet bear real responsible for the guilt) has always struck me as absurd. If there is no choice there is no sin. Simple as. Moreover, if there is no choice there is no virtue. And, yet, God is truly omnipotent. You can’t sacrifice that idea either. Get rid of either God’s power or our choice and you have a diminished faith that leads to all sorts of nonsense. Maybe it’s like the marbles.

Let it be simpler than Heaven or Hell. That’s a pretty extreme version of the Attractor Theory. Perhaps our lives have predefined points in them. Temporary “end states” we have to get to somehow or another. Maybe it’s like in mini-golf where there are the fake holes that shoot your ball down an unseen tunnel to some exit closer to the real hole. Maybe life has lots of those. Perhaps God has said, “Okay, now John Smith here, his life is going to involve getting sick in grade school, marrying Sarah Lee Thomas at 27, having four children, dealing with one debilitating injury, and finally death at 93.” And those things just have to happen. How you get there is up to you, and how you get there matters, but, you will get there. You’ll hit those predefined moments of your life. That is your fate. The divine attractor pulls you towards them.

We could get a little more complex and imagine a branching fork mechanism. Perhaps how you handle and respond to Predefined Lifepoint A determines if you will go on to choose between Predefined Lifepoints B and C or Predefined Lifepoints D and E. I imagine this is closer to the truth. I imagine it is actually far, far, more complex than that but, I do have a hunch, and intuition if you like, that it is something sorta like this. That we have free will constrained by fate. That there is an attractor pulling us towards the eschaton, the end of time.

That attractor, I believe, is Christ. The alpha and the omega. The beginning, and the end.

See, Jesus is inescapable. He truly is. Everybody ends up talking about him all the time, even when they don’t. His message, his life, the possibility of what he might mean, haunts the entire world. He isn’t there, and then, all of a sudden, he is. A political debate seemingly totally unrelated to religion is suddenly punctuated by a candidate’s appeal to Jesus’s words. His sermons echo in the back of the heads of lovers during an argument. His life stands in condemnation of how we live, and all our sins. He haunts the Islamic world no less than the Christian one. In some ways perhaps more for being more of a background character. He is considered a god in Hinduism. The Dali Lama considers Christ a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being who attained Buddhahood and the great Thai Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh affirmed his resurrection from the dead. He’s literally all atheists can talk about. He’s everywhere.

Like some grand cosmic force of, what?, narrative maybe, he is pulling everything either too himself or pushing it away. The right and the left hands of God. The sheep and the goats. Perhaps the Biblical analogy which comes closest to an attractor analogy is best. The threshing floor. He takes the grain and hurls it into the wind and the wind (wind and spirit are the same btw) separates the wheat from the chaff, both falling in different places.

I don’t know.

All I know is that no matter how much I have personally wanted to escape him, I never could. He’s always been there. Making me choose. His life and his words an affront to every selfish action I’ve ever taken and ever time I’ve ever allowed myself to indulge in doubt or fear. Not that it’s stopped me from indulging, or being selfish mind you. Hardly. Sometimes I’ve been the chaff. Maybe too often.

I guess the message is to make your choices. Yes. But be mindful that there is an attractor pulling you towards an end state. A final sorting mechanism. If you like, the judgement seat of God.