Chaos
Bob Johnson is intrigued by a question: Does God defy chaos?
Do you Quakers believe in God? The news-reporter thrusts the microphone almost up your nose. Well? Do you? It’s a simple enough question – yes or no? Stop all this wishy-washy fudging – you’ve had long enough to think about it. Do you or don’t you?
I used to fret about how I’d reply. I felt obliged to be scrupulously honest, while desperately wanting to avoid losing something vital through crass verbal fragility. My fretting days are over. I’ve discovered chaos. Not your ordinary, everyday, chaos, not your ‘SNAFU’ (‘Situation Normal All Fouled Up’) – no, this is ‘scientific chaos’, the official version, backed by a Universal Law of Physics, no less. And it’s everywhere – and destined to get ever worse. Officially, it has been re-branded ‘entropy’, or disorganisation, but it’s really only the old enemy: Biblical Chaos.
Chaos, yes, that’s for me. My belief in chaos is rock solid. Let me count the ways. I believe in it unreservedly, unflinchingly, passionately, devotedly, faithfully, courageously, confidently, even – if I may – religiously and, of course, scientifically. However, it would be a mistake to think believing in chaos is easy. It poses a direct, mocking challenge to human reason.
Many people dodge it. They much prefer to believe in something like a clockwork universe, a hidden pattern behind all the obvious chaos around us. A rust-free, indestructible, unchanging place – yet to be discovered but supposedly just around the next corner – while all the while the real world keeps obstinately pointing the other way, and not only in the scientific textbooks.
Take, for example, the Superstorm Sandy of 2012. Here was chaos on a grand scale – people our size resembling ants drowning in a puddle. It was not easy to explain, unless you’re a passionate believer in chaos. One mother, for example, told how her gorgeous son left their home ‘to be with his Jenny’, only to find, later, that both had been crushed by a wind-blown tree. ‘God must have looked the other way’, she said, still choked with grief.
Now, here’s one instance where God did not defy chaos, at least not for this New Yorker. People will draw different conclusions from this, as they are fully entitled to do. For me, it emphasises a rather different defiance of chaos, and one which helps. I couldn’t have come to it without our stalwart: a warm-hearted but vibrantly flexible Quakerism.
For just as all around us is inanimate chaos, so, too, is animate ‘non-chaos’. The wisdom, as ever in human affairs, is to spot the difference, and then laud it.
‘Entropy’ is science for chaos, disorganisation – all inanimate systems degenerate into disorder. But living things do the opposite. They exhibit ‘anti-entropy’, or, as I prefer, ‘Antropy’. I don’t know how they do this. I will never know – but that troubles me not the slightest. I revel in the fact that they do. The biosphere doesn’t lie. It tells us the truth. It’s as if living things have cottoned on to chaos, to entropy, and found a way of ‘answering’ it, of turning it on its head, of coming up with a way of dealing with it that brings prodigious delight to humans, including me.
So, the next time you watch a bluebottle or a bumble bee, or see a new bud blossoming, don’t look away, join them. Say to yourself, here’s another living thing struggling to face down chaos, and then think how you can translate this, in a Quakerly fashion, into our wider world.
Well, does God defy chaos? That’s for you to decide. For myself, I delight in trying to, in my minuscule ant-like way. Do you?
Comments
Trying to understand the current series of storms changing our landscape must surely lead us to the conclusion that we are on the receiving end of chaotic forces, supposedly started on the other side of the world. Having some humility in the face of such events may help us to work in harmony together to minimise the impact of continuing chaotic, creative forces so that we can face reality that we are not fully in control of our destiny.
By Tim Newell on 13th February 2014 - 17:26
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