Does God Play Dice in a Random World?
Does God Play Dice in a Random World?
An Argument against Divine Action?
In life, there are unpredictable situations we describe as happening by ‘chance,’ or ‘randomly’, meaning that there is no intention or planning behind them. A few examples of events happening by ‘pure chance’ could be of winning the lottery, the outcome of a dice toss, coincidentally finding a lost item, meeting unexpectedly someone in a certain place at an unplanned time, etc. In a more natural context one could also consider some natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes as ‘happening by chance’ because, at least for long periods, they remain largely unpredictable events. We don’t consider an earthquake morally responsible for killing people because we don’t believe that there was any conscious and willful agency behind it with a goal-directed intention or premeditation to kill. These events just happen and are beyond our control, and that’s why we speak of ‘luck’ or ‘bad luck’, good or bad ‘fortune.’
Thus, unguided, purposeless, aimless processes can express themselves in form of a series of events that are unpredictable and that we label as being ‘random’ or governed by ‘pure chance’.
The question, however, is if also the converse is true? If a phenomenon is unpredictable and appears even to the best of our statistical analysis as purely random, or just ‘white noise,’[1] can we infer from that that it must be an unguided, aim- and purposeless process?
Usually, we tend to believe so. But it is easy to show that this isn’t necessarily the case.
For example, think of the ups and downs of the financial market. Nobody can predict the value of company stocks or the exchange rates of the dollar in the coming years. The graph shows the Dow Jones index between 2017 and 2020. One might not perceive it as completely random, it is not pure white noise, but it looks pretty much unpredictable, as was its crash in the first quarter of 2020.
Nevertheless, the stock market isn’t governed by blind, mindless, and aimless forces of Nature. On the contrary, it is the sum of a large number of very purposeful and goal-directed agents–that is, lots of profit-oriented stockbrokers.
One might object that this is an example of the clash of many independent intentional sources, it doesn’t represent the action of one single volitional agent: It is like the (apparent) ‘chaos’ of a beehive.
Quite so. But the example shows that what appears to an external observer as ‘random chaos’ isn’t necessarily indicating a lifeless, meaningless, and undirected blind process. It may well be the result of the sum of many goal-directed agents.
Anyway, it isn’t difficult to find other examples of random behavior that hides conscious and willed action. Think, for instance, of how the letters you are reading are encoded in digital format. At the machine language level, everything is expressed with the two binary symbols “1” and “0”. For example, the sentence “Randomness is a myth” is encoded as (spaces not considered):
“0101001001100001011011100110010001101111011011010110111001100101011100110111001101101001011100110110000101101101011110010111010001101000”
In this string, there are 73 ones and 63 zeros–that is, about 54% vs. 46% chance each. Still not a perfectly random sequence but it remains almost completely unpredictable if you don’t know the code, the language, let alone the text this string encodes. Nevertheless, it represents a sentence framed by a conscious agent.
Many more examples could be made that highlight how any inference from statistical notions, such as ‘chance’ or ‘randomness’ to the supposed existence or inexistence of a volitional agent, are unwarranted extrapolations. What words like ‘random’, ‘chance’, or ‘coincidence’ really signify is only our ignorance. They point out that things are much too complicated for us to follow in their chain of causes and effects, but they tell us nothing about supposed unguided phenomena.
One might, again, object that, after all, this is all self-evident. No news here. And yet, we always tend to associate the concept of random chance and unpredictability as something indicating a lack of agency or purposefulness. We instinctively conflate the lack of predictability with the lack of a predetermining will and intention. This way of seeing and perceiving the world is deeply rooted in our mindset.
Also in science, when it tackles more philosophical questions, such as the hypothesis that evolution could be a guided process, and that eventually conceives of divine action and intervention in the unfolding of evolutionary history, one of the most frequent objections is that this would be in contradiction with our scientific knowledge of evolutionary biology, and that tells us how evolution is largely determined by random mutations, coincidental environmental factors, and other unguided phenomena from the ground up. As shown above, this is not at all a coherent argument. Arguments based on unpredictability that jump to conclusions regarding final causes are logically incoherent. Random arguments about randomness will not eliminate divine action in Nature.
