Anybody who has seen the movie Jurassic Park is probably familiar with the term "Chaos Theory." In the movie, the mathematician character uses the common analogy, "a butterfly flaps its wings in China, and it rains in New York."  Chaotic systems, in a mathematical sense, are systems where a small change in input can result in massive changes in the result, like a butterfly flapping its wings setting off a series of events that eventually leads to rain in New York.

The concepts I want to explore in this short paper, I'm not the first or only person to make similar observations.  Although I did indeed think of the idea of human society being akin to a chaotic system on my own, other people thought of it too, and before I did.  So, if you do a search on the web, you'll likely find other papers saying similar things as I'm about to.*  However, I suspect that for the average "man on the street," the ideas I'm going to express are very foreign.  And, very foreign to most visitors to my site.  So, here is my take on the idea.

So, lets say one day I were to stand in the way of "you," the reader of this paper, merely to steal a moment's time from the reader.  The reader might think to him or herself, "what was that guy doing, standing in my way?"  But probably wouldn't give the incident a second thought, and would carry on his/her business.  But what would the long-term effect of that incident be?  What would be different, in say, fifty years, had I not stood in the reader's way?  I'd like to reader to pause for a moment, and think about this.  What would be different in fifty years?  Nothing?  A little bit?  Impossible to tell?  I intend to show that the difference in fifty years (or less) would be that everybody born will have a different genetic composition!  Just standing in the reader's way--or not--will change the entire human race in a couple generations or less!

For people who have thought about these concepts before are probably thinking, "yes, of course."  But for other people, you are probably thinking I'm out of my mind.  So let me explain.  So, say I bump into "you", the reader.  Your progression down the street will be delayed a moment.  You get in your car, or on the bus a moment later.  Some car makes a light that wouldn't have, had you been there a second earlier.  This car, in turn, makes somebody else make a light that wouldn't have, or vise-versa.  These cars in turn make other cars and other people make lights they wouldn't have, or vise-versa.  Pretty soon, the exact positions of every car within a few miles will be in different positions then they would have been, if only by a few feet.  This, in turn, will propagate through every town, in every city on Earth.  Who knows in how long, probably take longer for the effect to reach deep in the Brazilian wood-forests.  But I see no way that such propagation could not reach every corner of the globe, if only in a small degree, and very quickly.

So, now everybody on Earth is getting home or to work (or wherever) a second earlier or a second later.  So, what difference does that make?  Probably not a lot, at least not immediately.  But surely there will be people who were in fatal accidents, by being a block away from where they would have been, no longer are. Likewise, somebody that would have been a block away from a fatal accident, now is in the accident and dies.  Sure, this will be the exception, only a relatively few people will live longer or die sooner simply by my bumping into you.  But, surely it will be a few people.  And of course those people, will likewise have effects on other people, changing who lives and who dies all over the world.

But of course, as I said, this should still be a relatively few people that now live or die because I bumped into you.  But as I said, everybody on Earth will be impacted, if just by a second or two.  Now, how did I get my genes?  I got my genes by a specific sperm of my father impregnated the egg of my mother.  In every ejaculation, literally millions of sperm are released.  If my father's ejaculation took place but a moment earlier, or a moment later, the chances that the exact same sperm would have impregnated my mother is probably literally less than one in a million!  But--if by bumping into you, the reader, I delay you by a second, which sperm cells turn into children will be changed the world over!

So now, comes the point where I discuss religious implications of this.  Say God does a miracle.  Any miracle.  Perhaps He decides to cure someone of cancer.  If God does this, will that not mean that God will change the course of history of everybody on the planet, just like my bumping into the reader?  Some may say that somehow God can contain Chaos Theory.  Perhaps God intervenes in such a way that prevents world-wide propagation of his miracles.  But how?  Clearly, if God saves somebody's life, then that person will impact people every day for the rest of his/her extended life.  How can this person not cause world-wide changes like I have theorized?

On the other hand, I have also heard theology that God created the universe to subject to Chaos Theory intentionally!  God wanted an unpredictable universe so that it could surprise Him.  In such a theology, a perfectly predictable universe would be "boring" to God.  I'm not going to discuss this theology in detail, but I'll say that it seems to contradict what most Christians believe--they usually believe that God knows exactly what will happen at all times.  So, for the remainder of this paper, I will ignore this possible theology.

So, if God knows what will happen, he must know that every time He does an intervention or miracle, no matter how small, He must know that it will impact the entire human race for the rest of history.  So, when someone says to me that God saved his or her life by a miracle, my first question is, "really, you are so special that God altered the rest of history for you?"

* Footnote:  I myself did a search the web for articles on human society and Chaos Theory.  I happened to find a contrarian paper.  The contrarian author noted that claiming that human society is a chaotic system is an unprovable theory.  We can't bump into somebody on the street, and compare what would have happened had we not done so.  Also, this other paper noted that while a contrarian theory that human society is not a chaotic system is also unprovable, his understanding of the mathematical definition of a chaotic system seemed to indicate that human society probably does not fit the mathematical model of a chaotic system.  So, fair enough.  I'm not going to claim that human society strictly fits the mathematical model of a chaotic system.  What I want to show in this paper is merely that human society does seem very likely to be "chaotic like"-- to be very much like the layman's understanding of a chaotic system--regardless of whether or not it is strictly speaking a chaotic system.