Exponential Growth and Evolution in the Gospels

The Kingdom of God Grows Exponentially

Jesus talks about exponential growth so many times in this gospels that I believe he’s showing us how evolution works. Not merely biological evolution, but the same evolutionary process that underlies scientific exploration and entrepreneurial pursuits. What Jesus calls the Kingdom of God is, I think, a domain of expanding abundance and prosperity that comes from people acting in alignment with the Truth.

I’m sharing this not as a solid conclusion, but in a request to my audience to please tell me where I’m wrong and what I’m missing. I have been doing my best to follow Jesus over the past few years. I now find myself wandering apart from the different flocks I see. I want to follow the shepherd, not just one flock - and in this journey I’ve come to believe Christ was revealing to us the social blueprint of prosperity. I think that blueprint, at its core, features a feedback loop between willing sacrifice, acceptance of our flaws, and redemption through grace. If we want another golden age, I think we need to understand the part we’re missing in that message - which is that without love of and submission to God, science and the economy will wither, because those are both fruits of the Holy Spirit.

Please, tell me what I’m missing and getting wrong here. Help me evolve this thesis.

Jesus Describes Exponential Growth

Jesus compares The Kingdom of God to Money, invested for returns - but only when invested with a willingness to bear risk - in the parable of the talents. Note that the more talented we are, the more Jesus tells us God expects from us. This is the same of exponential growth: the bigger it is, the faster it grows.

Jesus also compares the Kingdom of God to seeds leading to exponentially growing yields - but only when sown on good soil. Note that the word ‘soil’ is the same as the root word for humility. Jesus is telling us our lives will grow exponentially but only if we are humble, not with hardened hearts, and not distracted by the concerns of this world.

Jesus also warns against “The yeast of the pharisees.” Yeast also grows exponentially.

Jesus tells his followers to spread the gospel, which ends up having the effect of making that message spread virally. As he spreads his message, Jesus warns competing messages, which also grow exponentially.

In both cases, we see something like a combination of generation and selection. Jesus is telling us that we have the potential to live immensely fertile, productive lives - but only if we live them according to His Way. We can choose exponential life, or - left to our own devices - we will die.

That combination of generation and selection is the crux of evolution.

Jesus Describes Evolution

Evolution doesn’t just describe biological organisms changing over time. It also describes entrepreneurship and scientific investigation. You can view a hypothesis as a kind of cognitive organism. Experiments either kill it off, or they don’t. In order to perform experiments on a hypothesis, we have to be willing to die to that hypothesis.

By being willing to die to what may be a false conception of reality, we have the chance of an encounter with the Truth. Truth might find our theory wanting. If reality breaks our hypothesis, we can pick up the pieces and try again - but only if we’re humble. When we do that, we’re evolving our belief structures. If reality breaks our theory, we can also - like the unrepentant thief - reject reality. When we do this, we can’t evolve. We just end up suffering from the same problems over and over again.

The same pattern plays itself out in free market economies.

A business venture is effectively a hypothesis about how to provide value to others. When you build a prototype and show it to customers, you’re surrendering your idea to the judgement of reality. If you don’t delight your customers, your idea has to die. If you’re willing to keep suffering - i.e. to bear your cross - you can pick it up and try again. This time, you’re more informed by encounters with reality, and the next hypothesis you generate might be a bit more valid. You can try again, generate another hypothesis, and then make another sacrifice - i.e. a short term investment - and see if it works.

This same pattern even plays out in the development of software systems. Each release is a kind of hypothesis about how to help the business improve. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of working on one technology stack long enough has seen it evolve. There is simply no other word for it. Most large scale technology systems were never designed - they evolved, iteratively - pushed in a direction through pieces that were designed. Yet you can’t evolve your system if you aren’t willing to risk breaking it. The same pattern shows up: in order to evolve, you need time investment and willingness to bear risk, and to let reality tell you that you were wrong.

The combination of scientific exploration and capital investment, accepting risk in exchange for the possibility of reward drove a massive feedback loop that dramatically increased human material prosperity over the last few hundred years. Both of these processes seem to be stalling out right now. I think they are stalling because we have imagined that science and entrepreneurship are something fundamentally different from faith - rather than a distillation of the practice of faith: one of humility, sacrifice, and devotion to Love and Truth above all else. It’s just a question of what is being worshipped - Life and Truth, or something lesser.

