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God, Chance and Purpose: Can God Have It Both Ways?

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David Bartholomew is Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His book offers a perspective on chance and divine action that only a statistician could provide.

The problem that his book addresses is that chance suggests lack of purpose, and theology speaks of purpose. His solution is seeing chance within, not outside, the providence of God. "Chance plays a positive role in the world and . . . does not undermine God's sovereignty."

Bartholomew identifies three models of evolution:
(1) Blind chance: little or no opportunity for God to act at all.
(2) Purely deterministic: "God's determinate actions successfully mimic chance and at the same time achieve other desired outcomes."
(3) Mostly chance with occassional intervention by God: a modest amount of direct action (obscured by chance) with a large dose of genuine randomness. "In this scenario there are many random happenings, and most of the time, the deity in charge has no more to do than to sit back and delight in the variety of creation. For example, he cites Simon Conway Morris' notion of convergence, according to which "evolution is liable to produce similar solutions to similar problems wherever and whenever they occur . . . making the emergence of something like ourselves a near-certainty" ("Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe" (Cambridge University Press, 2003)).

Regarding the popular notion of God acting undetectably at the quantum level (as suggested by Robert Russell, John Polkinghorne, Nancey Murphy, and others), he concludes that "it is very doubtful whether there are any quantum events which God could influence whose outcomes might significantly determine what happens at the macro level."

In his chapter on Intelligent Design, he concludes that it is a tautology and is not, therefore, a valid scientifice method.

Although the book is non-technical, a background in statistics would certainly help in fully grasping the author's points. I recommend this book for Christians (particularly those with any training in statistics) who want a better understanding of the nature of God's providence, i.e., how God acts in the world.

Even though I'm not a fan of theology, I can recommend this carefully written and serious book to anyone who is interested in the theological implications of chance as seen by a professional statistician. His thesis is "chance is to be seen as within the providence of God rather than outside it" and I'm not competent to comment on the theological arguments. But less than half the book explicitly involves God; much of the book is a descriptive account of where and how scientists see chance involved in the natural and human world. For instance, the chapters on "Chaos out of order" and "Order out of chaos" are nice reminders of the importance of the levels and scales on which we view the world; what looks random on one level may look ordered on another. And the brief and straightforward accounts of many topics (small world networks, random epidemics, game theory, genetic algorithms and a dozen more) are clear and non-technical. So this book is as good or better at surveying the domain of chance as many popular science books written expressly for that purpose; though to my taste, like most other books it is too uncritical of the claimed real-world
relevance of such mathematical models.

Also noteworthy is a central chapter giving a cogent technical critique of the attempts by William Debski, a leading advocate of Intelligent Design, to calculate the chance of a particular biological feature (such as the bacterial flagellum) having ``evolved by chance".

The book explores the role of such ideas as probabilities, chance, randomness, and purpose, to approach the existence of God. Essentially, the thesis is that chance or determinism are not directly linked with the presence of God. The statistical explanations are interesting, but the book is flawed on many levels.

Firstly, nowhere does the writer define what he means with the term "God". Simple as it may sound, it is an essential part of the discourse and to philosophically ignore it places the argumentative foundation in serious danger. Essentially, the writer falls victim of his own criticism of "taking variables for granted" when calculating probabilities. The book casually accepts a monotheistic - perhaps even a specifically Christian - version of "God" with all the associated shortsightedness this produces. Would the argument be different should we consider a different "God"? The answer must be yes.

Secondly, the writer's approach to quantum mechanics is both outdated and flawed. It should come as no surprise that a statistician would opt for the ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics, arguing that there is no paradox at all (e.g. with kittens in boxes or electrons passing through double slits), because, in his opinion, quantum mechanics do not apply to individual electrons - or kittens - but to vast numbers of them. The fact that he argues that, essentially, quantum mechanics - devised to be used with individual particles - should not apply to individual particles poses no problem or paradox to the him.

All in all, it's an interesting to read book, with short chapters and not bloated with mathematics, but it's philosophically flawed and offers little to the age-old metaphysical questions of Who are we and Is there a God

I was tempted to quote Disraeli's (or was it Mark Twain's?) remark about statistics--"there are lies, damn lies and statistics"--and let it go at that, but decided to proceed further. The insights on probability and statistics are indeed worthwhile (although I've dabbled in statistics, I wasn't really aware of the distinction between probability--a priori guessing--and likelihood--a posteriori reasoning, and such fallacies as the Prosecutor's fallacy). These make if worthwhile to get the book. However Bartholomew doesn't connect the science behind statistical law (as applied to the way the world works) but sticks to purely ontological chance. Let me take just two examples. He cites radioactive decay as a purely random process, but it in fact is based on physical law--the quantum mechanics of a particle in a potential well; if one goes from microscopic to macroscopic dimensions, then other, deterministic models apply. Bartholomew argues against the strong Anthropic principle by supposing that there is a distribution for the appropriate fundamental constants (it would have to be awfully tight--the omega value, in particular)that makes them more probable than just "pick a number,any number" but that is essentially the same as saying the values were "chosen", i.e. that some physical law prevails to set the constants. I could cite other examples, but space forbids. I've bought the book and got something out of it, but it's not one I'll keep in my permanent library; look for it on Paperbackswap.