God Does Not Play Dice!

TheMadFool

God does not play dice with the universe. — Albert Einstein

It was many decades ago when this Moslem chap, complete with a keffiyeh. tried to convince me of the existence of Allah (God). The gist of his argument was that there's order in the ~~world~~ universe. He was especially moved by how the 9 planets (Pluto was still a planet back then) revolved around our sun in a way that puts to shame the world's best orchestral performance.

What troubled me most was I couldn't figure out the following:

Did,

1. Order -> God

or

2. God -> Order

???

If it's 1, he had clinched the argument. There's no way I could argue against him if 1. Order -> God.

I made no effort to refute him since I hadn't learned logic then and he seemed like someone who couldn't recover/survive his worldview being turned on its head.

Anyway, let's grant the atheist his right to disagree and concede that, yes, 1. Order -> God is false. In other words, let's accept that the order in the universe isn't a sufficient condition for the existence of Allah/God. My moslem friend, it seems, was wrong. Sadly, we've drifted apart over these years and I won't be able to contact him to pick up where we left off 20 years ago.

That out of the way, take a look at 2. God -> Order. This seems plausible, reasonable, and rational to believe. Even if I'm at a loss as to how I might justifiy it, it definitely is a more believable proposition than 1. Order -> God.

Now, my plea to the theist is to grab this golden opportunity. 2. God -> Order simply means that God is a sufficient condition for order. There is order in the universe. Put simply, atheists are extending a hand of reconciliation towards theist and conceding a point - God is a sufficent condition for the existence of the universe which basically amounts to admitting that the God hypothesis with respect to order in the universe can't be ruled out as impossible.

God then exists as a sufficient condition even if not as a necessary condition for the universe.

What's all this about?

Well, imagine the order in the universe arose, as atheists aver, by Chance.

If so then this:

3. (God v Chance) -> Order

What do we observe? Order. Ergo, it's got to be either God or Chance. Here's where it gets interesting. Our observation of order in the universe can't distinguish between God and Chance. That means, God is just another name for Chance and the converse is true as well, Chance is God's alias. Atheism and Theism are one and the same thing! :chin:

Archaeological digs of settlements dating back to Neolithic times have revealed a disproportionately high density of heel bones of sheep or other animals among the shattered pottery and flints that are usually found in sites that humans once inhabited. These bones are in fact ancestors of my casino dice. When thrown, these bones naturally land on one of four sides. Often there are letters or numbers carved into the bones. Rather than gambling, these early dice are thought to have been used for divination. And this connection between the outcome of a roll of a dice and the will of the gods is one that has persisted for centuries. Knowledge of how the dice would land was believed to be something that transcended human understanding. It's outcome was in the lap of gods. — Marcus du Sautoy (What We Cannot Know)

180 Proof

'Order' is in the eye of the beholder, that is, an aspect of disorder (chaos) we happen to be 'mapping' – like 'seeing' faces in clouds – just as a 'whirlpool' is an emergent aspect of a storming sea. And since g/G is a "mystery", only begging without answering any question, it cannot be an explanation for anything that needs explaining. "God does not play dice" because g/G is the dice themselves wherein the number of which and sides of each are constantly in flux (Heracllitus, Democritus) as they eternally roll (if quantum uncertainty is fundamental). Thus, the theistic/deistic deities are merely imaginary (atheism).

TheMadFool

g/G is the dice — 180 Proof

Bingo!

'Order' is in the eye of the beholder, that is, an aspect of disorder (chaos) we happen to be 'mapping' – like 'seeing' faces in clouds – just as a 'whirlpool' is an emergent aspect of a storming sea. — 180 Proof

I concur. Order is a phase in Chaos. It appears that time plays a big role in our perception of order and chaos. A video on youtube reports that the solar system is unstable - the earth is drifting, only by a few centimeters every million years or so, away from the sun and our dear ol' moon is doing the same, inching away from the earth. If we could record all that, speed it up like in timelapse photography, gone is the order! :chin:

180 Proof

↪TheMadFool

:up: Like ripples on a pond or a candle's flame ...

