Solution Complexity
By Anthony Casperson
2-15-24

Not long ago, an accidental patch #8 got sent out to PS5 owners of Baldur’s Gate 3. The designers weren’t done with the patch—which adds new subclasses to the game—so word had to be sent out to the players in order to undo the patch before anything in their games broke.

Thinking about this new—and soon to be released—patch reminded me of another patch that had come out just a few months after the game released. I had been in Act 3 of my second playthrough of the game at the time. And experienced a very buggy run through the titular city of Baldur’s Gate because something in the patch bogged the game down.

I think the game had been trying to process every character in the city as if they had been on screen. At the very least, it would occasionally cause everyone other than my controlled character to pause, stutter, and eventually run to where they should’ve been if the pause hadn’t happened. And every tiny crime that my character accidentally performed was noticed by everyone. (I play sneaky characters so that I can be a loot goblin. Don’t judge me.)

The purpose of patches such as these is to fix problems and bugs that are in the system. To root out problems that hadn’t been noticed in playtesting due to those particular circumstances not being stress tested before release.

But this makes us ask why patches for games and similar applications end up occasionally making the interface worse. Why do some patches break more than they were intended to fix? And why does it take so long to fix the new bugs as well? Sometimes taking weeks or months of terrible user experience before something comes out.

Shouldn’t this be an easy fix?

The reason why there never seems to be a simple solution to such issues is because it’s a complex problem. In programming, there can arise an issue where one minor change in one location can cause total collapse of the program because of the interaction of specific chunks of code. (My expertise of computer programming isn’t good enough to get much beyond that level of understanding, but I do know this much.)

Because there are so many simultaneous pieces of code all trying to work in conjunction with one another, if the “solution” introduced to fix something in one area doesn’t interact well with another piece of the whole, then new problems rise. What should have been a simple solution can end up undoing months of work.

The problem had a complexity that isn’t fixed with the supposedly “simple solution.”

Truthfully, solutions are rarely simple for complex systems—from video games to interpersonal relationships to personal worldviews. And those who propose simple solutions rarely take the time to consider the outlying ramifications of their system patch. They remain blind to the stress areas for what they’re trying to fix.

And far too often, they become so overly dogmatic about the value of their approach that they end up doing more harm than good. All the more so when real people are involved.

For an example, let’s look at a group of people whom very few will consider level-headed about their simple solution. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the bible will know that the Pharisees had some problems. They were the original hypocrites. If Jesus calls them out for this, we know we’re on solid ground to agree with him about their failings.

It’s not known exactly when this group of theological scholars originated, other than some time between the exile of Judah and the time of Jesus. However, the reason for the Pharisees’ existence is known. They intended to fix the problems that caused the exile to begin with.

Pharisees were originally meant as a patch for the spiritual failings of the people of Israel.

The nation of Judah had been sent to exile because of their disregard for the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They’d followed after other gods, even trying to syncretize Yahweh with the pantheons of their idolatrous neighbors. They’d treated their fellow Israelites poorly. They’d forgotten the very word of God. And they’d failed to keep the Sabbaths.

As a matter of fact, according to 2 Chronicles 36:21, the whole reason why the exile took the seventy years that it did was to make up for the seventy Sabbath years that the people of the land had failed to keep—the one year in every seven years that they were supposed to let the land rest from agricultural growth. If we look at timeline of Israelite history, this means that the Israelites almost never kept the Sabbath year during their entire time in the Promised Land.

Also, with the weekly Sabbath rest prescribed from God being one of the few easily seen differences between the Jewish people and their neighbors during the exilic period, the Sabbath itself became something to rally behind. Return to practicing the Sabbath became both a focal point for fixing past sins and a rallying point for the people of God who wanted to return to holiness.

But the problem arose that focusing so much on the Sabbath basically made it a god to be worshipped rather than a method of worshipping God.

Sure, the Pharisees and the people they led weren’t bowing down in front of blocks of wood or chunks of gold, but they still put something other than Yahweh on the throne of importance for their lives. They became so dogmatic about their simple solution to fix the idolatry of their ancestors that they flung themselves into a totally different idolatry.

When we seek simple solutions to complex areas of life, we will often fall to either the side of vacillating permissibility or the side of pharisaical hypocrisy. Allowing whatever suits our fancy, or only finding loopholes from judgement if we are the ones who’re being judged.

This is why Jesus so often had to explain his godly actions that were performed on the Sabbath. He was trying to show them the complexity of godliness when they wanted to keep their simple solution. Jesus had introduced a new patch, but the Pharisees had complaints about the patch notes.

“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). The purpose of Sabbath rest is for God’s creation to be recharged and re-energized so that we can worship him well throughout the week. It’s not to be something that we worship itself, making it so important that we have detailed rulings about whether something is or isn’t enough work for the day of Sabbath rest.

Now, the point for this blog isn’t to talk about how the Sabbath relates to us. But, the illustration fits well when showing the negative side of “simple solutions” for complex areas of life. There is rarely a simple, easy-to-implement solution to our experiences of spiritual life.

(Even our access to God because of Jesus’ work on the cross isn’t simple. Sure, we have very little to do with complex parts of salvation, but it was far from a simple solution. I mean, let’s see how easily you can explain the method in which Jesus came to be fully God and fully man.)

As easy—and tempting—as it is for us to just say “Jesus” to every spiritual problem, that mentality rarely helps in the situation at hand. We might want to propose our favorite spiritual discipline to people struggling with depression, but such words often do more harm than good.

Telling someone to “Just have more faith” when they’re already clinging on to Jesus with every ounce of strength they have makes a person question what the point of faith is then. No amount of theological study will release a person from the pain of loss. And telling someone to just put on a smile in the midst of their depression will shove their face under the water that they had barely been treading to begin with.

There are a lot of moving pieces in our faith of following Jesus. All of which interplay with one another in delicate balance. For us to introduce a spiritual patch that hasn’t worked through numerous stress points will only leave us with more bugs—if it even fixes the original problem to begin with.

Solutions to spiritual issues are complex. Let’s stop sending out patches that haven’t been completely tested. And let’s certainly take time to look into the problems we’ve added because of ill-advised updates. Our spiritual lives don’t have the weeks and months to wait for the actual solution.