Destiny, Will and I: Does God Play Dice?

And tell me how does God choose?
Whose prayers does he refuse?
Who turns the wheel?
Who throws the dice?
On the day after tomorrow.

Tom Waits - Day After Tomorrow

Are the shapes of our lives no more fateful than the distribution of leaves on the ground? Who can say? but men and women will wonder; men like Tom waits as he comments on the plight of soldiers who are “gravel on the road” to politicians. Fundamental inequity has ever thus brushed us the wrong way and is the very stuff of war. By now, most folks have pocketed the truism, life is unfair and dusted their hands. But, beneath the surface the itch of our dysphoria bites. After all, who are we without our will? The ever turning gyre of determination squealing beneath crushing compromise coughed out before a universe whose nature is homoeostatic; perverse to whim and indifferent to pain.

The problem has a long tail. Indeed, most of the philosophy of antiquity centres squarely around the ‘if God is good then why does man suffer, and if man was given the will to inadvertently or purposefully cause his own suffering, why? Especially since God must have created the evil in man, and the transitivity indicts God as partly or wholly evil.’ No clear position was ever established, hence philosophy lives to fight another day.

Since modernity and the Nietzschean ‘death of God’ we have collectively turned our back on simple ideas of good and evil, instead embracing a more relativistic (post-modern) absurdity, rendering such questions meaningless or rhetorical at best; once again indicating our “that’s life” drop it and move on psychological reality. As Taoist whimsy skilfully suggests, there is peace in acknowledging the state of the game as it lies.

Modern thought has surfaced new heavyweights to content with ancient proclamations of destiny and divine pre-determination. Einstein is famously quoted as saying “God doesn’t play dice” indicating his belief that the universe is deterministic given the starting rules, and would play out exactly as it has if reset to the beginning. However, the quantum world has other ideas and has proven to be the most reliable scientific theory to date (it’s why your phone has satellite internet). Simply put, the theory propounds that particles exist in ‘probabilistic limbo’ until observed, at which point there is a distribution of chance as to how the state of the particle resolves. One could use the philosophers favourite trick of moving the goalpost back and argue that the distribution of chance and the resolution of each event is determined, it simply appears as chance at the moment observed. In any case, the question of will (as classically formulated) is resolved, because chance leaves just as little choice to act one way or another as determination does.

Even disregarding science, if you are a free agent you should be able to not think for a minute, but try for yourself. You’ll be reporting back quicker than you think.

Science was and likely will be the last vice to squeeze out the fairy tale of free will and disabuse us of our pride. The residue is the duality of design and chance and the questions that branch out from the truth of either reality. If life is design, what (and where?) is the designing principle? If chance, how? And how does there appear to be elements of design? Is there an answer? I contend there is, albeit subtle, otherwise I would not be writing. What point is history if no more potting clay remains to scratch and paw?

To begin, I ask what can be said about design and chance with the least presuppositions or assumptions, scientific or otherwise? Since existence is self-evident, and our enquiry pertains to how that nature unfolds, I follow from here and observe:

What I can immediately recognise, is that thoughts arise abruptly along with changes in the environment that flow smoothly into one another without categorical boundary. These changes are apparently spontaneous, some more predictable or familiar according to what I might expect to occur. Many changes appear to conform to recognizable patterns that square neatly with memory. Some memories seem deeply seated, matching the patterns and confirming their ordinary nature, and others hypothetical, on the fringes of possibility; probing the unknown. All of this process is happening at once and by itself, including any feeling that I am doing or not doing. My sensemaking apparatus is one of these spontaneous appearances, and absolutely essential to my sense of reality and the stability of my consciousness. It is the most familiar apparatus present, so much so as to be near invisible. It should therefore be no surprise that the world appears formulaic and designed, as my survival needs and sensemaking rely on carving up the chaos into the relatively predictable elements.

The implication is that the reality of design exists, but it exists as a by-product of sensemaking ganglia emerging from chaos. Natural selection forces that arise in rare environmental conditions. We should perhaps not ask why the world makes sense or follows laws and rules, but why we sensemaking, rule generating creatures, assume that our sensemaking applies outside of ourselves. We might reasonably say that chaos is the mother of design, but both are mutually interdependent. Chaos chanced upon design and design formulated the idea of chaos. Sense makes sense of itself. The brain has grown to study itself. Really this is another way of saying they are two poles of one occurrence.

Finally, addressing the question of predetermination, it is easy enough to spot the paradox. If there is a designer who designed the designer? If the designer designed themselves, then they are not separate their own creation, but how could they create themselves from nothing? From a rational standpoint, this is a hopeless knot. A philosophical dead end. It’s only by considering radical alternatives that the knot unbinds.

What if nothing is something? If nothing was something then it has and will always be, and creation always was, but without a creator, because the creator is a source with no name, shape or will, thus anything that is, they become at the moment of becoming. Consequently, everything arises from pure, eternal chaos. Nothing at the source of everything, because true nothing, cannot prevent the existence of something. In the same way that the innocence of a child cannot prevent it from hurting itself, so human woe and suffering are the consequence of universal freedom. Life does not know not to be Stalin. Life can only run the program, it cannot know what it is doing beforehand because there is no before. It only knows what it is doing once it is doing it, much like improvised dancing, where the rhythms work themselves out through you as you go along. You cannot know what's best or wise before you do, because to gain wisdom you must first do. Wisdom is becoming. Wisdom is life at play.