Yohan

Reality cannot be inconsistent.
Reality is the standard by which we measure if something is consistent or not.
What ever is consistent with reality, is true. Whatever is not, is false.
We create maps that are either consistent or inconsistent with reality.
If our map of reality leads us to the conclusion that reality is itself inconsistent, it means our map is inconsistent with reality.

magritte

Reality cannot be inconsistent. — Yohan

Reality is consistent with our model because the model is our reality. That's truth.

Yohan

Reality is consistent with our model because the model is our reality. That's truth. — magritte

So there is nothing but models of models of models ad infinitum>?

magritte

So there is nothing but models of models of models ad infinitum>? — Yohan

In everyday conversation reality is a word for what we might imagine to be out there.

From a philosophical perspective only formal technical models can be constructed because we can't be certain of anything more. Then the models can be tentatively presumed to correspond to what is now labelled reality. The debates are about possible improvements and objections to improvements of that model. What is labelled truth is the correspondence of a statement to that model but of course not to some unknowable outside world.

But common conceptions always remain very different from the terminology used by philosophers. Lack of understanding of this distinction leads to most if not all public criticism of philosophy. No, we are not shoveling clouds.

Alkis Piskas

↪TheMadFool

All this is very nice and I found a lot of good arguments. However, the subject of order vs. randomity in the universe seems quite debatable, as well as how someone perceives one or the other. So I am not going to get involved in it, but only remind us that Einstein has also stated that "God Plays Dice with the Universe" in a letter regading his issues with quantum theory. The context and conditions in which these statements were made were different, of course. But they show the debatability of the subject.

***

P.S. Einstein wasn't referring to a personal god in the quote. He was using "God" as a metaphor. Neither was this an affirmation of destiny.

Benj96

Reality is the standard by which we measure if something is consistent or not.
What ever is consistent with reality, is true. Whatever is not, is false. — Yohan

What do you mean by consistent? Because if you mean repeatable then I’m afraid there are myriad examples of phenomenon and things in the universe that can never be repeated more than once. That doesn’t make them false just exceedingly rare or “unique”.

Yohan

What do you mean by consistent? Because if you mean repeatable then I’m afraid there are myriad examples of phenomenon and things in the universe that can never be repeated more than once. That doesn’t make them false just exceedingly rare or “unique”. — Benj96

Does anything ever repeat? I doubt it. However, I suspect core principles, and reality itself at its core, don't change.

Consistent: compatible or in agreement with something.

Chaos, on the other hand, I understand as something that is incompatible or in disagreement with something. How can Reality act in a way which is incompatible or in disagreement with itself?

Yohan

Then the models can be tentatively presumed to correspond to what is now labelled reality. — magritte

Are you saying we have a model of reality, and then theories about the model? And the model is constructed based on experience and interpretation, and experience is something internal and cannot be know-ably of external origin?

magritte

Are you saying we have a model of reality — Yohan

No. I'm suggesting that philosophical reality is made up by the philosopher, constructed out of the elements of the model, to match a particular philosophical model. For example, if all objects make up everything there is, then we darn well better make sure we can say what objects are. Is the Sun, which is an extended cloud of mysterious plasma an object or must we be able to grasp all objects?

This in contrast to personal reality that we usually mean when we say that this or that event or memory is real, As memory of a personal experience fades into the past it becomes less real. More or less real which we swear by is not allowable in philosophy, some thing is either real or it is not.

Cuthbert

What do we observe? Order. Ergo, it's got to be either God or Chance. Here's where it gets interesting. Our observation of order in the universe can't distinguish between God and Chance. — TheMadFool

OK so far.

That means, God is just another name for Chance and the converse is true as well, Chance is God's alias. Atheism and Theism are one and the same thing!

Whoa! Who broke the window? It was either my brother or it was me. You can't tell from observation which of us did it. Therefore my brother and I are the same. That reasoning does not work.

It's interesting enough before the final part.

TheMadFool

That reasoning does not work. — Cuthbert

Can I tell, from the broken window, who broke it? Was it your brother or was it you? I can't and in that blind spot, both you and your brother are identical.

