Dogmatic Complexity

I've been reading Francis Hall's 10-part Dogmatic Theology -- though certainly not all of it -- and Ian Barbour's Religion and Science. As I read these two books, I find them, in some sense, fundamentally unsatisfying because they're primarily descriptive. That is, they decompose or split the problem into lots of separate parts and offer lots of definitions, but while useful, it doesn't really address the problem. It doesn't get at the underlying pattern, connections, or reality that underlies religious thought. These different pieces must instead be lumped together. Now critics will say it's impossible, and I get that, but I have an intuition that we know enough about complexity, complex system, and complex social systems that we can say something innovative and useful about both religion and policy.

They key to this project is lumping instead of splitting, but how does one do that? One must first identify a "way in," and that's provided through philosophy. There are a number of words that for me provide a way in though:

• Teleology, which has been criticized as confusing causes and effects
• Trinitarianism, the concept of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost which postdates the Bible
• Dialecticalism, Hegel's concept of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis

The way through to think clearly about these abstruse terms is through complexity, which is in turn defined as nonlinear, stock-flow (integrative), and feedback causal relationships as tell as network relationships. Complexity is used dogmatically here in that the underlying mathematics and physical patterns associated with complexity are assumed to be true and applicable. The modern thinkers who for me underpin these thoughts are Jay Forrester (system dynamics), Norbert Wiener (cybernetics), Friedrich Von Hayek (economic control), and Herbert Simon (bounded rationality) though there are many who have contributed to this literature.

Negative, balancing feedback relationships result from an odd number of negative, which means change in the opposite direction, causal relationships. For example, the more people, the more deaths, but the more deaths, the fewer people. Marxists tend to say such relationships are "internally inconsistent," though a proper understanding of feedback relationships shows that they are both ubiquitous and confusing. Hence the lack of clarity that surrounds religion, policy, and the social sciences. These fields are all doubtlessly complex, but only recently, with the advent of powerful computing, are the tools available to address and account for this complexity. One limitation is that those who study social science usually have little expertise in the computational and mathematical techniques that underlie complexity. How far the complexity sciences can uncover, reveal, and inform social systems remains to be seen, but it is an endeavor that will certainly be worth the effort.