Creation

Law and Probability

Fraser Watts, Fraser Watts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429872884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Published in 1999. How can we reconcile assumptions about the lawfulness of the universe with provision for chance events? Do the 'laws of nature' indicate what absolutely must happen, or just what is most likely to happen? These are important questions for both science and theology, and are explored here in the first in-depth coverage of an important but neglected topic.

Including perspectives from prestigious contributions, and published with the backing of the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR), Creation: Law and Probability employs the disciplines of history and philosophy, as well as cosmology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience in a fascinating dialogue of faith traditions.

CHAPTER ONE

Concepts of Law and Probability in Theology and Science

Fraser Watts

The task of this initial chapter is to open up issues that others will explore more fully in succeeding chapters of the present work. In the following introductory overview of the topic I will examine the concepts of “law” and “probability” and related concepts, and in particular show how they are used in different ways in theological and scientific discourse. I will also indicate how concepts such as law and probability have arisen in various different scientific domains, and how they play an important role in the interface between science and theology. In the final section I offer an outline of the succeeding chapters of the book.

Lawfulness and Related Concepts

The concept of the lawfulness of nature underwent a significant revision in the Enlightenment period, and came to have overtones of determinism that it had not had before. As Peter Harrison explains in Chapter Two, the concept of “laws of nature” is one that we have inherited from the seventeenth century. As he says, it was a concept that was initially introduced on the basis of theological presuppositions, though these original presuppositions have now largely been abandoned. I would additionally suggest that the seventeenth-century concept of the laws of nature in their turn worked back upon theology, and contributed to a theological change of direction. For example, miracles began to be defined in contra-distinction to the lawfulness of the natural world, in a way that had not been so explicitly a feature of earlier thinking.

It is one of the interesting developments in recent philosophy of science that the concept of lawfulness has once again become more flexible, less rigid than it was in early modernity.¹ Indeed, this change in the concept of the lawfulness of nature is perhaps one of the hallmark changes between modernity and post-modernity. These recent changes in the concept of lawfulness have significant implications for theology. In Chapter Three, Philip Clayton distinguishes three broad views of the laws of nature, as expressions of divine choice, eternal necessities, or regularities discerned by humans. The latter two are both very much in play in secular thought, but I suggest that a shift can be discerned towards the latter view.

A softer view of the laws of nature can make it easier to see how divine action can be reconciled with laws of nature without those laws being violated. For example, an instrumentalist view of the laws of nature does not see those laws as something that divine action might overturn. Almost everyone who has written in recent years about the relationship of the lawfulness of nature to God’s action in the world has wanted to find some reconciliation of the two that avoids the kind of interventionism in which laws are violated. A softer view of the laws of nature is one way of achieving that reconciliation.

It is worth acknowledging here that theologians are pulled in conflicting directions about the laws of nature. There is a tension between wanting to emphasize the lawfulness of nature as a reflection of God’s faithfulness, and wanting to emphasize the openness of creation as reflecting God’s continuing initiative. Those drawn in the first direction would sympathize with Einstein’s comment that “God does not play dice”, those drawn in the latter direction would want to emphasize the possibility of God acting in the world, for example in response to prayer.

Though “law” is the term used in the subtitle for this book, there are other related terms that could have been chosen, and some of these are represented in the titles of subsequent chapters. Things are further complicated by the fact that each of these terms can be used in a variety of different ways

Lawfulness is closely related to both determinism and necessity. Determinism has probably been more prominent in philosophy of science, whereas necessity has probably been more prominent in philosophical theology. We witness the familiar phenomenon here of theology and science using apparently similar concepts but ones that, on closer examination, prove to be significantly different. It is very important to distinguish here, as Clayton does, between what concept of the laws of nature is being employed, and whether or not a theological account of the laws of nature is being adopted.

Some of the complexities in the concept of lawfulness can be seen in different versions of natural theology. One can distinguish different traditions of natural theology that emphasize respectively the orderliness, the fruitfulness and the intelligibility of the natural world.² These are not interchangeable concepts, though it is arguable that all of them presuppose a certain basic lawfulness.

