“Why is there something rather than nothing?” is considered by some to be the most fundamental question in metaphysics, and by others to be an invalid question. The Big Bang, quantum mechanics, time, consciousness, and God are all attempts to answer this question. They all invoke randomness or chance or probabilistic universes to escape the First Cause Problem. Physics and mathematics cannot address the question. An implied God of Randomness is the cop-out for all atheists.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Commonplace Thesis, and the close connection between randomness and chance it proposes, appears also to be endorsed in the scientific literature, as in this example from a popular textbook on evolution (which also throws in the notion of unpredictability for good measure):
scientists use chance, or randomness, to mean that when physical causes can result in any of several outcomes, we cannot predict what the outcome will be in any particular case. (Futuyma 2005: 225)
Some philosophers are, no doubt, equally subject to this unthinking elision, but others connect chance and randomness deliberately. Suppes approvingly introduces
the view that the universe is essentially probabilistic in character, or, to put it in more colloquial language, that the world is full of random happenings. (Suppes 1984: 27)
The scientific method is forced to introduce random into stories about the origin of time and causality and the universe and life and everything. Often the invocation of random is used to avoid any questions of Divine Origins. But random and chance and probability are all just commentaries about a state of knowledge. They are silent about causality or about Divinity. Random ought to be causeless. But that is pretense for such a random is outside our experience. The flip of a coin produces only one outcome. Multiple outcomes are not possible. The probability of one of several possible outcomes is only a measure of lack of knowledge. Particles with a probability of being in one place or another are also an expression of ignorance. However when it is claimed that a particle may be in two places simultaneously we encounter a challenge to our notion of identity for particle and for place. Is that just ignorance about location in time or do we have two particles or two places? Random collisions at the start of time are merely labels for ignorance. Invoking singularities which appear randomly and cause Big Bangs is also just an expression of ignorance.
Whenever science or the scientific method requires, or invokes, randomness or probability, it is about what we do not know. It says nothing about why existence must be. The fundamental question remains unaddressed “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
And every determinist or atheist, whether admitted to or not, believes in the God of Randomness. Everything Random is Unknown (which includes the Divine).
Tags: atheism, deteminism, Random
The k2p blog 