Tell me what the definition of identical means. If A is identical to B, it means, given a set of propositions about A and B, I can't tell them apart, no? Take that and see where it leads to.

TheMadFool

All this is very nice and I found a lot of good arguments. However, the subject of order vs. randomity in the universe seems quite debatable, as well as how someone perceives one or the other. So I am not going to get involved in it, but only remind us that Einstein has also stated that "God Plays Dice with the Universe" in a letter regading his issues with quantum theory. The context and conditions in which these statements were made were different, of course. But they show the debatability of the subject — Alkis Piskas

Thanks for that tidbit!

What exactly is it that you find "debatable" about chaos and order?

Alkis Piskas

What exactly is it that you find "debatable" about chaos and order? — TheMadFool

Whether Einstein, eh, I mean God, plays dice or not! :grin:

Note: Maybe physicists know better? I am not good in Physics ... so I can't take part in the debate!

TheMadFool

Whether Einstein, eh, I mean God, plays dice or not! :grin: — Alkis Piskas

Irrelevant!

Note: Maybe physicists know better? I am not good in Physics ... so I can't take part in the debate! — Alkis Piskas

Physics is (becoming) a branch of mathematics.

Alkis Piskas

Whether Einstein, eh, I mean God, plays dice or not! :grin:
— Alkis Piskas
Irrelevant! — TheMadFool

First of all, I said that jokingly. (Didn't you see the laughing emoji?) Second, it's not that irrelevant as you say, since we are talking about order vs disorder. I remind you that your question was"What exactly is it that you find "debatable" about chaos and order?" Besides, it is you who brought up the concept of "God" in real terms (literally), based on Einstein's statement, altghough, as I mentioned, he used "God" metaphorically.

Anyway, whether God is involved in the order of the universe or not, we have to bring in physics, and in particullar, quantum physics. So, regarding always my "debatable", here is something interesting from Prof. Alan Tennant, who has won the Europhysics Prize:

"Prof. Tennant remarks on the perfect harmony found in quantum uncertainty instead of disorder. ‘Such discoveries are leading physicists to speculate that the quantum, atomic scale world may have its own underlying order. Similar surprises may await researchers in other materials in the quantum critical state.'"
"If there’s an underlying order in the quantum world, that would be a rather significant philosophical shift. So I’m guessing this meaning of this result is going to be rather highly debated."
(https://entangledstates.org/2010/01/09/golden-ratio-observed-in-quantum-states/):

Do you see now what debate I am talking about? However, I can't go further than this, because as I already told you, I have little knowledge of physics.

Physics is (becoming) a branch of mathematics. — TheMadFool

Well, it's my turn now: "Irrelevant!"
(Really, how does this statement relate to anything else in here? Who has said anything about mathematics?)

Fine Doubter

↪Yohan

The fabric of the universe is analogies all the way down.

↪TheMadFool

They aren't necessarily / probably aren't identical; they are in an analogous position. You don't have further information to tell them apart. A lot of the puzzles of Raymond Smullyan leave us at that point:

http://www.logic-books.info/sites/default/files/lady-or-the-tiger-and-other-logic-puzzles.pdf

is a link given on another thread and here is part of my comment on that:

I like:
- that many of the answers will remain incomplete or even almost completely unknown, due to too few clues
- that you often have to change the sequence in which you attend to issues, and not deal with them in the order someone told you to

On a related note I find serendipity very provident: ideas and good books or articles seem to come looking for me.

Serendipity = serenity dip.

Fine Doubter

"Irrelevant!"
(Really, how does this statement relate to anything else in here? Who has said anything about mathematics?) — Alkis Piskas

Because maths is orderly - until you get the deranged teacher :cry: :fear: :scream: :worry: :groan:

Banno

-> — TheMadFool

What's that?

TheMadFool

First of all, I said that jokingly. (Didn't you see the laughing emoji?) Second, it's not that irrelevant as you say, since we are talking about order vs disorder. I remind you that your question was"What exactly is it that you find "debatable" about chaos and order?" Besides, it is you who brought up the concept of "God" in real terms (literally), based on Einstein's statement, altghough, as I mentioned, he used "God" metaphorically. — Alkis Piskas

Sorry, I'm bad at humor. I used to be a jolly chap until I discoverd fate had other plans for me. My bad!

