On Tue, 13 Feb 2001, Iain Strachan wrote:
> So now what you have is the
> appearance of a random process, but which is not random, but guided subtly
> by God in a manner so it appears to be random. To parody Einstein's famous
> quote "God does not play at dice", we find that "God plays dice most of the
> time, but sometimes He cheats and gets aways with it". To me, that also
> seems deceptive.
>
Iain,
You have posed a very interesting question: If some happenings appear to
us to be random, is God being deceptive?
Apparent nonrandomness exists in the world; otherwise science would be
impossible since it is concerned with detecting patterns. It seems that
the problem for atheists is to explain how seemingly nonrandom events or
processes are ultimately the result of random ones. We theists, on the
other hand, trust that our sovereign Lord is behind seemingly random
events even though we don't know exactly what to expect.
If I calculated the decimal expansion of the cube root of pi and wrote
down every seventh digit of that expansion for the first few thousand
digits, and if in my absence you found the piece of paper on my desk with
that sequence of numbers and assumed that they were the result of some
process involving only throwing dice, flipping coins, etc., would you be
justified in considering me to be deceptive because the numbers appeared
to be random but in fact weren't chosen at random? If you knew me well
enough and found my sequence of numbers, you would probably conclude that
there was some sensible reason for that particular sequence, even though
you hadn't figured out what it was. Your not being able to detect a
pattern doesn't mean that you should assume that there is none and claim
that you were deceived if that is not the case.
That is my reaction to your interesting question.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
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