Albert Einstein, and many other physicists, often liked to express their amazement at how structured and ordered nature is, especially because of the fact that everything in nature seems to behave according to certain rules or laws.

But any structure or order perceived in our existence is merely an illusion. Scientists these days like to hide this fact by coming up with “deterministic chaos.” What they are saying is that there are laws in nature, and everything behaves according to those laws, but things may occasionally seem chaotic or random because we are unaware of small details which also have an effect on those things, and may cause them to behave differently than we would expect.

An example of this is the butterfly effect: The fact that a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo could influence the weather on the other side of the world, or: sensitivity to initial conditions. Edward Lorenz discovered this when he was seemingly entering the same values in a weather simulation system and getting different results every time. It appears that really small seemingly insignificant differences in the initial values were causing big differences in the outcome of the simulation.

In other words, if you wanted the same results every time from the simulation, you would have to enter the exact same initial values every time. In the real world this means that if you would do a simple experiment of throwing a stone, and wanting to calculate exactly where it will land according to the laws of Newton, you would need to measure the initial conditions to infinite precision. Not only that, you would need to keep track of every possible variable that can influence the stone in the experiment, from the forces of the wind to small dust particles hitting the stone while it is in mid-air. Very soon you’d discover that to be able to determine exactly where the stone will land, you’d need to keep track of an infinite amount of variables to infinite precision. Just like you would need to keep track of an infinite amount of variables to infinite precision, if you wanted to be able to exactly predict the weather somewhere in the world. Overlooking even a small variable, or even the slightest error in initial values, would give you a totally different result.

Now, is it realistic to assume that we will some day be capable of dealing with an infinite amount of variables to infinite precision? I think that if god existed, he’d probably be the only one who’d be capable of doing that.

Only if we would be capable of dealing with an infinite amount of variables to infinite precision, would we be capable of exactly determining the outcome of everything. And only then will we be able to speak of order and determinism.

Since that is by all means impossible, we have no choice but to conclude that we live in total chaos. And when something does indeed behave as we would expect, that is completely by chance.

Scientists think they will eventually be able to discover and describe everything in the universe with simple mathematical terms. They are even looking for a theory of everything: One set of equations that describe how the entire universe was formed and how it operates.
But even as they figure out more and more equations for the systems in nature, nature keeps surprising them with systems that seem to act against the laws that they have set forth for those systems. But they keep trying to explain those things from the perspective of a belief in order in nature, thus calling irregularities in outcome “deterministic chaos.” In other words, they’re saying: “No it’s not really chaos or random, the outcome can in fact be determined if only we knew all the variables that are involved and their exact initial values.”

Yeah, right.

A better and more realistic approach would be to view things from the perspective that we live in a chaotic system. And even though the system may seem chaotic when viewed as a whole, if you would isolate a small part of the system from the rest, there may seem to be order in that small part of the system.