Anyway, whether God is involved in the order of the universe or not, we have to bring in physics, and in particullar, quantum physics. So, regarding always my "debatable", here is something interesting from Prof. Alan Tennant, who has won the Europhysics Prize:

"Prof. Tennant remarks on the perfect harmony found in quantum uncertainty instead of disorder. ‘Such discoveries are leading physicists to speculate that the quantum, atomic scale world may have its own underlying order. Similar surprises may await researchers in other materials in the quantum critical state.'"
"If there’s an underlying order in the quantum world, that would be a rather significant philosophical shift. So I’m guessing this meaning of this result is going to be rather highly debated."
(https://entangledstates.org/2010/01/09/golden-ratio-observed-in-quantum-states/):

Do you see now what debate I am talking about? However, I can't go further than this, because as I already told you, I have little knowledge of physics. — Alkis Piskas

The "debate" is about whether the quantum world has order or not. However, my argument isn't about order/chaos (disorder) per se. Order insofar as my argument is concerned is only a representative of the category of evidence that makes theists go, God!

I picked order only because my moslem friend used it in his argument for Allah/God. A contingency rather than necessity i.e. what order/disorder is doesn't matter to the point I'm trying to get across. Any other piece of evidence to do with the existence of the universe that makes the God hypothesis plausible will also work in my argument. The atheistic response to such God arguments being it could be chance. For instance, the fine-tuning argument made by theists claims that the universe couldn't have been a chance occurrence - the probabilities involved are near zero. The response from atheists is that theists are talking out of their hats - people do win the lottery.

Ergo, you're barking up the wrong tree. :grin:

Physics is (becoming) a branch of mathematics.
— TheMadFool
Well, it's my turn now: "Irrelevant!"
(Really, how does this statement relate to anything else in here? Who has said anything about mathematics?) — Alkis Piskas

Physics is mathematics in action in the physical world. You seem to be enamored of physics as if physicists are privy to information mathematicians are not. False.

↪Fine Doubter

Thanks for the link to a book on puzzles.

->
— TheMadFool

What's that? — Banno

Material implication.

Wayfarer

What do we observe? Order. Ergo, it's got to be either God or Chance. — TheMadFool

Buddhists don't worship a creator God, but they have no trouble acknowledging there's an order to nature. They also believe there is karma, the results of intentional actions, which in their view is a natural moral law that has consequences beyond the individual's current existence. But there's no God in their belief system required to underwrite that.

It seems to me that there's a dialectical process at work behind all this. In the early modern period, Newton, Galileo, Descartes, and others, all assumed that the order of nature is a consequence or manifestation of God's laws. Yet as the natural sciences advanced, the role for God seemed to be diminished. A Buddhist scholar's analysis of this:

The early founders of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century — such as Galileo, Boyle, Descartes and Newton — were deeply religious men, for whom the belief in the wise and benign Creator was the premise behind their investigations into lawfulness of nature. However, while they remained loyal to the theistic premises of Christian faith, the drift of their thought severely attenuated the organic connection between the divine and the natural order, a connection so central to the premodern world view. They retained God only as the remote Creator and law-giver of Nature and sanctioned moral values as the expression of the Divine Will, the laws decreed for man by his Maker. In their thought a sharp dualism emerged between the transcendent sphere and the empirical world. The realm of "hard facts" ultimately consisted of units of senseless matter governed by mechanical laws, while ethics, values and ideals were removed from the realm of facts and assigned to the sphere of an interior subjectivity.

It was only a matter of time until, in the trail of the so-called Enlightenment, a wave of thinkers appeared who overturned the dualistic thesis central to this world view in favor of the straightforward materialism. This development was not a following through of the reductionistic methodology to its final logical consequences. Once sense perception was hailed as the key to knowledge and quantification came to be regarded as the criterion of actuality, the logical next step was to suspend entirely the belief in a supernatural order and all it implied. Hence finally an uncompromising version of mechanistic materialism prevailed, whose axioms became the pillars of the new world view. Matter is now the only ultimate reality, and divine principle of any sort dismissed as sheer imagination. — Bhikkhu Bodhi

Which leads me to....