The end product of a universe that supports evolution is a bunch of embodied stories all competing with each other, competing for scarce resources in a Hobbesian tooth-and-claw fight. This seems like hell, and it is - unless there’s a path out.

I think that path out is only accessible if you believe it exists, and submit to it humbly. I believe this because Jesus says this explicitly, and I have seen the enormous benefits of giving my life to Him. I think all of the prosperity that we take for granted came about because of Him, and by rejecting Him, the world is rejecting the possibility of both knowledge of Truth and the prosperity of Life abundant.

Jesus Points at Himself

We were told a decade ago that once society dropped the trappings of superstitious religion, we’d have a scientific Golden Age. Instead what we got were ‘pregnant men’, and ‘the science is whatever we say it is.’

I don’t think this is a coincidence.

Without Christ, there is no willingness to die for the truth. Without dying to falsehood, for the sake of truth, there cannot be evolution. Without evolution, there cannot be science or economic growth. The only way a person can be truly open to evidence is if they are more than willing to die for the Truth. This goes even moreso for human institutions.

Whenever an institution tries to cover up its failures, it makes the same mistake as Peter when he denies Christ, telling him that “This Shall never happen to you.” Jesus calls him Satan at that time - because Satan says, “You, this person, this institution, are too important to let a little falsehood get in the way of doing what needs to be done. You cannot die.” Jesus tells us, we must die - for the Truth.

If you’re not willing to die for the truth, then your brain will rationally interpret any evidence that breaks your perception of reality as being an existential threat, and thus keep you away from it. An institution convinced it cannot ever fail is going to make precisely the same mistake. You simply won’t be able to consider the evidence that proves you wrong, because admitting you’ve been wrong about something is, at some level, a kind of death.

We cannot evolve without being willing to die.

This is why I don’t think it’s enough to say the Gospel is merely a description of exponential growth and a blueprint evolution. The medium is the message. Jesus was both the message for humanity, and the medium by which it was transmitted: If you want to live forever, at an individual or group level - you have to follow His way.

In particular, I think the investments we make and the evidence we submit ourselves to do not matter at all for our prosperity, compared to the faith in our hearts. Sure, we can still discover things - but those discoveries will only poison and enslave us if we aren’t discovering and investing out of Love.

Some people say technology is neutral. This is insane. A technology for immiserating people at scale is not morally neutral. Nor is a technology that can heal hearts which are paralyzed with fear. The technologies we develop are going to advance the spirit in which we seek them out - if we seek with greed, we will find machines that trap us in local minima. If we seek out of a desire for power and control, we will find machines that enslave us. If we seek out of love and trust in God, we will find technologies and businesses that make God’s presence more tangible in this world.

A fool who wakes up every morning and devotes himself to the service of our Lord will be more prosperous in this life than Elon Musk with a team of nerds or Donald Trump with a GOP-packed Congress and six supreme court justices - none of that matters if our aim is off.

The future is too chaotic to be predictable and too entropic for anyone to survive it alone. Your ape brain, no matter how wisely your neurons are interlinked, no matter how many allies you have or how much energy you’ve got at your disposal - it’s just not enough to avoid shooting yourself in the foot. We are all fools, until we accept our foolishness and turn ourselves over to the guidance of God, who loves us infinitely. That is the beginning of wisdom.

This is why the only path to large scale global prosperity is for as many of us as possible to follow the best example humanity ever had of the path of evolution, and therefore life.

Human prosperity and knowledge can only grow when we follow, collectively, follow the path of Life and Truth - a path which Christians call by the name “Jesus.” Does this mean Christians should force Christianity on everyone? Of course not. If we can’t win others over by virtue of our example, we need to strengthen our own obedience to God. One way to do that is to see the ways in which non -christians have, in many ways, been better examples of Life.

The name we call the path doesn’t matter as much as the faithfullness by which we walk it. This is why I think anyone who devotes themselves to the Truth seeks the Good Shepherd, regardless of what name they use to call him by.

God walked among us to show us how to evolve - as individuals and as groups. We must love God infinitely, Love our neighbors and ourselves, fear nothing, and be totally willing to die for God.

We will be prosperous if, and only if, we walk the Way.