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# **Abrahamic — A Systems Theory of Religious History**
### *An Empirical Framework for the Dynamics of Belief, Identity, and Institution*
**by Willem DeWit**
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*Abrahamic — A Systems Theory of Religious History* contends that the world’s major faith traditions are best understood not simply as collections of stories or systems of morality, but as dynamic, adaptive systems: self-organizing networks of belief, emotion, and practice that evolve through feedback mechanisms. Religion, in this view, becomes a form of information processing—transforming energy, memory, and meaning into cohesive social order.
Every culture operates on a kind of code. Its symbolic layer—stories, rituals, laws—functions as software, while its embodiment through hormones, nervous systems, and social institutions serves as hardware. Together, these layers generate recursive loops that sustain identity through repetition and coordinated action. Over generations, these loops accumulate inertia, a kind of **emergence debt**: the hidden cost of maintaining stability. When pressures surpass a certain threshold, the system undergoes a phase transition, reorganizing itself into a new equilibrium. This same pattern recurs in prophetic movements, schisms, reforms, and modern ideological resets.
The book applies this framework to the three major Abrahamic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—treating each as a distinct evolutionary strategy for balancing memory, constraint, and adaptation. Judaism exemplifies a high-constraint system that maintains coherence through textual recursion and ritual fidelity. Christianity reduces constraint to accelerate transmission, transforming memory into a universal mythology. Islam recalibrates both poles, employing legal codification and communal synchrony to restore balance. Each tradition follows the same mathematical grammar but adjusts its parameters differently, resulting in unique cultural ecologies.
Beyond theology, the model integrates chaos theory, homeostasis, network dynamics, and predictive neuroscience to construct a general theory of cultural evolution. Key variables—transmission rate, innovation pressure, constraint intensity, identity-weight, instability threshold—function like feedback parameters in any complex adaptive organism. Religion is thus one example of a broader class of systems capable of resisting entropy through structured memory and synchronized behavior.
Later sections translate these concepts into quantitative models.
Part IV, **“From Narrative to Model,”** expresses historical processes through differential equations and network architectures, mapping how moral energy and symbolic influence propagate through populations.
Part VI, **“Meta-Methodology,”** examines the epistemic and ethical boundaries of modeling meaning.
Part VII, **“Reflections – Beyond the Core,”** generalizes the framework to Hindu cycles, Buddhist feedback without a creator, and Shinto’s ecological recursion. It also extends the model to non-religious domains—politics, markets, computation—demonstrating how constitutions, economies, and algorithms inherit a feedback grammar once reserved for the sacred.
Throughout, the analysis remains empirical. Revelation, devotion, and authority are treated not as metaphysical assertions but as interacting components within a systemic architecture.