Paradoxes

A paradox is where two apparently contradictory statements turn out both to be true. We live with paradoxes every day and don’t even notice. I want us to look at three of them and see what sense we can make of them. They are:

• CHANCE and NECESSITY.

• RANDOMNESS and ORDER.

• CHOICE and PRE-DETERMINATION.

CHANCE and NECESSITY

There is really no such thing as ‘chance’ in any objective sense. We perceive an event as being a matter of chance because of two considerations:

1. We regard it as being SIGNIFICANT;
2. We see it as having been UNEXPECTED and/or UNPREDICTABLE.

For example, over breakfast my wife asks me about someone we used to know. I reply that I haven’t seen him in years and know nothing about his current circumstances.

When I get on the bus to go to work, who should I see sitting on the bus with an empty seat beside him but that very person. I am amazed and overjoyed.

When I get home I say to my wife, “You won’t believe this, but by pure chance that man was on my bus this morning and we were able to catch up with each other.”

This was a chance encounter because (a) it was significant on account of the conversation over breakfast and (b) it was totally unexpected and entirely, from our perspective, unpredictable.

Now, what if I learned that the man in question was in the habit of taking that bus every morning, but I normally took an earlier bus, which on that day I missed? In that case, we would not attribute so much ‘chance’ to the meeting. And what if, added to that, my wife had not mentioned him over breakfast? In that case, the meeting would not have been by chance at all. The only unexpected or unpredictable part would have been that I was later than usual and missed my normal bus, but because the other man always took that bus, the meeting was less significant.

Suppose you’re playing a board game where you have to throw dice. In order to start, you have to throw a six. If someone gets a six on their first throw, we would say it was a stroke of luck. If someone else eventually gets a six on their tenth throw, we would not attribute luck to it, because a six must come up eventually.

But what if the rule was that you have to throw the dice ten times and the tenth throw must be a six? Getting a six on the first throw would be insignificant, but getting one on the tenth throw would be a stroke of luck. The objective outcome is the same. It is the subjective expectation that makes it ‘chance’.

No-one would ever say, “I needed a six, and by pure chance I got a five!”

In the Big Bang Universe, which is a physical/metaphysical closed system where everything is pre-determined at the sub-atomic level by the principle of cause and effect, nothing whatsoever happens ‘by chance’. Everything is totally predictable if only you have (a) sufficient data, (b) sufficient computational skill, and (c) sufficient time.

In God’s Universe, it’s different, because God’s Universe is not a closed system but an open system. God Himself interacts with it, the spiritual universe interacts with it, and the human beings within it have the ability to influence the cause-and-effect predetermination of the physical universe because they have a spiritual dimension as well as a physical dimension.

The human spirit is not subject to the physical principle of cause and effect. It is subject to the spiritual principle of cause and effect, but is also able to make decisions and choices which interfere with the chains of cause and effect and, we could say, redirect them.

In the Big Bang Universe, I experience the ability to make a decision and a choice, but it is an illusion. The decision has been predetermined by the Big Bang, because the physical brain is no more than a cog in the machine.

In God’s Universe I really can make a decision and a choice, because I am spirit as well as body, and my spirit can over-rule the physical chain of cause and effect.

This means that my throw of the dice is not predictable, except by someone who can read my mind and see what decision I am going to make about when and how I release the dice.

So, in the Big Bang Universe, everything is bound by necessity; but in God’s Universe, chance is possible because human decisions and actions are only predictable in a general way – i.e. “I would expect him to do this, because that’s what he usually does” – but not predictable in every specific instance.

RANDOMNESS and ORDER

As human beings, we like to have things in order – neat and tidy.

Suppose you were travelling along through an area where there were trees, shrubs, and wild flowers of various kinds that seemed to be growing higgledy-piggledy, leaving no clear pathway and with no sense of order, when all of a sudden you come across an area where the trees are standing in neat rows, the shrubs are evenly spaced between the trees, and the flowers are growing in tidy beds that are devoid of weeds and grass.

Your assumption would probably be that the neat, ordered area was evidence of the work of a horticulturalist (i.e. an intelligent designer), while the unkempt and haphazard area had been left to nature.

What you would be observing would be the difference between what we would call RANDOMNESS and ORDER.

Nature is replete with randomness, and human designers tend to reduce randomness to as much of a minimum as they are able.

An interesting commentary on this observation was written by a gentleman called William Paley in the book entitled 'Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature', which was published in 1802. This is his famous, or perhaps infamous, watch-maker analogy:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. ... There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. ... Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
— William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)

(A full discussion on the topic can be found on Wikipedia.)

