Mind... Our "simple" world

In my job as an engineer, I'm sometimes told that "you're making things complicated." I usually smile and finish my explanation, or try to explain in simpler or more meaningul terms, but what I really want to tell them is that our world is infinitely complicated on its own, and I just exposed a small portion of that complexity to them.

With apologies to all engineers, doctors, scholars, physicists, and anyone else thought to be intellectual out there, I'll share a closely-guarded secret: the world is infinitely complex, and so are the very simplest portions of it. What we engineers do is all based on modeling: we take an infinitely complex system and model it in terms which are so crude that we can understand them, hopefully in a way which will approximate the truth closely enough to allow us to predict some of the results of acting upon it. And engineers are not alone. Think your doctor thoroughly understands your body? Ask him or her to describe the quantum mechanics involved with keeping just one of your cells intact, or even to explain with certainty how any single drug will behave within any single patient on any given day.

As J.I. Packer wrote in his excellent work, Knowing God, what we know about someone or something becomes exponentially more complex as the someone or something becomes more complex. That is, it's easier to "know" a bug (or at least anticipate how it will behave in a given situation) than it is to "know" a horse, and it's almost impossible to really "know" a person (which is why we husbands have the blessing and challenge of continuing to study our wives, recognizing that their feelings and interests can and often do change throughout our lifetimes).

There are lots of reasons for this, including the fact that each mechanism within the physical world has an almost infinite number of parameters affecting its operation. Think of a drop of water running down a window-pane -- it can and will be affected by the size of the water droplet (which also affects surface-tension of the droplet and a host of other parameters), the slope of the window, the frictional coefficient of the window's surface, the gravitational pull on the droplet, the ambient temperature, the speed and direction of the wind, the amount and direction of light (photons), and on and on and on (it makes one's head spin!).

Why then are we surprised, as Christians who believe in an infinite, all-powerful God, that He is infinitely more wise and complex than we are? (My guess is that as limited creatures we get very uneasy, if we are honest with ourselves, with the realization that our sphere of control does not extend as far as our sphere of responsibility, even if it is "our" God who is in control of it all!) There is an aspect of doctrinal understanding that says that God does not just reign over His creation, He sustains it. That is, without His continuous, powerful control over all things, they would all fail within an instant.

The knowledge of this adds to my life one more blessed paradox -- that being confident of God's goodness and wisdom I can know that all things work together for true good, and yet I can have little confidence in the results of my own abilities (but for His grace). I've met engineers who were confident that any and every problem could be overcome if they just thought about it and worked on it long and hard enough, but that is just not the case. God is good in keeping His physical laws constant (our God is a God of physical order), but we usually don't have the resources to predict all of their interactions. I am called upon to be excellent in all I do, and so my limited human mind often necessitates that I fool myself into attacking each problem as though it can be solved, and yet I must take care to continuously call for help from God, Who is the only one who can really solve every problem.

Once again, reality points me to the One True God, for in a world of infinite complexity why would I want to worship a god who is small and definable enough for such a limited creature as me to understand?!?