Orderliness is the closest to lawfulness, though the Hebrew Bible probably thinks about creation more in terms of order than of law. Even where there is an apparent reference to the lawfulness of the world, it would be anachronistic to read back into that the concept of law developed in certain dominant strands of Enlightenment thought. Certainly the Hebrew concept of law has no overtones of determinism.

Fruitfulness is a more significant concept from a religious point of view. The world could not have been fruitful without being orderly. It could have been orderly but barren, but it is hard to see what divine purpose would have been served by such a world. Fruitfulness is an important concept theologically precisely because it invites an inference about purpose behind creation, though purpose cannot be securely inferred from fruitfulness.

The intelligibility of the world also presupposes lawfulness. It also raises issues about how realist we want to be about lawfulness. Is the lawfulness of nature there to be discovered, or is it a construction of the human mind? This is to pose the issue in rather extreme terms, but there are a variety of in-between positions. For example, it may well be that we are only likely to discover lawfulness in the natural world if we make prior assumptions about the lawfulness that we believe to be there.

Lawfulness probably needs to exist in some sense in both nature and the human mind before the two can be brought together. If so, it is not helpful to press the question of whether lawfulness is primarily a matter of nature or mind; both are in a sense primary. This is not to deny the reality of lawfulness in nature, and certainly not to suggest that lawfulness is merely a human projection, but it assumes that the discovery of lawfulness is an interactive process and depends both on what we humans bring to it, as well as on what is there to be found.

Probability and Related Concepts

Terms like lawfulness, necessity and determinism each have an opposite, and there is a parallel set of distinctions to be made between such concepts as contingency, unpredictability, chance, randomness and probability. There are also important differences between this set of terms, though what they have in common is that they all imply some kind of openness. Space does not allow an exploration of all the issues that arise here, so I will restrict myself to making some brief remarks about chance, unpredictability and probability.

Chance is, in a sense, the most extreme term, and purely chance processes seem to be rare. Usually, chance intersects with other more predictable processes. A distinction needs to be made between concepts of chance that arise from human ignorance, and more metaphysical assumptions about chance. For example, it is widely assumed that there is indeterminacy in quantum measurement. However, that is not the universal view, and there is no evidence from which it necessarily follows. It may just be that we don’t yet understand whatever deterministic processes are at work. Sometimes when we attribute outcomes to “chance”, we are not saying much more than that we do not have any adequate way of predicting them. It is a big step from that to saying that an outcome is “due to chance”, as though “chance” was some unusual kind of causation.

The concept of chance is at the heart of much scientific thinking about both mutations and multiverses. However, interestingly, there have been different theological reactions to the concept of chance in the two domains, and there may be an intellectual inconsistency here. I will assume for the sake of argument that which mutations occur is genuinely a matter of chance, even though the rate of mutation seems to be a response to changing circumstances, such as cosmic radiation. Theologically, it is tempting to argue, as Peacocke has, that chance mutations provide the scope for God’s purposes to be fulfilled. Chance mutations, he argues, throw up a broad range of possibilities that can be scanned, as by a radar beam, selecting out what is fruitful for the divine purpose.

There are many versions of multiverse theory, discussed by George Ellis in Chapter Four. On one model there is a very large series of universes, which differ from one another randomly. Theologians have not been as sympathetic to the idea of chance multiverses, though it seems that an exactly parallel move could be made. One could postulate that random multiverses provide a broad range of possibilities from which God could select what was fruitful for his purposes. It is strange that the concept of chance has been more readily accepted by religious thinkers for mutations than for multiverses.

It may be because the idea of chance mutations seems so securely established scientifically that people feel that they have no choice but to accept it, whereas the idea of multiverses is a more speculative idea that people do not yet feel they need to accept. Or it may be because the idea of multiverses has been presented as an alternative to the anthropic principle, with a seemingly natural alliance between atheism and multiverses on the one hand, and between religion and the anthropic principle on the other. If chance really is compatible with religious thinking, that ought to apply in both contexts. However, as Bartholomew emphasizes, chance and probability are used in different ways in the context of different arguments.

