The Probability of Grace

Yesterday, there was one of those delightful cascades of randomness that change the arc of an expected evening.

After dropping the little guy off at drums, I wandered over to Starbucks for my weekly three hour writing session.  Only, when I got there, a single individual sat in the corner I usually occupy.  It's the corner with the table and the plug.   She had a giant stack of cards, which she was comparing to a photocopied list of cashed checks, individually filling out, addressing, and prepping for mailing.  Thank you letters for donations of some sort, it seemed.  Good work.

But it was the work of hours.  That wouldn't have been an issue, but when I flipped open my laptop, I was looking at a 24% charge.  I could have asked her to move, but her setup was complex and space intensive.  She was there first.

And so my flow for the evening changed.

I cranked out emails until the laptop blorted out a cry for mercy, and then mucked about on my smartphone for a bit.  In that mucking about, I came across a tweet, which led me to a review of a book by University of Oxford philosopher/physicist David Wallace.

Along with David Deutsch, Wallace is one of the most articulate proponents of the Everett Many Worlds hypothesis.  He views it as resolving many of the conceptual challenges of quantum mechanics.  The review for his 480 page, seventy five dollar book was glowing, albeit somewhat on the dense side.

How dense?  Well, one of the most exciting sentences for me personally was this one:

The second pass invokes a Bayesian approach to inference: Wallace shows that Bayesian updating applies unproblematically in an Everettian context, in the sense that agents who conditionalize on the data will take that data to confirm EQM in branches with aggregate weight close to 1.

Just rolls right off the tongue.

What it's saying, and what the review articulates further as it explores that "second pass," is that probability theory is the best framework for understanding the decisionmaking processes of sentient beings in a multiverse.

Yeah, I know.  That doesn't really make it much easier.  But it's both cool and important.

If this idea is to gain any meaningful purchase with human beings, it's going to need to be said in ways that more people can understand.  Physics and philosophy may be awesome, but the language used is too distant from the common tongue.  To...um...deepen the probability of this spreading, translation will be required.

Still, this is exciting to see from someone who is Someone, because integrating Bayesian probability into Christian ethical and moral processes has been on my mind for much of the last year.

If creation is...as I believe it to be...a theistic multiverse...then we need to understand our choices not in terms of absolutes or certainties, but in terms of establishing probability.  The probability of what?

"The Probability of Grace."

Not a bad working title for the next book, think I.

Probability, Gambling, and God

As part of my tendency to read as widely and as wildly as I possibly can, the last few weeks have been spent nibbling away at Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise.   It's a fascinating book about statistics and probability, from a statistician whose track record in predicting American elections is remarkably accurate.

Though he's despised by the pundit-class, particularly those on the right wing who've been recently stymied by his predictions, Silver comes across as remarkably nonpartisan.   He cares about data, and being as accurate as possible.  Period.

One thing I most certainly did not expect as I read through Silver, though, was just how much theology would be involved.   This goes well beyond the opening chapters, where he spends page after page discussing the Reformation.  It goes beyond his quoting Proverbs.

Silver is a Bayesian statistician, meaning his approach to interpreting data is probabilistic and flexible.  Bayesian statistics derive their name from Thomas Bayes, an eighteenth century Presbyterian minister/mathematician.  Bayes created a theorem that calculates the likelihood of things, a theorem that he derived from a theological treatise on the nature of God's sovereignty.

This was beyond cool, and it took my reflections to interesting places.  Silver's explication of probability theory and Bayes essay on the nature of the divine play out interestingly against the theological implications of Many Worlds theory.

Silver spends a great deal of time talking about probability in the context of gambling.  I'm not a gambling man myself.  First, it doesn't float my boat, and second, I've watched gambling destroy too many lives and relationships.  More on that another time.

But there's one wager I know that might be interestingly informed by a fusion of Bayesian thinking and the Many Worlds Interpretation.   It's the wager suggested by Blaise Pascal.  That classic wager is also itself a probabilistic statement.  To woefully oversimplify it, Pascal's Wager suggests that there is nothing to be lost by believing in a God if God does not exist, and much to be potentially be lost if you do not believe and God turns out to be there.  Therefore, belief is a more rational position.

This has always struck me as a bit weak, if only because it seems too self-interested and abstracted.

Applying the Bayesian Theorem to belief in the probability of a God is a related but different wager.  Bayes laid out the probability of a thing in terms of an equation, which is perhaps one reason most human beings struggle with it.  I fiddled around with a spreadsheet for a bit the other day, trying to  figure out what elements might make for an interesting probabilistic proof.   What factors should be considered in calculating the probability of God?   Hmm.  Good question.

Faith as a transcultural phenomenon?  Sure.  But  the absence of empirically measurably evidence needs to be in there.  So do the belief patterns of scientists.  I mucked around for a little bit, assigning factors and percentages.  I was as conservative as possible, and as contrarian to my own faith-position as possible.  With the most pessimistic assumptions used as primary metrics, I ended up with a rather low probability for God's existence.  Not "impossible."  Just "highly improbable."

This was not news.  It's why faith requires a Kierkegaardian existential leap, eh?

Where the equation got interesting was when I took it beyond the assumption of one space and time, and into the multiverse.  As Stephen Hawking spitballed it, there might be...at least...10 to the 500 discrete universes.  Assuming they're not functionally infinite.   What I found?

Taking a Bayesian probabilistic equation and playing it out across ten to the 500 iterations, the answer is pretty much always yes.

The House always wins, baby.  The House always wins.