Paley argues that the stone displays all the signs of randomness, whereas the watch displays all the signs of non-randomness, or order, and therefore he concludes that the watch must be the product of design.

Unfortunately he is open to the criticism of claiming to assume that which he already knows – namely, that the watch was designed. Perhaps he should have chosen a better comparison than a stone and a watch.

For instance, an uncut diamond and a cut diamond, or a shapeless lump of flint and a flint arrow-head might have been more appropriate.

But a fundamental problem with all of these comparisons is that he is trying compare a man-made object against a natural object in order to show that nature must have been designed, despite the fact that it is the natural object which is being presented as not having been designed.

I would attribute the reason for this error of thinking to arise from an intuitive sense that design and randomness are incompatible; that where one exits, the other must be absent.

But is this true?

I've said that human designers seek to reduce randomness to a minimum and focus on order, which is generally the case, but there are exceptions.

An example of such an exception is the design of a golf course. If you compare a football pitch to a golf course you will see some significant differences. All football pitches are the same size, the same shape, with the same white lines in the same places, and the same netted goalposts in the same places. On a pristine football pitch, nothing is random; everything is in proper order.

By contrast, every golf course is unique. There are similarities, of course. There are either nine or eighteen holes, each of which has a teeing-off point, a fairway, and a putting green with the hole somewhere within its borders. There will be bunkers and other obstacles, such as trees and ponds, situated here and there throughout, but in no set position and of no set size or shape. Even each green is unique, with its own peculiar inclines, gradients, humps and bumps.

The golf course designer is working on an area of land which has its own special randomness already in situ, and what he tries to do is to retain as much of that randomness as possible while introducing sufficient order to make it recognisable, and usable, as a golf course.

In short, randomness is built into the design and is an integral and essential aspect of it.

In the 1960s, certain artist began to experiment with what was known as ‘action painting’. The artist would lob paint balls against a canvas on the wall, or pour paint on a canvas on the floor and then roll about on top of it. The outcome was totally random, but it was random by design.

When I was a teenager, tie-dying was popular. You would take a white tee-shirt, tie it in a few knots, then boil it in a pot of dye. When it had dried out and you untied it, the tee-shirt had a unique pattern, totally random, but random by design.

When we look at our physical universe, this is what we see: randomness and order integrated into a system in which both are essential principles.

In the Big Bang Universe, how do we account for this? I’ve already shown that everything in the Big Bang Universe is predetermined by the Big Bang itself, so why do we see order and randomness walking hand in hand?

Perhaps this is just a matter of perception – we see ‘order’ here because we are able to measure it in some way, and we see ‘randomness’ there because we are unable to do so. If we understood randomness better, would we come to the conclusion that randomness is just another expression of order?

I’ll leave that for the scientists and statisticians to answer. I’ve no doubt that someone has already done so.

The ancient Greek philosophers sought to understand the universe by the use of pure logic. They spoke about ‘the harmony of the spheres’, assuming that all of the celestial bodies must be perfectly round and move in perfect circles. Of course, it turns out that they were wrong. The earth is verging on being pear-shaped, and its orbit is closer to the shape of a rugby ball than a football, but is still amenable to being measurable and predictable.

What, actually, do we mean by ‘random’ anyway? Is ‘random’ just another way of saying ‘chance’?

I’ve argued that ‘chance’ does not exist objectively; it is merely a subjective perception of the significance of an unpredicted, or unpredictable, event.

Randomness is similar to chance in the sense that, for all practical purposes, it is unpredictable.

I am one of three siblings. I have a brother and a sister. If you saw us standing side by side you would probably notice two things about us: (1) that there is a ‘family resemblance’ – i.e. in some ways we look alike; (2) that it is very easy to distinguish between us, because we all look different. And yet we all have the same mother and father. Each one of us has half of our DNA from the same father and the other half of our DNA from the same mother, and yet our personal DNAs are different – in fact, they’re unique. No human being has ever had the same DNA as I have, and none ever will.

Even identical twins are not entirely identical.

A number of years ago I was staying with a couple who had identical twin boys who, at the time, were about eighteen months old. When I first saw them together, I was amazed. I had never seen identical twins before, and I wondered how on earth their parents would be able to distinguish between them.

However, as the week went on I began to discern subtle differences in both their appearance and their manner, and by the end of the week I would have been about 80% confident that I could tell which boy was which.

