Archive for June 2007

The mythology of chance

June 21, 2007



Many scientists have overstepped their bounds, and wound up in the fantasy world of myth.

Chance is a Soft pillow that only the ignorant, and disinterested can provide.

Kant was motivated to write after reading Hume who was very big on chance.

Chance has caused geniuses to fall asleep at the switch of science.

It serves as a magic tool to scientists for making shabby philosophizing a most respectable attitude.

As Arthur Kessler once said, “As long as chance rules God is an Anachronism.”

I believe this to be  an understatement.

If chance rules God cannot be validated.

For chance to make God irrelevant all it has to do is exist. It doesn’t even have to rule or be very strong. All it takes is an ounce of it, or even 1 milligram it. If chance exists then God ceases to exist. If there is such a thing as chance which has become a scientific law, then we have an unbridgeable chasm between science, and theology, and something has to give. Chance is central to the doctrine of creation principally. Is there such a thing as creation?

Every atheist understands this,” If you can gainsay this concept then Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are finished.” The 3 great religions of the world all understand that God is the efficient, and sufficient cause of the entire Universe, and all agree on that. Where chance functions, mythology operates chiefly as a substitute for creation. It is a concept that is appealed to relentlessly to save the phenomena of the universe without an appeal to theology. That’s why some people welcome the entrance of chance into the world of scientific thought.

I once heard a sermon where a minister tried to defend creation against these people who were saying that the world was created by chance. And he had read somewhere the odds against a universe being created by chance were astronomical, and stated that  there was  an infinite number of possibility against it. He stated that it was mathematically impossible for the universe to come into existence by chance. After the sermon he asked me what I thought, and I bluntly told him that he just gave away the store. He asked me what I meant and I told him 3 things.

In the first place if there is 1 chance in 10 gazillion googolplexes that the universe took place by chance, and if the timeframe for this to happen was infinite it seems to me that one of these possibilities is going to come up sooner or later in eternity. It’s not like there’s only one shot for these things to happen.

Second, it is not mathematically impossible when you’ve just given a mathematical possibility as remote as it may be in terms of 1 out of all of these zeros and it’s still mathematically possible for the universe to come into being by chance.

Third question was the biggest one,” What are the chances that anything can happen by chance,” I asked him, and he said “I don’t know what you mean”, and I said “NOT A CHANCE.” I said nothing can happen by chance, and he said why not, and I said to him that chance cannot do anything. I once had a discussion with one of my professors in Grad school who said to me that the universe was created by chance. And I had pushed him a little bit on this, and I had a coin to illustrate the problem, and I said to him “if I take this .50 cent piece what are the chances that if I flip it up into the air that it comes up heads,” and he said” 50/50.” Then I asked him how much influence does chance exert on the flip of the coin, and he said, “what do you mean,” and I said, “well, the chance that it comes up heads or tails is determined by the how much pressure is exerted on it, what the density of the atmosphere is how many revolutions it takes and so on.”

Those are all the variables so how much influence does chance have, and he still didn’t get it, and I said well look, if you’re using the term chance to talk about mathematical possibilities it’s a perfectly useful term. But when we ascribe to chance a power to something, we are saying that chance is something. “Now what is this mysterious X factor that causes this coin to come up heads,” and he still gave me that deer in the headlight look. And I told him, “chance cannot do anything because chance is not anything.” For something to act it must first be, and chance is not a thing, it’s nothing. And when you say to me that the universe was created by chance you are saying that the universe was created by nothing. And you’ve taken a perfectly good word, to describe mathematical possibilities, and now informed it with “magical power.” Giving it ontological status, and giving it power to do something when it is not anything. Chance has become the magic tool for making shabby philosophy respectable as stated earlier by Boethius the Roman philosopher. One of the basic axioms of philosophy, and science is ex nihilo (Out of nothing, nothing comes) in simple language it states that you cannot get something from nothing.

If there was a time when there was nothing what would there be now? NOTHING ….if it’s true that out of nothing nothing comes. The soft pillow is this, “out of chance everything comes” which is saying “out of nothing something comes.” Or “ Out of nothing everything comes.” And that is the principle idea that is used as a substitute for creation. Now there are those of you that may say the universe is eternal and was always here, and that’s another question. But the vast majority of critics today who deny the creation of this world by a self existent eternal God appeal to some kind of beginning to all of reality that comes from nothing. It’s the rabbit out a hat without a hat without a rabbit without a magician. It’s worse than magic its pure mythology. If this mythology were not taken so seriously today we could be amused by it, but whats at stake is not just theology but science itself. Incidentally this professor went on to become a Christian.