Re: God's "Randomness" (was Chance and the Hand of God)

Bill Hamilton (hamilton@predator.cs.gmr.com)
Fri, 9 Feb 1996 13:13:07 -0500

At 3:29 PM 2/8/96 -0500, Eddie G. Olmstead, Jr. wrote:
>Brian Harper:
>>One could also draw on my illustration below to argue that God's purposeful
>>action may very well appear random [remember this means incompressible,
>>unfathomable] to us if God is more complex than our brains ;-). This is
>>an interesting take on algorithmic complexity that I hadn't thought of
>>before. This doesn't actually require a linkage between God's purposeful
>>intervention and true randomness. If God's purposeful interventions
>>result in phenomena whose descriptive lengths (complexities) are larger
>>than the complexity of our mental faculties, then they will appear to us
>>as if they are random even though they are in fact orderly and purposeful.
>>An interesting idea .... :-)
>
>Yes, it is very interesting. The seed of this idea sprouted in my mind the
>other day after I reread your algorithmic complexity posts, but I was
>struggling to develop it. I really like it. God is not irrational, but
>extra-rational. His logic and order do not conflict with our concepts of
>logic and order, they simply extend beyond our capabilities. We can study
>and comprehend his simpler patterns of order, but as His patterns of order
>get more advanced, their complexity simply extends beyond human
>understanding. If this is true, then our use of "random" simply means "too
>complex to understand" rather "lack of order".

A quotation from Davenport and Root's book, "Random signals and noise"
(McGraw-Hill 1958) seems appropriate here:

One way to approach the notion of probability is through the phenomenon
of _statistical regularity_. There are many repeating situations in
nature for which we can predict in advance from previous experience
roughly what will happen, or what will happen on the average, but not
exactly what will happen. We say in such cases that the
occurrences are
_random_; in fact the reason for our inability to predict exactly
may be
that (1) we do not know all the causal forces at work, (2) we do not
have enough data about the conditions of the problem, (3) the
forces are
so complicated that calculation of their combined effect is unfeasible,
or possibly (4) there is some basic indeterminacy in the physical world.
(p 5)

The point being that three of the four reasons for describing behavior as
random imply a lack of knowledge or capability on our part, while the
fourth implies a lack of even the possibility of knowledge or capability.
When we say some behavior is random, we are not so much claiming it's not
under any control as admitting that we do not know, and perhaps cannot know
how it is controlled.

Bill Hamilton | Chassis & Vehicle Systems
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