There are those who would argue that the prevalence of randomness, particularly in reproduction, is an indication of the absence of design in nature. By the same token there are some who believe that God has ordered everything to the last detail so that even what appears to be random is, in fact, deliberate.

I would maintain that neither of these positions is correct, but that God, far from being a watch-maker, is perhaps more like a golf-course designer, who has produced an ordered system within which randomness is an integral and essential part. It is random by design.

Now, I want to think about the predictableness of randomness.

When we look at the moon, we see its face pock-marked by the craters left by countless years of random strikes by meteorites. Our own planet earth has been the victim of such strikes in the past.

But let’s imagine an astronomer scouring the night sky, as is his wont, and seeing one evening a body that he has not seen before. His investigations lead him to conclude that it is a giant meteorite, perhaps an asteroid that has been knocked out of its normal orbit by a collision with another object, and that its trajectory is calculated to intersect that of the earth in approximately 17 years’ time.

We would initially consider this to be a random event.

However, now that the trajectory of the meteorite is known, the only remaining unknown is what its exact landing point on the earth might be. Will it be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or somewhere in Siberia or the Sahara desert, or will it land on London, New York, Singapore? For each of these possibilities, a contingency plan is drawn up by a United Nations working group, while another investigates the potential of intercepting the meteorite before it enters our solar system and either deflecting or annihilating it.

The point behind this imaginary incident is this: what began as a random event – an asteroid being dislodged from its normal orbit and sent towards the earth – is no longer random but clearly understood and totally predictable.

If I go to the seaside, pick a handful of sand from the beach, then throw it into the air, the grains of sand will fall back to the ground in what we would know as a random pattern, or a random distribution. By this we would mean two things: (a) the trajectories and eventual locations of the grains of sand were not planned, and (b) they were not exactly predictable.

However, they are only ‘not exactly predictable’ because of our own limitations. Like the rogue asteroid, if we had sufficient data, sufficient skill, and sufficient time we could plot precisely the trajectory and landing place of each individual grain of sand.

It seems to me, in light of the foregoing, that the true distinction between ‘order’ and ‘randomness’ is a very thin line. It could even be argued that they are simply variants of the same phenomenon, at opposite ends of a sliding scale. However, it is the case that order, as we normally understand it, where we have knowledge of its cause, is almost always the outcome of human intervention (i.e. intelligent design). Is it reasonable to deduce from this that order whose cause we do not know must therefore also be the product of intelligent design?

Perhaps not, but it certainly is the case that there is a very strong probability that it could be.

CHOICE and PREDETERMINATION

We've already thought about predetermination in relation to the Big Bang Universe, but surely the Bible teaches that God predetermines events?

Indeed He does, but it is important to note that He does not predetermine ALL events, only those that are key events in His plan for the salvation of the world.

I would distinguish between these two types of predetermination by using the terms ‘micro-determinism’ and ‘macro-determinism’

By micro-determinism I mean that events are determined at the lowest level. In the Big Bang Universe, the Big Bang predetermined what would occur at the level of quanta, which determines what happens at the level of particles, which determines what happens at the level of atoms, which determines what happens at the level of molecules, which determines what happens at the level of substances, cells, and so on, and what happens at the level of cells determines what happens at the level of organs and organisms, so that all human affairs in this scenario are entirely dependent on and predetermined by quantum physics.

By macro-determinism I mean that events are determined at the highest level. In God’s Universe, God has predetermined an overall outcome for this world and all of the people in it, but the outcome for each individual is NOT predetermined.

For example, He predetermined that the Israelites would migrate from Egypt to Canaan, by way of the Red Sea, but He did not predetermine exactly who among the Israelites would successfully complete that journey. The first generation, who should have gone in, were prevented from doing so by their rebellion. Instead, the second generation completed the journey.

God predetermined that Jesus Christ would be crucified to pay the price for our sins, but did He predetermine that Judas Iscariot would betray Him, or that Pontius Pilate would authorise the execution? These men made their own choices, but perhaps God arranged for them to be in their respective places because He knew the choices that they would make.

God has predetermined that there will be a Day of Judgement when every human being who ever lived will appear before His judgement throne to give an account of the conduct of their lives, and to be either rewarded or punished appropriately. The event is predetermined, as are those who will attend the event, but the sentences that will be pronounced are not predetermined, because that will depend entirely upon the choices that each one of us has made throughout our lives.

God’s Universe is a mixture of planned outcomes, random outcomes, and outcomes resulting from personal choices.

