PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

3. INANIMATE PRODUCTION LIKE ANIMATE REPRODUCTION
may interpret this as a “catching-up” effect. People had been expecting a
savior for a long time. When one finally came, a certain amount of pentup
energy was released, resulting in an accelerated rate of sainthood attribution.
Had canonization proceeded according to the more natural rate observed
from the fourth century onwards, it would have started before the
birth of Christ. If the patristic curve is backcasted, the time when its
level equals 1 percent of the ceiling can be taken as an approximate beginning
of the process of canonization of Christian saints. From Figure
3.3 we see that this beginning is around the 3rd century B.C., implying
that Christianity starts before Christ!
Here is Marchetti’s explanation. 10 Many speculations have been
made about Jesus’s whereabouts between the age of fifteen and thirty.
The Judaic schism of Essenes was active at the time in that region and,
as individuals or in brotherhoods, demonstrated asceticism and extraordinary
piety from sometime during the third century B.C. until the first
century A.D. Information from the Dead Sea scrolls indicates that their
doctrine contained many of the essential elements found later in the
Christian message. It is possible that Jesus matured among them.
The backcasting of the patristic curve can be justified if we make two
assumptions. First, that there is one general S-shape for cultural waves
so that the two curves in Figure 3.3 must be similar. And second, that
saints and martyrs belonging to the same general line of faith (such as
Essenes and Christians) should be grouped together. If these assumptions
are made, the part of the curve backcasted before the appearance of
Christ provides numbers and dates for individuals who should have become
saints instead of some hastily canonized early Christian ones.
Such deductions might serve as guidelines for a targeted historical research.
Accelerated growth is often observed at the beginning of an S-curve.
The starting up of natural growth might be impeded for a variety of
“technical” reasons. But once the growth process is under way, it proceeds
faster than normal for a while to make up for the time lost. We
will see many more examples and explanations of this phenomenon later
on in Chapter Ten.
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