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Lightning strikes a tree in your back yard during a thunderstorm, and a big branch lands on your roof. Your car is rear-ended in traffic, and you wind up in the hospital with whiplash injuries. You suffer a fatal heart attack while shoveling heavy snow in your driveway, or you are diagnosed with terminal cancer. Leaving aside the possibility that God is punishing you, all these misfortunes are random events. And yet, as I learned in insurance school more than 40 years ago, all are subject to precise statistical laws that enable insurers like the one I worked for to charge an appropriate premium to protect their policyholders against similar losses in the future. How can these perils, as we called them in the insurance trade, be random and predictable at the same time?
To understand that, we might begin with a simple coin toss. Short of the coin landing on its edge or rolling down a storm drain, there are only two possible outcomes: heads or tails. There is no telling which, however, even if the coin has previously landed heads or tails numerous times in a row. The coin has no memory, as statisticians like to say. The outcome of each individual toss is entirely random. And yet, if you toss the coin ten thousand times, even though the outcome of each individual coin flip is entirely random, the distribution of heads and tails will closely approximate 50-50. A clear and predictable pattern has emerged that brings order out of the randomness of individual events.
Everyone now understands that coin flips and dice games are governed by the laws of probability. But until Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat worked out the math in the 17th century, the outcomes were attributed to fate or divine intervention. Later, Jacob Bernoulli developed a mathematical proof demonstrating that actual results would approach expected outcomes with repeated trials. You can flip a coin 10 times, and you will likely get any combination of heads and tails; flip it 10,000 times, and the results will almost certainly round to 50-50. The law of large numbers, as it is called, enables insurance actuaries to calculate the right premium, even when they don’t know which of their policyholders will be rear-ended in traffic or will suffer a fatal heart attack while shoveling snow.
The curious interplay of randomness and predictability is not limited to accidents or games of chance but extends to some of the basic processes of nature. Quantum physicists concluded early in the last century that the behavior of elementary particles could not be precisely determined but was fundamentally a matter of probabilities. Einstein was never reconciled to this, arguing that God did not “play dice” with the universe. Subsequent experiments proved that’s exactly what he did, assuming you believed God had a direct hand in the actions of elementary particles.
Apart from Einstein’s comment, God’s hand rarely comes up in discussions of the subatomic realm, probably because quantum mechanics is well beyond the ken of most people concerned about God’s role in creation. It is an altogether different story when discussion turns to the mechanics of evolution. On the surface, Darwin’s theory is hard to reconcile with the biblical account of creation. But the crux of the issue lies out of sight, in the winding and unwinding of those double strands of DNA whose existence could only be guessed at in Darwin’s day. The problem is that the whole enterprise turns on genetic mutations – in effect, a crapshoot. How can you square a process propelled by random genetic variation with an orderly creation presided over by a sovereign deity?
If you turn to Scripture, the Lord is portrayed as leaving nothing to chance. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?” Jesus asks his disciples. “Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Perhaps God was too busy counting hairs to keep proper track of genetic mutations. But no, that can’t be it. Religious conservatives point to the wondrous intricacy and order in creation and deny this could be the product of random processes operating without purpose. Materialists point to the evident randomness and deny there can be a sovereign God calling all the shots.
The two sides are looking at the same processes through opposite ends of the telescope and neither is taking proper account of the astonishing degree to which randomness yields to order in the natural world. Far from being mutually exclusive, randomness and order work in tandem to generate new possibilities and to optimize outcomes. Without random genetic variation, for example, species would cease to adapt to changes in the environment and become increasingly vulnerable to extinction; indeed, without genetic variation, life on earth would still consist of nothing but bacteria.
Fundamentalists who deny the random operation of biological processes have no trouble embracing the concept of free will, which may be the ultimate wild card in God’s plan for the universe. Theologians tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile free will with a sovereign Lord but nevertheless insist that humanity must be granted its freedom. So why should God not be granted the same privilege? Why should he be bound to iron laws of determinism in the unfolding of his own creation? True, the random actions that occur at the ground level are contained within a larger framework of physical laws. And there may be a still higher level at which God works his purpose out. But you’ll never find it by counting hairs on every head.
There is as much art as science in the workings of nature, which I think is why so many artists have taken their inspiration from it. To behold God’s creation is to see abundant evidence of playfulness and imagination. That’s because God has given himself room the breathe, just as we have been given room to breathe. God is supposed to know everything about everything and to know it well in advance. But I’d like to think when he flips a coin, he is willing to leave the outcome to chance. As Oxford physics professor Paul Ewart puts it, “Chance is there for a purpose.” I’m not so bold as to lay out God’s purposes, but I suspect in this case that he may just want to be surprised.
Matthew 10:29-30
Stephen Hawking, “Does God Play Dice?”, www.hawking.org.uk
Paul Ewart, “The Necessity of Chance: Randomness, Purpose and the Sovereignty of God,” Science & Christian Belief, Vol 21, No. 2 (2009)
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