Unpredictability has been the subject of sharp debate among the science and religion community. It is widely recognized, with the advent of chaos theory, discussed by Niels Gregersen in Chapter Five, that there are many complex systems that are unpredictable. The debate is about what can be inferred from that in terms of the openness of the universe. I think everyone agrees that unpredictability is different from indeterminism, and also that you can’t legitimately infer indeterminism from unpredictability. Failures of predictability may occur in deterministic systems simply because there are too many variables to calculate.

There can be legitimate differences of view about whether unpredictability is suggestive of indeterminism. Though indeterminism can’t be inferred from unpredictability, it is perhaps a reasonable metaphysical conjecture that systems that are unpredictable may in reality be under-determined, as John Polkinghorne has suggested.³ The matter cannot be settled conclusively by the fact that the mathematics that is used to model chaotic systems is deterministic. It is possible that deterministic mathematics might provide a sufficiently good way of modelling a complex system that, in reality, had a degree of under-determination.

Turning to probability, one of the questions that will need to concern us here is whether probability is sufficient to infer divine purpose. To take a specific example, if the emergence of a species such as homo sapiens is probable in the course of evolution, is that sufficient to be consistent with the claim that it was God’s purpose that such a species should evolve? Would God depend on something that was merely likely rather than something you could be sure would happen?

There is, of course, a sense in which theologians have often claimed that the world is contingent, meaning by that that God could have created it differently, that he didn’t have to create it the way it is. However, that is not the kind of contingency associated with probabilistic laws. In the latter case, the point is rather that the way the universe is created often does not guarantee particular outcomes, it only makes them likely. My sense is that divine purpose, even after allowing for God having granted the world a degree of freedom, needs to depend on something stronger than likelihood. However, we are dealing here with one of those conundrums that seem an inescapable part of religious thinking.

Reconciling Law and Probability

Whereas lawfulness, as we have come to know it, is a concept of early modernity, probability is a concept of late modernity. It was only when science moved beyond the assumption that the natural world was a mechanism that the concept of probability became relevant to science. In putting these concepts of law and probability alongside each other, we should be aware that we are bringing together concepts that have their roots in different eras.

It may initially seem that we are dealing with sets of opposite terms, that chance is the opposite of determinism, contingency the opposite of necessity, etc. However, it is important for us not to be too simplistic about this. Though it may appear that we are dealing with opposite concepts, they may not be mutually exclusive. Lawfulness and probability may be pointing in opposite directions, but they may not be incompatible with each other.

There is a conceptual interconnectedness between law and probability. It is at least arguable that probability and lawfulness are such interconnected concepts that one is parasitic on the other, and cannot really be defined without the other; just as, more generally, it is arguable that all words can only be defined in terms of their opposites. Rather than dealing with mutually incompatible concepts, then, we may be dealing with concepts that are necessarily interconnected.

There may well also be a fruitful intermingling of probability and lawfulness in terms of their consequences, as Arthur Peacocke pointed out in connection with evolution in Creation and the World of Science.⁴ Neither pure unbroken regularity, nor the unpredictability of pure contingency are particularly fruitful. It is the combination of the two, the combination of lawfulness and contingency that is most fruitful. Though some have doubted whether chance can have a place in the divine purpose, David Bartholomew in Chapter Eight makes a strong argument that it can. For Peacocke and Bartholomew, it is the combination of chance and lawfulness that is particularly fruitful in fulfilling God’s creative purposes.

The concept of probability is much closer to lawfulness than is either chance or unpredictability. It is a reasonable extension of the concept of the lawfulness of the natural world to include probabilistic laws as well as absolute ones. The key difference is perhaps that predictions from absolute laws are necessary, whereas predictions from probabilistic laws are contingent. Probability combines an element of predictability with an element of openness.

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