Last week I got an idea I’d like to share. It’s new and conceptual — but I’d value your feedback.
Why I’m thinking about this: I’m an atheist scientist working on infectious disease, with a background in Christian faith. I’ve always cared about what “life” means and how to live well. In my day job I use dynamic network models, transmission, risk propagation, and contact-pattern analysis. Science and religion often feel like separate spaces; both are powerful. Lately, though, the models I use at work seem to give me language to speak — rigorously — about the same domain religion points to: the sustaining web we’re born from, live within, and pass on. That felt interesting enough to share.
1) The concept (edge-first, non-mystical)
One-liner: What keeps us alive is not any single node, but the sustaining action of the edges — the flows that feed, inform, protect, carry, repair, and coordinate.
Concretely, I don’t mean a metaphysical “life force.” I mean flows on edges:
- food → soil → microbes → farmers → roads → shops → you
- knowledge → parents → teachers → language → media → you
- safety → norms → institutions → strangers stopping at red lights → you
- oxygen → forests & oceans → you
- power → grids → you
- support → friends & colleagues → you
From a personal view, this network has a thousand faces: planet, parents, food, roads, digital infrastructure, pollinators, soils, colleagues, strangers. We are born from this network, kept alive by it, and responsible for passing it on stronger to the next generation.
Properties:
- Edge-first: Value lives in flows (energy, matter, information, care), not only in nodes. Think sustaining verbs: nourish, inform, support, transport, protect, repair.
- Substrate-agnostic: Humans, animals, plants, “stone” (abiotic scaffolding), and technological systems all enable or constrain sustaining flows.
- Lens shift: from theology (a single source above) to topology (a living pattern between and within us).
2) How this bridges science and religion
My hunch: an edge-first lens offers a shared object both domains already care about — just with different vocabularies.
a) Translating ideas, not collapsing them
- Love thy neighbor → increase reliability of support edges (mutual aid, reduced failure cascades).
- Stewardship/Creation care → maintain/regenerate ecological and social throughput (soil, pollinators, commons, institutions).
- Sin/Harm → behaviors that corrode or sever connections (extraction, deceit, pollution) and amplify risk propagation.
- Forgiveness/Reconciliation → trust-repair protocols that restore broken edges (apology, restitution, renewed monitoring).
- Sabbath/Rest → scheduled regeneration to prevent overuse and brittleness.
- Idolatry → mistaking a node (wealth, tribe, leader, tool) for the whole network that sustains you.
b) What science gains
- A moral target that is operational: strengthen sustaining edges = improve healthy flow, redundancy, recovery.
- Testable predictions: systems with better edge health show fewer cascades, faster recovery, and broader inclusion of weakly connected nodes.
c) What religion gains (for those who want it)
- A mechanistic layer for teachings about care, humility, and responsibility — without requiring metaphysics.
- A frame that can include non-human life and future generations in a single, lived obligation.
d) What this is not
- Not an argument about God’s existence.
- Not smuggling religion into science, nor reducing religion to equations.
- Not “protect every status-quo network” — sometimes good repair means re-wiring or sunsetting harmful structures.
About the name
For discussion clarity, I’m using a placeholder name: Virelia — simply a handle for “the sustaining action of edges.” I chose it because it sounds neutral and evokes vitality (Latin viridis, “green/life”) and strength-from-the-many (Latin vires, “forces”). The concept matters more than the label; if you have a better name, I’m very open.
Asks:
- Does this framing help you say anything you couldn’t already say with “resilience/commons/cooperation”?
- Name suggestions welcome — “Virelia” is provisional.