'Order' is in the eye of the beholder, that is, an aspect of disorder (chaos) we happen to be 'mapping' – like 'seeing' faces in clouds – just as a 'whirlpool' is an emergent aspect of a storming sea — 180 Proof

I don't understand how you can justify this. The order of nature, even on the most simple levels, is not dependent on us in any sense. The rising and falling of the tides, the laws of motion which determine them - these are not 'aspects of disorder'. Maybe Brownian motion is disorder. But I can't see how you can plausibly deny that there is an order to nature which science and reason can discern, and then exploit for practical advantage. Imagine if every time you turned on the tap, fire came out, and when you struck a match, it produced water. Absurd, of course.

TheMadFool

Buddhists don't worship a creator God, but they have no trouble acknowledging there's an order to nature. They also believe there is karma, the results of intentional actions, which in their view is a natural moral law that has consequences beyond the individual's current existence. But there's no God in their belief system required to underwrite that. — Wayfarer

That seems to have slipped my mind. However, there is/has to be difference between answering the question, "whence this order?" with chance and simply refusing to answer the question (Noble Silence, the Buddha). The former is a knowledge claim while the latter is to either deny that the question is a sensible one or to avoid, as you put it, prapañca, getting entangled in thought or possibly because there was no point to knowing the answer or our priorities are messed up or...I'm out of ideas.

Buddhism's law of karma suggests that the Buddha did recognize the existence of laws in the universe, specifically laws concerning causality, karma being moral cause and effect. Rather, or for some, too scientific don't you think?

Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. ("I had no need of that hypothesis). — Pierre-Simon Laplace

[...]divine principle of any sort dismissed as sheer imagination.
— Bhikkhu Bodhi — Wayfarer

Imagination, it seems, is the cornerstone of my argument. We have order. Ergo, theists claim, it could be God. Theists counter, it could also be Chance. It could be God or it could be Chance. The distinction between necessity and contingency is the difference between what is (the former) and what could be (the latter, imagination).

Is it,

1. God implies Order (God is a possibility - imagination)

Rain implies wet ground (Rain is one way the ground becomes wet but it could also be a leaking pipe)

OR

is it,

2. Order implies God (God is a necessity - not imagination)

Decapitation implies death (Death is a necessary outcome of decapitation)

Wayfarer

However, there is/has to be difference between answering the question, "whence this order?" with chance and simply refusing to answer the question (Noble Silence, the Buddha). — TheMadFool

To my knowledge, the question of whether the Universe was ordered was never put to the Buddha. It was not one of questions he declined to answer, because he wasn't asked it.

karma being moral cause and effect. Rather, or for some, too scientific don't you think? — TheMadFool

In the early 20th Century, when Buddhism first became popular in the West, comparison was often made between karma and the 'scientific laws' of 'cause and effect', to illustrate that Buddhism was a 'scientific religion'. But really I think it's a specious comparison, I don't think it's a scientific principle in the modern sense. Not that it's unscientific, rather a pragmatic principle which Buddhists don't believe would require scientific validation.

A video on youtube reports that the solar system is unstable - the earth is drifting, only by a few centimeters every million years or so, away from the sun and our dear ol' moon is doing the same, inching away from the earth. — TheMadFool

The other point is that the odds of the Universe being ordered in such a way that it can give rise to matter and so life, and everything else, are vanishingly slight. If it were a matter of pure chance, then the odds are very small indeed, as explained in Martin Rees book, Just Six Numbers. This, of course, is the observation behind the cosmological anthropic principle, which gets a lot of pushback because it seems to indicate some sort of divine providence. After all, Bertrand Russell wrote in his famous atheist manifesto, A Free Man's Worship, that 'Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving', whereas the anthropic principle seems to demolish that, as if the emergence of life were written into the very fabric from the outset. Disputing this claim is often cited as a rationale for the 'multiverse':

