Probability, Chaos, and Purpose

One sure-fire, guaranteed way to drive down the blog traffic is to post about things no-one else on the planet cares about.  

At this particular moment, the level of online buzz about obscure eighteenth century theological monographs is...um...what you might expect.   Still and all, I've been forging my way through Thomas Bayes' complex monograph on the benevolence of God.  And it is complex, right down to the syntax.

Eighteenth century sentence structure takes a bit of getting used to.  Oh, sure, I use commas by the bucketload, but Bayes strings sentences together that take up entire pages.   You need to be a mathematician just to diagram them.   I wonder what his sermons would have been like. Lord have mercy on his congregation.

But when you get through all that, how is his thinking?  It's fascinating.  Enlightenment era rationality shines bright throughout it.  Yes, there are references to Scripture and Tradition.  But that's not how Bayes buttered his bread.  Logic, reflection and reason governed his thinking.  This is not surprising, given that Bayes was both a mathematician and a nonconformist Christian.  

Saying he was a nonconformist wasn't just a way of saying he did his own thing in his own time.   It was a legal category, meaning he was not in compliance with the Act of Uniformity of 1662.   Ah, to have been Presbyterian when it was a synonym for being a nonconformist.  Good times.

As a pastor and mathematician, Bayes was responsible for Bayes Theorem, the equation used by modern statisticians to determine probability.  Driving my curiosity about Bayes is this:  Given that the theology of the faithful shapes and forms the direction of their thinking, what in his theology made him explore probability?

What Bayes appears to have been responding to is a Deist pamphlet he'd received.  Again, what a different era this was, when it wasn't just Jack Chick who handed out tracts.  The Deist was apparently making an argument for God's existence from design, suggesting that the beauty and order we perceive in things was clear evidence for the existence of God.

Bayes seems to resonate with this on some levels.  He appreciates beauty in things, but his mind is too rational to stop there.  As he puts it, we have no "...reason to think that every being that perceives the same order and proportion in an object must have the same sentiments of its beauty."  Order exists, he suggests, but it goes far deeper than the limitations of human subjectivity.

We human beings see design in orders and symmetries and patterns.  But there is also, Bayes observes, order in things we perceive as less than lovely.  What he suggests, nearly two hundred and fifty years before chaos theory, is that there are patterns and structures in what we perceive as chaotic, ugly, or "imperfect."

Does our perception of the orders and symmetries that comprise beauty mirror Gods'?   No, not really.  We're limited, and what we see as disorder or ugliness is simply part of a greater pattern we struggle to perceive.   "Nothing can appear to Him confused and disorderly," says Bayes.   What appears to us to be chaos, Bayes seems to be saying somewhere in the thicket of some crazy-long sentences, is part of the divine creative purpose.

As he resists the classical design argument for God's goodness and power, Bayes starts taking theology in a different direction.  He talks of God creating creatures that are "capable" of happiness.  He talks of our having the "capacity" for goodness and joy.

He begins heading in this direction towards the end of the monograph, but takes it no further.  But where it seems to be leading is to probability, towards a God who gives freedom and options, and who creates the possibility of happiness for any who wish to pursue it.

Which is why I find Bayes so very fascinating.  Given the radical implications for human freedom that seem to be arising in my explorations of Many Worlds theory, this is some good stuff.

Rays, Part Two

It was the final day of our stay in Bermuda, and I was taking a little bit of time to pray.

Praying from a balcony on the twelfth deck of a cruise ship probably doesn't qualify me for membership in the Desert Fathers Monastic Ascetic Club. I hadn't spent the last 40 days sitting atop a pole. I wasn't wearing a hairshirt. Locusts had not been an option at the buffet that afternoon.

I was taking my usual approach to praying, meaning that rather than trying to come up with a nice little list of things I want God to do for me, I just tried to stop thinking and wanting and grasping for a while. As I did that, I looked out across the water of the King's Wharf Harbor, and...well...just looked at it.

It was late in the day, and the rays of light from the afternoon sun played like ten thousand fiery jewels across the surface of the sheltered water. The wind stirred and folded the water into ripples and whorls, and the sun shattered itself again and again across that stirring surface. It was so very simple, just the interplay of three basic elements in a tiny patch of creation. Yet it was also infinitely complex, as the patterns of sun-dapple shifted and changed on the waves in ways that were both logical and unpredictable.

As I contemplated it, I felt a strong sense of the interconnectedness of wind and air and light, how each one moved according to its connection to the other, and how each connection was both simple and almost unfathomably complex. Modeling even simple fluid dynamics is something that gives physicists headaches, and yet here it was before me.

The elegance of the dance between water and air and sun seemed, at that moment, just impossibly marvelous. These mindless things seemed so paradoxically mindful of their place, and of their relationship to one another.

If only human beings could move with such consistent grace.

Intelligent Design?

Intelligent design "theory" is neither faith nor science, but a malformed hybrid mutant that betrays both.

That said, I believe in intelligent design. I believe that all of creation was fashioned by God's hands, and that with the eyes of faith we can see the subtle imprint of God's touch in the world around us.

But intelligent design is not a scientific theory. Theories are assertions that are tested against the proofs of empirical evidence. A theory is accepted as true--or proven false--based on whether a series of tests or evidences support it or poke it full of holes. That's the scientific method.

It is NOT the method of faith. A theory can be proven right, but it can also be proven wrong. Our faith in God as creator cannot be like that. It is unshakable. It is NOT a testable hypothesis. Faith, real faith, is not built upon the proofs of empirical evidence. It we have to argue faith from a series of mutually supportive logical proofs, then we do not have faith. As the Apostle Paul says, "Hope that is seen is not hope." As the Apostle Paul says, "We look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen." As the letter to the Hebrews says, "Our faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."

What we know in faith to be true is not science, and it has no place pretending to be science.