Chapter 21
THE GAME OF LIFE
Simple rules can produce complex order that looks designed but wasn’t.
21.1 Conway’s Puzzle
In 1970, a mathematician named John Conway sat in the common room at Cambridge, playing with paper and pencil.
He was trying to invent a universe.
Not a universe like ours—no physics degree required, no billion-dollar accelerator. Just a grid, some rules, and patience. He wanted the simplest possible system that could still surprise him.
The challenge was delicate. Rules that were too simple produced boring outcomes—everything died, or everything lived, or patterns just oscillated predictably. Rules that were too complex felt like cheating—you could make anything happen if you added enough conditions.
Conway wanted the sweet spot: rules simple enough to fit on a napkin, yet rich enough to generate genuine novelty.
It took two years of tinkering. Then he found it.
21.2 The Rules
Imagine a sheet of graph paper, infinite in all directions. Each square is a “cell.” Each cell is either alive (filled in) or dead (empty).
Time moves in discrete steps—tick, tick, tick—like a slideshow. At each tick, every cell looks at its eight neighbors (the squares touching it, including diagonals) and applies four rules:
Rule 1: Survival. If a cell is alive and has two or three living neighbors, it survives to the next tick.
Rule 2: Death by loneliness. If a cell is alive and has fewer than two living neighbors, it dies.
Rule 3: Death by crowding. If a cell is alive and has more than three living neighbors, it dies.
Rule 4: Birth. If a cell is dead and has exactly three living neighbors, it becomes alive.
That’s it. Four rules. A child could follow them.
Now watch what happens.
21.3 The Emergence
Start with a random scattering of live cells. Apply the rules. Watch.
At first, it looks like chaos. Cells flicker on and off. Patterns form and dissolve. No obvious structure.
Then, after a few ticks, something curious happens. Some patterns stabilize. A two-by-two square of live cells just sits there, unchanging—each cell has exactly three neighbors, so each survives, and no dead cell has exactly three live neighbors, so nothing new is born. Conway called this a “block.”
Other patterns oscillate. A row of three cells becomes a column of three, then a row again, blinking back and forth forever. This is a “blinker.”
And then there are the gliders.
A glider is a pattern of five cells that, over four ticks, moves one cell diagonally across the grid. It doesn’t just sit there; it travels. It’s not programmed to travel—nothing in the rules says “this pattern should move.” The movement emerges from the rules applied to the cells.
The glider was not designed. Conway didn’t plan for it. He discovered it after setting the rules in motion. The rules permitted it; the rules didn’t specify it.
And the glider is just the beginning.
21.4 The Lesson
Decades of exploration have revealed astonishing complexity in Conway’s simple universe.
Glider guns: Patterns that emit a steady stream of gliders, firing them across the grid like a factory producing products.
Spaceships: Larger patterns that travel across the grid at various speeds.
Puffer trains: Patterns that move while leaving debris behind.
Methuselah patterns: Small initial configurations that evolve for thousands of generations before stabilizing, producing vast quantities of activity from tiny beginnings.
Universal computers: Patterns that can perform any computation—given enough space and time, you could implement a working computer within the Game of Life, running software, processing information.
All from four rules.
This is the lesson: complex order can emerge from simple rules without being designed in every detail.
No one specified the glider. No one planned the glider gun. No one blueprinted the universal computer. They were all permitted by the rules and discovered by exploration.
The rules are the ground. Everything else is emergence.
21.5 The Theological Model
Now consider the universe.
Our universe has rules—the laws of physics. These rules are far more complex than Conway’s four conditions, but they’re still rules: regularities, patterns, constraints that govern what can happen.
From these rules, complexity emerges. Particles form atoms. Atoms form molecules. Molecules form cells. Cells form organisms. Organisms form societies. Societies produce mathematics, art, philosophy, questions about their own existence.
None of this was specified in detail. The Big Bang didn’t contain a blueprint for Mozart or the Magna Carta. The laws of physics didn’t include instructions for building cathedrals. These things emerged—permitted by the rules, not dictated by them.
This is what creation might look like.
Not a God who designs each creature individually, specifying the giraffe’s neck length and the beetle’s wing pattern. A God who sets rules—rules so elegant that they permit life, consciousness, beauty, meaning—and lets them run.
The rules are the logos, the rational structure. What emerges is creation—not in violation of the rules, but through them.
The glider wasn’t designed. It was permitted. And it’s glorious.
21.6 What the Model Illuminates
The Game of Life model clarifies several theological puzzles.
The diversity of creation. Why so many species, so many forms, so much variety? Because the rules permit vast possibility spaces. God didn’t have to design each beetle; the rules allow beetles to evolve, and evolution explores the possibilities.
The role of chance. Is the universe random or designed? Both, in a sense. The rules are designed (or are the expression of the logos); what emerges within the rules has an element of contingency. Which glider appears where depends on initial conditions—but that gliders are possible is determined by the rules.
The problem of natural evil. Why do tsunamis and cancers exist? Because the same rules that permit life also permit destruction. The rules don’t discriminate. They allow both. A universe where only good things could happen would require different rules—rules that might not permit life at all.
The hiddenness of God. If God designed every detail, we’d expect to see fingerprints everywhere—explicit marks of intention. If God set rules and lets them run, the fingerprints are subtler: the fact that the rules permit meaning, not the specific forms meaning takes.
The Game of Life is just a model—a toy universe, infinitely simpler than ours. But it shows that complex, meaningful, surprising order can arise from simple foundations without requiring intervention at every step.
Creation doesn’t need a micromanager. It needs good rules.