We could illustrate this by using the analogy of a football match, much of which is predetermined: the teams that will play, the referee, the venue, the starting time, the next stage in the league for the winning team, the rules of the game, the strip that each team will wear, and so on. Much is also random, such as injuries that might occur, interruptions from the terraces, near misses, accidental hand-balls, etc.; but most of the enjoyment of the game comes from the personal choices that the players make in relation to how they will play the game as individuals and as members of their team.

However, there is one thing that is not permitted to be predetermined, and that is the final score. Anyone who attempted to predetermine it would face serious repercussions for that unlawful choice.

What do we mean by 'choice'?

I would say that what we normally understand as ‘choice’ is: the ability to adopt an opinion or to follow a course of action without having been made to do so by any force or influence other than one’s own desire or conviction.

The issue, however, is complicated by the further question: who or what am ‘I’?

In the Big Bang Universe, as we have already seen, everything that happens in predetermined by the inflexible principle of cause and effect in a closed system.

Someone might argue that, since ‘my own desire or conviction’ is predetermined in this way, then the fact that my ‘choice’ is also predetermined is irrelevant. I am still making the choice, even though the outcome of that choosing process has been predetermined since the moment that the Big Bang was triggered.

I think, though, that any reasonable man in the street would not recognise that as being genuine choice.

Every human society on earth has a legal and a judicial system of some kind, including the ones who believe in the Big Bang Universe. We all believe intuitively that people make choices, for good or for ill, and that we should all be held accountable for those choices.

Of course, in many legal systems we have the concept of ‘diminished responsibility’ on account of, perhaps, a mental illness or other problem which issues in a loss of self-control on the part of the accused. We might say informally, “He couldn’t help it; it was the psychotic episode that made him do it”. However, I have never heard anybody, even the most ardent atheist, say, “He couldn’t help it; it was the Big Bang that made him do it”!

If I am to be held to account for my choices, then I must be deemed to be free to make those choices. Otherwise, our systems of justice are shams.

So, if we believe in justice, personal responsibility, and moral agency, we must believe that the individual has a genuine ability to choose, and is not merely a function within a cosmic printed circuit board.

I read somewhere a few years ago a suggestion by someone that, although every event within a purely physical universe must be predetermined by the Big Bang, it is conceivable, based upon our understanding of quantum physics, that freedom of choice might be possible because at the level of quantum physics events can occur which are essentially spontaneous, and therefore are not bound by the strictures of cause and effect, and if this were to take place within our brain cells, then this could manifest itself as freedom of choice.

Indeed, this may be the case, but it does not answer the fundamental problem, because what is happening here is still a process which is not, in any way, under my control, any more then the functioning of my spleen or my liver is under my control. It is still not my choice. It is still something that is happening to me rather than being made to happen by me.

So, is freedom of choice even possible, and, if so, what is needed to enable it?

To answer that, let’s revisit our list of attributes which the First Cause must be able to produce within the universe.

CONSCIOUSNESS: Without consciousness, there can be no freedom of any kind. A nonconscious being, such as a tree or an earthworm, simply exists. The concept of ‘freedom’ does not apply, because the creature just exists and would not know whether it was free or not.

IDENTITY: Every human being has a sense of SELF. I recognise myself as being distinct and separate from my environment. I develop an awareness of my boundaries – what is ‘me’ and what is not ‘me’. I protect my boundaries. I am jealous of my privacy.

EMOTION: I suggested earlier that choice is based on DESIRE and CONVICTION. Can there be desire without emotion? By definition, emotions put us into motion, they motivate us.

REASON: By reason we understand ourselves and our world. By reason, also, we become convinced of truth. I mentioned earlier that choice is predicated upon DESIRE and CONVICTION. Reason leads us to conviction, but our reason must be based upon truth in order to lead us into truth.

FREE WILL: This is the ability to make choices and act in accordance with them, rather than having all activity, internal and external, predetermined or enforced by someone or something that is ‘not me’.

MORAL AGENCY: In the absence of conscience and free will, moral agency would not be possible. Both of these faculties have already been discussed and those considerations need not be repeated.

PURPOSE and MEANING: Every human being needs to have purpose and meaning in their life. No-one is satisfied simply to exist and reproduce. The survival instinct is probably the strongest drive we experience, and the instinct to reproduce is not far behind, but we still need to achieve something, to express ourselves somehow, to serve a purpose that is greater than our own selves.

SPIRITUAL AWARENESS. From the dawn of humanity, men and women have looked beyond the visible and sought for the invisible, and many have found it. Not everyone has seen the same thing, but that does not mean that none of them was right.