At this point, many of those acquainted with quantum physics will begin to point out that in the microscopical realm, things are ‘really random’ and governed by ‘pure chance.’ But in what sense is ‘real randomness’ more real than ‘normal randomness’ and ‘pure chance’ more ‘pure’ than ‘unpure chance’? In physics, these popular distinctions boil down to theories with and without so-called ‘hidden variables.’ The unpredictability of the outcomes of dice tosses is only due to our ignorance of all the forces acting upon the dice (also called ‘deterministic randomness’), while quantum randomness isn’t due to our ignorance, or the imprecise knowledge of the conditions acting on a quantum system, or the imprecise measurements, or because of our invasive observations. It is a ‘cause-less’, real, inherent, and intrinsic randomness–that is, a so-called ‘ontic randomness’– that would persist anyway, even if we know everything about the system we observe.
This seems to vindicate the original objection: After all, in such pure randomness one can’t smuggle in a conscious agency, otherwise, this agency would have to behave randomly with an erratic and deranged personality. Right?
Einstein couldn’t come to terms with this kind of complete randomness and unpredictability inherent in quantum phenomena, which led him to state that “the old One [God] doesn’t play dice.” Niels Bohr promptly answered:”Don’t tell God what to do.”
To show how Einstein himself fell, again, into the randomness fallacy, think of the following situation.
Let God play dice. His dice, which, of course, is a fair dice, follows the statistics of dice tossing, namely that there is a probability of p=1/6= 16.66% for each outcome. However, assume also that God’s tosses are not constrained to any order of outcomes. For example, there is nothing that prevents Him from tossing dice and obtaining the outcome “6” first. In fact, there is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents this from happening, and the only provision is that in the limit of large numbers–that is, after many tosses–on average it happens only once after 6 tosses. The same must be true for any other outcome. There is no other constraint for God other than that of following the probability law. Thus, imagine God constraining Himself to probabilistic laws, but still being free to choose in which order which outcome should occur at which time.
This doesn’t, by any means, make the dice tossing less random. In the limit of many tosses, the outcome frequency for each number converges and is equally probable, which, statistically means that it is a random time series. In statistics, the temporal order of a time series is irrelevant, provided that it follows the assigned probability law.
Now suppose that we convene that if at time T the outcome is, say, number “3”, then a switch turns on a light, otherwise there should be no light. Then God is entirely free to turn on the light by tossing a “3” exactly at time T, if He wills so. If the frequency of the outcome remains equal to all others in a large time interval, then nobody would notice the difference, and the time series of all events would result nonetheless completely random.
Of course, the mechanisms of creation which led Him to say “Let there be light” were certainly a bit more complex than that. But the purpose of this metaphor is to point out how randomness does not entail slavery to probabilities. Even if we are constrained by natural statistical laws, we are still free to choose the order of each event. Notice also how this might entail interesting connections between quantum mechanics and free will.
In other words, Bohr’s answer to Einstein’s objection could have been also: Not only does God play dice, but He is the dice.
One might ask why should we come up with such a weird metaphysical theory and not leave things as they are in the naturalistic frame: Quantum randomness is just what it is, phenomena happen without a reason and a cause, events pop in and out of existence, just out of the blue from nothing.
Personally, I don’t find this worldview less weird and not in the slightest intellectually more satisfying. On the contrary, it is a form of ‘magic’ in disguise that pretends to be ‘scientific’, only because it refuses, for ideological reasons, even to consider the hypothesis of divine action.
At any rate, nothing in science disallows us to entertain such a hypothesis. When it comes to philosophical questions of a more metaphysical character, randomness in biology, quantum physics, or wherever in nature, has nothing to tell us about final causes or will in the universe. This conflation emerges only due to our misplaced assumptions. There is no reason to be afraid of chance and unpredictability in a conscious universe.
[1] The older generation might recall the typical white noise image produced by a CRT TV when no channel was available.