Pope Francis's Encyclical "Laudato Si'" - Part 1

Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si'" ("Praise Be to You") is a plea for people of good will — not just Catholics like me — to take climate change seriously as a global threat that calls for all of us to change our ways. The steady emission into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are born of burning fossil fuels has to abate.

The Pope ties concern for the ecology of the Earth with religion's traditional concern for social justice: a preferential option for the poor. The poorer nations of the world are at once the most likely to suffer the harsh effects of global warming and the least responsible for creating the impending climate disaster in the first place.

We need accordingly to rein in our tendency in the richer nations to use the gifts of nature sheerly for generating wealth, as if Mother Nature were just a thing to be exploited by the few who are lucky enough to reap her economic benefits.

In the course of explaining the Catholic Church's stand against pillaging the environment, Pope Francis takes up the theology of creation rooted in the very first story of the Bible:

"In the first creation account in the Book of Genesis, God’s plan includes creating humanity. After the creation of man and woman, 'God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good' (Gen 1:31)."

Men and women are deemed "very good" — hence, social justice is a must. Everything that God made is likewise called "very good" — hence our duty to preserve and protect the Earth.

It is in the course of his discussion of creation theology that Francis says something I find quite interesting:

"How wonderful is the certainty that each human life is not adrift in the midst of hopeless chaos, in a world ruled by pure chance or endlessly recurring cycles!"

That sentence suggests certain theological implications of the recent insights of science into "chaos" and "complexity."

Graph illustrating
the "butterfly effect" in
chaotic systems actually
can look like a butterfly

Chaos theory has come to the fore in the last half century, following the discovery that the unpredictability of weather — and hence ultimately of the Earth's climate — stems from infinitesimal differences in "initial conditions." This is the "butterfly effect." Due to the mathematics of chaos, illustrated by the graph at above-left, a tiny butterfly flapping its wings in Rio can in theory produce a tornado in Reno. Accordingly, the computers we use to model such things can't predict weather beyond a few days into the future.

That's because weather is one of nature's many "nonlinear dynamical systems": basically, changes occur in the state of any nonlinear dynamical system according to mathematical functions that do not graph as a straight line. These changes that occur can be unpredictable in the long run. "Chaotic" instances of nonlinear dynamical systems — not all such systems are chaotic and unpredictable — diverge so much in their states' unfolding trajectories that beyond a short period of time their future simply cannot be known in advance.

"Chaotic systems are predictable for a while," says Wikipedia's article on chaos theory, "and then 'appear' to become random." Such systems, whether natural, manmade, or purely mathematical, exhibit what scientists today refer to as "chaos." This means that the systems are not, strictly speaking, "random"; their behavior is "deterministic." If we could but know their initial conditions with perfect exactitude, we could predict their successive states with equal exactitude from the present moment right up until the end of time.

When Pope Francis speaks of "endlessly recurring cycles," on the other hand, he is talking about the opposite of chaos: order. Science recognizes two types of order in the panoply of conceivable behavior patterns of nonlinear dynamical systems. One type of orderly behavior is what happens when a marble released along the inner surface of a coffee cup, near its rim, ultimately comes to rest. After rolling down and then back up the inside of the cup and repeating that behavior for quite a while, the marble ultimately sits motionless at the cup's bottom.

The second type of order is that of "endlessly recurring cycles." The Earth orbits the Sun each year in just such a seemingly endless cycle.

So we have orderly nonlinear dynamical systems, and we have chaotic ones. Out of the scientific study of chaotic behavior has more recently emerged a companion notion, the "theory of complexity." Complexity, in this usage, has to do with nonlinear dynamical systems that are capable of "self-organization."

A flock of birds is
a self-organizing system;
the flock is an "emergent property"
of individual birds keeping a set distance
from their immediate neighbors

We typically think that organization can be imposed on a network of interacting elements that make up a nonlinear dynamical system strictly "from the top down," as when a strong leader imposes order on a gaggle of squabbling factions. Yet graceful order quite surprisingly can emerge "from the bottom up." The question of how this can happen, and can combine and interact with top-down order, is the province of complexity theory.

Scientists studying complexity have discovered that such self-organized behavior takes place at the "edge of chaos." According to M. Mitchell Waldrop in his book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, the edge of chaos is "the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive" (p. 12).

Nonlinear dynamical systems whose behavior exhibits spontaneous self-organization can be impelled from that beneficent edge over into the realm of outright chaos — it can happen when a Brazilian butterfly innocently flaps its wings — but can then, all by themselves, move out of chaos back over into the orderly regime. When that happens, the result is not always a return to the old, previously established order. It is rather the generation of a newer, more elaborate order. There is a concomitant gain in the system's "complexity" — the diversity or elaborateness of its interacting elements. This is, then, one meaning of the term "self-organized complexity."

Self-organized complexity is accordingly a third, quite unexpected kind of order. The order that arises in such a system is completely spontaneous. It is not static, as with a marble that eventually comes to rest at the bottom of a coffee cup, and it is not cyclical, as with a planet endlessly orbiting a star.

The human species, complexity science says, is a product of just such a process of spontaneous self-organization. That is, the evolution of life on Earth is not solely a matter of random DNA mutations sifted by Darwinian natural selection. There is something else going on. Earth's life is a "complex adaptive system" capable of generating, then preserving, self-organized, elegantly graceful, completely novel order.

So when Pope Francis says we are creatures of "infinite dignity" who are "made in God's image and likeness," and when in the same breath he says that "that each human life is not adrift in the midst of hopeless chaos, in a world ruled by pure chance or endlessly recurring cycles," he seems to be affirming insights of the recent sciences of chaos and complexity into the evolution of life on Earth. At the same time, he rejects the assumption many people make that Darwin's theory of evolution implies that no Creator God exists.

In future posts, I will talk more about how complexity theory furnishes a useful lens through which Pope Francis's "Laudato Si'" may be viewed.