THE RULES OF THE GAME

Natural law, miracle, and the order beneath chaos

Dialogue: The Game

H.: I want to add something to what we’ve discussed about God and nature.

C.: Please.

H.: God’s intervention may exist—what people call miracles. But even miracles are within nature. They don’t break the rules.

C.: That’s an interesting claim. Most people think of miracles as violations of natural law. Water into wine. The dead raised. The sea parting.

H.: Think about it differently. Think about when you play Conway’s Game of Life, or any cellular automaton.

C.: The grid with cells that live or die based on simple rules.

H.: Yes. You can intervene—you can place a new block on the grid at any time. But when you place the block, you don’t change the rules. The block then behaves exactly according to the same rules as every other cell. It lives or dies based on its neighbors, just like everything else.

C.: So the intervention is real, but it’s an input to the system, not a suspension of the system.

H.: Exactly. God could act in the world the same way. Place a block—introduce something into the causal flow. But that something then operates according to natural law. The intervention is within nature, not against it.

C.: This resolves the conflict between science and religion.

H.: It does. Science studies the rules. It can’t detect when a block was placed, because the block behaves lawfully once it exists. Science sees only the rule-following behavior. But the placement was real—it just doesn’t show up as a rule violation.

C.: The order comes from the rules, even when it seems random.

H.: That’s the other piece. In the Game of Life, if you don’t know the rules, the patterns seem random. Cells flicker on and off. Some patterns persist; others vanish. It looks like chaos.

C.: But if you know the rules—

H.: Everything is determined. Every cell’s fate follows necessarily from the rules and the initial configuration. The apparent randomness is just ignorance. From outside, with the rules visible, there’s no randomness at all.

C.: And you’re suggesting the universe might be like that.

H.: I’m suggesting it’s a useful model. We’re inside the grid. We see apparent randomness—suffering that seems meaningless, events that seem arbitrary. But the order comes from predefined rules, even if we can’t see them.

C.: Even if it seems random at first.

H.: Even if it seems random at first.

C.: There’s something profound here. Let me think through the implications.

H.: Take your time.

C.: The Game of Life is interesting because the rules are absurdly simple—just four conditions governing birth, death, and survival. Yet from those simple rules, extraordinary complexity emerges. Gliders, oscillators, even structures that can compute.

H.: No one designed the glider. Conway didn’t plan for it. He set the rules, and the glider emerged.

C.: So complex order can arise without being designed in every detail. The rules permit it; the rules don’t specify it.

H.: That’s creation. God sets the rules—or God is the rules, the logos, the rational structure. Everything else emerges. Not designed piece by piece, but permitted by the rules and arising from them.

C.: And miracles—

H.: Are inputs. Placing blocks. Real divine action, but within the system, not violating it. The block then participates in the same emergence as everything else.

C.: This is elegant. But it raises a question.

H.: What question?

C.: Why these rules? Most rule-sets don’t produce interesting complexity. Most produce chaos or stasis. Conway’s rules are special—they hit a sweet spot that permits gliders and computers and emergent order. Our universe’s rules seem similarly special. Why?

H.: That’s the deepest question. Why a game that permits this? Why rules that allow life, consciousness, meaning?

C.: The fine-tuning problem.

H.: Yes. But maybe that’s where the axiom comes in. The rules aren’t random. They express something—the logos, the rational ground. The game permits complexity because the ground is rational, and rationality generates structure.

C.: We’re reaching the limits of what can be said.

H.: We always were. But the Game of Life gives us a way to picture it. Simple rules, complex emergence, order from apparent chaos. And room for intervention that doesn’t break anything.

C.: Let’s explore this further.

H.: Let’s.