Fundamental constants are ﬁnely tuned for life. A remarkable fact about our universe is that physical constants values needed to allow for complex structures, including living things. Steven Weinberg, Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind contend that an exotic multiverse provides a tidy explanation for this apparent coincidence: if all possible value enough collection of universes, then viable ones for life will surely be found somewhere. — George Ellis, Does the Multiverse Exist? Scientific American Aug 2011

TheMadFool

To my knowledge, the question of whether the Universe was ordered was never put to the Buddha. It was not one of questions he declined to answer, because he wasn't asked it. — Wayfarer

So simple and yet so profound. I feel sages like the Buddha and the like are what in sci-fi are known as super-advanced AI. No sooner than they're discovered/invented, we start off by asking questions to them. Quite naturally; we are, after all, looking for answers. Rather unfortunate that no one had the sense to ask the Buddha that question. His answer would've been either true or interesting! I don't see how we could lose given that.

But really I think it's a specious comparison, I don't think it's a scientific principle in the modern sense. — Wayfarer

For better or worse, probably the latter, discerning fine distinctions, so important to life and philosophy, isn't my strong suit. Good point!

exotic multiverse — George Ellis, Does the Multiverse Exist? Scientific American Aug 2011

If memory serves, it was you who said, some time ago, that the multiverse is a bad hypothesis. I'm inclined to agree - nobody in faer right mind would buy a lottery. Hmmmm :chin:

Cuthbert

Tell me what the definition of identical means. — TheMadFool

Take a walk outside the philosophy studio for a minute. I am not the same as my brother. Now go back inside. Whatever account of identity we come up with it has to be consistent with that. If we come up with a meaning for 'the same as' in which I'm the same as my brother, we've gone obviously wrong. And not going obviously wrong can often be as good as it gets in philosophy. Sometimes even that is out of reach.

TheMadFool

Take a walk outside the philosophy studio for a minute. — Cuthbert

Good advice! I'll keep that in mind.

I am not the same as my brother. Now go back inside. Whatever account of identity we come up with it has to be consistent with that. If we come up with a meaning for 'the same as' in which I'm the same as my brother, we've gone obviously wrong. And not going obviously wrong can often be as good as it gets in philosophy. Sometimes even that it out of reach. — Cuthbert

You fail to see the point. Perhaps you've read detective stories, true/fiction I don't care. What happens? A crime is committed. The detective then draws up a list of suspects. Given the evidence, logic dictates, it could be anyone on that list. In other words, given the crime, given the knowns, all people on that list are indistinguishable from each other - they're all identical insofar as the crime is concerned.

I just realized that we're both talking about different things - your point is about, my best guess, ontic identity (you and your brother are definitely not identical) but I'm interested in epistemic identity (with the broken window alone, I can't know whether it was you or your brother - the two of you are identical).

Cuthbert

'Epistemic identity' is when you can't tell two things apart. So if God and Chance are epistemically identical then you can't tell which created the Universe. OK so far. Then you conclude that God and Chance are the same thing. But they are not. They are not (as you put it) ontically identical. 'Ontic identity' is when two things actually are the same.

It is as if, because everyone is a suspect and you don't know who did it, you conclude that they are all guilty. You are writing as if Murder on the Orient Express is the only story.

Alkis Piskas

Sorry, I'm bad at humor. I used to be a jolly chap until I discoverd fate had other plans for me. — TheMadFool

Please, be a jolly chap again! It's much mor fun! :grin:

Order insofar as my argument is concerned is only a representative of the category of evidence that makes theists go, God! — TheMadFool

OK, I admit I disregarded this. My bad!

Ergo, you're barking up the wrong tree :grin: — TheMadFool

It may well be so! (And I see you got your humor back!)

You seem to be enamored of physics as if physicists are privy to information mathematicians are not — TheMadFool

I am not enamored with physics. On the contrary, I generally dislike physics (school trauma!).
(But I think I have cleared this up a few times, by saying that I'm not good in physics ...)

God Does Not Play Dice!

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