Random or designed?
Whether or not you are a believer, you might experience some logical discomfort if you are asked to fully agree with the following assertion:
We, along with everything in nature, are part of God’s creation AND we also came about entirely by random chance.
Think about the big mysteries of nature. How can a world that came about with exactly the right amount of oxygen, water, heat, nutrients, etc. for human life to thrive on Earth be the product of random events? Even worse, if we evolved into human beings through millions of years of random mutations, where could the hand of God possibly be in that?
“God does not play dice!” said Einstein to his friend Niels Bohr…
He was speaking against the implications of quantum mechanics, but at the core of Einstein’s issue was the same logic: That random events cannot possibly be the act of God. Was Einstein wrong?
Einstein understood the implications of quantum theory quite well. He wasn’t even wrong about God. What he was wrong about was dice.
Random, lawless, and chaotic.
For most of us, saying something happened randomly is akin to saying it was accidental. It happened by pure chance, like the flip of a coin or the roll of a die; a truly lawless process where any possible result could come about.
When you roll a die, you might get any of its numbers and you only need to roll a few times to learn an important lesson: Short of a “lucky guess” you cannot predict what number you’ll roll.
But what if you do it many times? Get yourself a bucket of dice and throw them one after the next. It won’t teach you anything you can use to cheat in a casino, but you’ll start to notice that you get each of the 6 possible results about 1/6th of the time. The more times you do it, the more precisely you’ll see that the probability is 1/6th for each outcome equally. If you graph the probability of rolling each number, it will look like this:
Pretty boring flat line. But bear with me. I claim that the implications of this flat line are way more interesting than you might think.
Let’s throw 2 dice instead. You’ll see that suddenly not all outcomes are equally probable. In fact, there are many more ways to roll a 7 than there are to roll a 2 or a 12.
Suddenly not all outcomes are equally likely, and the probability distribution is no longer flat. Now you can make a better guess as to what you might roll, although in this case, you’ll still guess wrong most of the time.
But in a way, we now have more information about the possible outcome. How did adding another random process cause this change? Is this still “lawless randomness” or is it now less lawless? Was the flat distribution lawless at all? To shed light on these questions, let’s look at what happens when we increase the number of dice in the experiment.
Throwing a die is supposed to be random. So why is it that the more dice we throw, the more precisely this peak is formed?
This shape means something fundamental. As it turns out, random isn’t random at all. What I mean is that random isn’t lawless in the least bit. In fact, the more of these random processes we combine, the more certain the global outcome becomes. Even the probability distributions become more and more precise the more experiments we perform.
“But what about chaos theory?” you might ask. A simple Google search will show you that what we call “chaotic” processes are also pretty trackable and lawful.
It could very well be that the global outcome of all the random and “chaotic” processes in the Universe is peaked precisely at a value that corresponds to our Universe, our solar system, our evolutionary history. Despite our naive intuition for what randomness implies or means, it too may be an agent of God’s creation.
What? A Universe where even what we call random is in fact deeply rooted in an underlying and precise law?
Good one, God!
These are the moments that make math and science so incredibly satisfying.
“The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” Psalm 19:1
As a scientist, I see the hand of God not only in my own life but in the laws of nature. At times when we may feel forsaken, like our lives and even the Universe are nothing but randomness and chaos, God’s providence is nonetheless there. Often in ways beyond what we even imagine.
So, what did Niels Bohr reply to Einstein’s “God does not play dice!”?
“You do not tell God what to do.” –Niels Bohr
We can easily forget that our limited understanding of what appears unlikely or impossible does not apply to God. Not only in the miracles he works in our lives but in the miracle of this beautiful Universe. He is, after all, the one who creates it.
Sometimes it is scary to ask questions. It can be like taking a step into the dark. What if I find something that challenges my faith?
The history of philosophy and science is that of humanity slowly unwrapping the marvelous gift that is God’s creation. We will surely feel confused and lost at times. It is, after all, an adventure. A back and forth of asking a new question, only to find new mindblowing revelations. But God never abandons us. The truth of nature can never contradict the truth of God. His love and his providence are there in every moment of time, in every law of nature.
_ “Then they prayed and said, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.”_
And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles.”
Acts 1:24-26