Divine Providence and Randomness in Nature - Rob Koons transcript

the question of randomness and chance is a very big philosophical issue or question that people have wrestled with and thought about hard for 100 years or more it's really one of the core issues especially in philosophy of science i think since probabilities become so important than science so i think my understanding of randomness and chance are that they really are based first of all on probability without some sort of notion of the probability of an event you can't even begin to talk about randomness let's say and then the other thing that's very important is that the probabilities have to be law governed that is they can't just be one-off this has a certain probability that is a certain probability it has to be that certain kinds of events have probabilities under certain circumstances and those regularities are what scientists call laws of nature the next piece in the in the puzzle that you need really is the notion of independence so the idea that two probabilities are independent of each other so if i flip one coin with one hand and flip another coin with another hand they each have a chance of coming up 50 50 chance of coming up heads and tails and they're independent of each other right if one comes up heads that doesn't make the other one come up tails or heads or something like that so once you've got that in picture then you can start talking about randomness and so an event is random when it's probabilities or its chances are independent of things like meaning purpose value and so on so to take a kind of classic example the difference between a string of letters that you know spells out one of shakespeare's sonnets or something like that right on the one hand and then a random sequence of letters in the other case and the difference between the two is that the probability of a letter any given point in shakespeare's sonnet is not random right because it's going to depend upon the meaning or purpose of the sonnet as a whole whereas in the other case you know you you know a very simple case would be each letter has a one and a 26 chance of appearing at each point no matter what's happened before what happened afterwards so one of the one of the kind of ironic things is that from a philosophical point of view you might say that the the random sequence is actually the more orderly sequence because it's it's very predictable on the basis of relatively simple laws whereas when you're looking at a sonnet it's actually quite unpredictable and and disorderly in a way right i mean what what happens of course is the poet is creating a new kind of order in the poem and if you really understand poetry maybe you can anticipate what's going on but it's it's easy the poet is also in a sense disrupting the order of of nature in the process of producing the poem yes so divine providence is really asking about or it's a question about the relationship between god and creation and the world that he's made god can certainly create a world of living creatures including human beings through evolution if he chooses right because again evolution is going to be describing what's going on at the level of secondary causality and you know as long as a process is i don't know logically consistent and coherent uh it's a process that god could in principle use could will into being and uh and even he could will that this process even if the process itself is chancy and involves randomness he could will if the process exists and produce a very specific result right even if the process itself doesn't have that result in mind it doesn't in a sense have the internal resources to guarantee that it'll get there god can do that god can both create a process that in and of itself could produce but doesn't necessarily have to produce a particular result it could will such a process into being and will that it produce a particular result so i think you can in a sense have your cake and eat it too here you have both the chancy process and the particular result i mean an analogy that i like to use is from the book of genesis when joseph is um remember joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers and uh in egypt and then he becomes the potiphar the prime minister prime minister i guess of egypt at some point and is able to save his family from famine and the brothers he meets his brothers at the end of genesis and he says you know when you sold me to slavery you intended that for evil out of jealousy for me but god intended it for something good so the very same event right which was the brothers selling him into slavery had in a sense there were two levels going on there there was a level of intentionality of the brothers which was evil there's a level of intentionality of god who is willing that this should happen for some good purpose and in an analogous sort of way i mean evolution could happen where the process doesn't have anything in mind doesn't have any sort of intention in mind but god could and so the very same event at the level of secondary causality could happen in a way that is unintentional doesn't have us in mind but at the level of primary causality it could god does have this in mind it is using this process to produce us i mean there's nothing inside evolution that necessarily points us points it towards human beings or any other particular outcome but it's possible for god from the outside so to speak to be directing this process to that particular result now it admittedly this is the toughest problem in this area right which is you know i mean it looks like you have a kind of over determination or too much causation going on um i mean the from a theological point of view we say god explains why they're human beings on earth and the evolutionary biologist says well from a biological perspective here's this chancy process that would produce human-like beings at a certain point perhaps and or at least has some chance of doing that and that's what happened and so you've got these two explanations and you might think that they're competing explanations right and that you can't have both or they'll be really weird if they had both it would be like um you know i pick a number between one and a hundred and you pick a number between 100 both just pick 78 right for no particular reason you might think well wait i mean that that can't keep happening over and over again there's got to be some sort of explanation of the coincidence between the two and that's right so the again the these two levels of causation primary and secondary it's not as though they're they're on an equal plane right and that somehow by a miracle they happen to converge on the same outcome because that would be a weird coincidence right that wouldn't make any sense um so you have to think that the primary causality is you know ultimately the true explanation right of of human beings uh why we're here ultimately but that doesn't mean that that you can't ask but how did god choose to bring about that end result right how did he to choose to do it did he choose to do it immediately by special creation he could have that's certainly an option or he could also choose to do it through a much longer process where the process in its own internal structure doesn't have any intention in mind it's just a kind of well it's just a series of chance events right which are such that given the laws of nature uh we can predict we'll produce living organisms of certain kinds at least so i mean i guess here's a way to kind of put it in a nutshell um god can say something like let there be evolution and let it in a chancy sort of way produce this specific result right so he's both insisting that the process be inherently chancy or random and that it nonetheless produce a particular result in this particular case there's no at least i don't think they don't see any logical inconsistency in that now you might ask why would god want to do it that way well it turns out that a world in which there is chance and randomness is actually a very orderly world as i mentioned earlier there's actually a close association between randomness and order so producing a world in which in which something like an evolutionary process is involved in shaping life on earth is just a way of maintaining the orderliness the beauty and the elegance of the natural world so it i think it does it does make sense from a philosophical point of view or even a theological point of view why he might do things that way