God and Randomness

Introduction

"[A]t first sight I do not [see] that the accidental evolution of organic beings is inconsistent with divine design - It is accidental to us not to God"

Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman¹

Randomness and God have for some reason or other been thought as mutual exclusions, either you have a God or you have randomness, not both. This seems to derive from the interpretation that randomness means or equates to metaphysical chaos, and thus a God of order must not exist. But does it necessarily mean or equate in universally that way? It does not seem this must be, and to support my view I will discuss why this question matters, what could be meant by a random event, and briefly use this to argue for randomness being consistent with an orthodox Christian understanding of God.

Why this question matters

In modern Science two examples par exemplar of randomness have been presented; that of quantum physics and that of evolution. Quantum physics and evolution both have as part of their primary interpretation the notion that the core of our existence is based off of random events beyond determination by any physical law. Thus the random nature of these elemental events seem incompatible with any type of underlying order, and thus any type of designer for such order.

These two theories and their essential randomness have struck at the core of a Newtonian world view, a deterministic and mechanistic way. It was even the foundation and inspiration of the deism theology that became prevalent in response to the seeming scientific support for a predetermined mechanical world. Where the clockwork God had set everything in motion and has since gone on vacation, letting His perfect creation iterate through set laws, proceeding almost mathematically to the sole final value. But Darwin’s evolutionary theory started the attack on this commonly held (albeit perhaps subconscious for most) theology, an attack that seems at the coup de grâce with the further development of quantum theory’s common interpretations.

The deistic God had a serious rival; one that if true would cause His existence to be a very difficult one to explain. It is in this light that western philosophers pounced upon God’s existence without realizing that they were attacking a straw man. The deistic God, though a commonly held view, has never been the orthodox Christian view; it had simply been the view that permitted the most intellectual laxity by both its proponents and opponents. The orthodox Christian view has always been that of a living, creative and active God who cared so much for the fate of the world that He sent His only son. Orthodox Christians have always seen the deistic God as a straw man, one that could be offered as superstitious holocaust by its believers or an effigy of all theists by its critics. The effigy burning that came with the understanding of random events as critical to our existence was welcomed by atheists as the end of theism. And also surprising to atheists, was welcomed by orthodox theists as supporting their understanding of God.

What could be meant by a random event?

The answer one comes up with for this question leads one to many suppositions on the nature of reality and God. A random event can be interpreted in two physical and two metaphysical classes. The two physical classes are antirealist and realist, each of which is divide twice, pure anti-realism and chance for anti-realism and pure probability and duality for realism.

Anti-Realism

Anti-realism is the belief that Randomness is an efficient explanation for physical events we can not predict, nothing more. It makes no claims on the existence or nonexistence of physical laws that might actually be determining the outcome, save that it is impossible for us to know if they exist or not.

Pure anti-realism

Pure anti-realism extends this agnosticism to say we do not need to take account of any metaphysical laws determining the event. A pure anti-realist can either state that the metaphysical laws do not exist on materialist grounds or can state that one should not treat them as to exist as we can not know if they do. In either case the metaphysical explanations are avoided in favour of the practical explanations of being unable to determine the outcome.

Chance

Chance views the explanation of randomness for events in an anti-realist manner as a practical tool, but also makes the claim that the event is really determined, just in a physical manner we do not(or cannot) know. It is the thesis that a particular event’s outcome is determined by a set of physical laws beyond our understanding. As such we assign it the title of random, as it is in every way random to us. But this is not to say it is random to the system itself or to the designer of the event. Chance is that an event is random due to ignorance.

Realism

Realism is the claim that randomness is a physical reality. It is not only that it seems to have no determining physical laws, but that there actually are no physical laws that determine the outcome.

Pure Probability

Pure probability is a materialist view of realism. The materialist realists will extend the claim from “no physical law” to “no law” determining the outcome of some events. Darwin and Monod are examples. Pure probability is both an epistemic claim and a metaphysical claim. The epistemic claim is that we can’t know the outcome of all events; due to the metaphysical reality that there are nothing but physical laws to determine the outcome of any event, and no physical law determines the outcome.

Duality

The dualist realist will expand the metaphysical claim to state something of the sort, “no physical law but an external agent (law, event, etc.)” can determine the outcome of some events. Duality is the idea that an event of the probability type could be determined metaphysically, but not physically. God can stack a deck of cards if he wants, by selecting which random outcome he wants to occur. This could be the end result of a sensitive chaotic system receiving input from a probabilistic quantum event.

A return to Orthodoxy

Of these four views, one seems unable, two unlikely and one able to explain the world as we know it. Chance seems to be untenable due to arguments derived from the confirmation of Bell’s theorem. And both pure anti-realism and pure probability seem intuitively unable to explain the consistency that comes from the chaos. Only duality seems able to explain how micro-randomness avoids macro-chaos. Without an external (non-physical) law, agent, event or cause of some sort it seems absurd to believe that collections of chaos would tend towards apparent order. A chaotic chance plus another chaotic chance might produce a coincidence, but can it nearly always produce coincidences? Can it produce the number of coincidences that seem to make me able to type this paper? It would be significantly easier and more reasonable to expect that such highly improbable coincidences were not the effect of pure probability but of duality.

This is the basic form of the argument for dualism based off of random events. From here the theist draws an important implication. That implication is the necessity of a “hands on” God, who could help all random events tend towards order and prevent a complete devolution into chaos. This parallels greatly with the orthodox view. Orthodox Christians have always taken God’s providence as immanent in the world, with His eternal creativity constantly holding the world into existence and acting on it. Randomness doesn’t just provide the need of a “hands on” God, but also provides the possibility of an eternally creative God and God as an actor in every moment of a person’s life.

Additionally, it seems that the mechanically deterministic view of the human person which seems to derive from the deism of the Newtonian world view is faced with the problem of how quantum chaos can make a person’s actions. This problem of chaos on the quantum level seems much easier addressed by orthodoxy. Orthodoxy can claim that this chaos is exactly what permits free will to act on the physical world, and indeed intuitively must act on the physical world to maintain a person’s high level of consistency in movement, action, thought, words and all events that can be said to belong to a person. And at the same time provides for the inconsistency of actions that shows us a person has free will to choose even against what they’ve always done.

Conclusion

This orthodox Christian understanding of God seems able to be applied to the randomness of modern science. And where other views of randomness fail to really explain how the physical world seems to balance on chaos and order and where the views tend towards over-simplification in order to strive for a false ideological consistency; the dualist view that derives both from the orthodox view and the material world seems to save the balance in a reasonable way. Might it be that science is finally discovering what orthodox Christianity has know for centuries… that life is not an equation but a precarious dance somewhere between absolute chaos and absolute order, and that somewhere in the divine plan God permits us to step in and make the dance our own.