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.

Another World, Another Me

Over the past few days, I've picked up another game for the PS3.  It's a bit outside of my usual pattern.  I rarely play JRPGs (Japanese Role Playing Games), but the reviews had been so good that I felt like I wanted to give it a try.

The game is Ni no Kuni, which translates into English as "The Another World," or "Second World."  It's a delightful little fable about a young boy who loses his mother after a tragic accident, and his journeys into a magical world that exists in parallel with our own.

What made the game super-extra tempting was that it was the first foray into gaming by Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki's brilliant anime shop.  Ghibli has produced beautifully imaginative works like Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, and others.   I loves me some Ghibli, I do.

I've got about four hours of play in over the last week, and what's been most striking about this game is...well...it's just so kind.  It's one of the kindest, gentlest games I've ever played.  It took a bit of getting used to, actually.  Given that gaming tends to involve headshots and your character tearing out the still-beating hearts of your adversaries, encountering a game where your main character tries to mend the broken hearts and minds of those around him is just...different.

The protagonist is a boy, and a gentle hearted soul, not some jaded soldier or vindictive demigod.  Your missions involve bringing reconciliation to families, encouraging a soul out of a deep depression, and driving off the demons that have consumed a bitter, self-isolated workaholic.  How?  You use magic to borrow the joy and hope and enthusiasm from souls who have an overabundance and are willing to share, and then you pour those healing things into the hearts of the broken.  As a pastor, I could seriously use some of that magic myself.

It's a deeply Christian game, even if it's hidden behind wands and wizards and faerie kings with lantern nose-rings.  George MacDonald and CS Lewis would have approved.

Playing this game about a parallel world as I'm working through the edits of my forthcoming book on the theology of the multiverse is also interesting.  In Ni no Kuni, souls are "paired" across worlds, sharing experiences.  Their destinies are not the same, but they are linked.

In my own meditation and prayer life, one recurring and idiosyncratic element is my awareness that within the infinite complexity of God's creative self expression, I do not have a single destiny.  I exist, in all of my possibility, before my Creator.   This is both liberating and terrifying.   When I pray, and I do, I ask not simply for God's will to be done.  I know, within the knowledge of my Maker, that there rests the living knowledge of who I might be if I remained most true to the teachings of Jesus.   For God, I am there in that place already.

What I seek in prayer is to be conformed to that self that brings the greatest hope and joy into the world.  Not my most materially prosperous self, because material prosperity can come at a cost, and guarantees no happiness.  Not my most ferociously partisan self, because that self does harm it doesn't yet understand.  But that self that is most generous, most kind, most gracious.  That self whose scars have healed, and whose heart is whole.  I know that I exist there, that I can inhabit that place.

Most Beautifully Various

Thomas Bayes was the Presbyterian pastor who came up with the equation underlying all modern probability theory, but he was also a Nonconforming Christian.

That meant a very particular thing at that particular place and time in human history.  In reading his short essay on God's goodness, I did find myself wondering about how that might have formed and shaped how he thought.

His faith meant that during his lifetime, he was legally a second class citizen of England.   He had chosen not to swear fealty to the state religion of his time, and that made him ineligible for public benefits and public office.

But that also made him free.  As a Christian, Bayes didn't have to hew to any particular and mandated patter of belief or worship.   Having attended a Free Church myself for a while as a kid living in England, I suddenly have a clearer idea of just where that came from.  That peculiar PresbyBaptiMethoCongregationalism of my youth comes from the very corner of Christianity that Bayes inhabited.

It also meant that his view of dogma, doctrine, and orthodoxy would have been shaped by a deep awareness of being different.  Of being outside of the acceptable norm.  And from that place, openness to the new and the different is considerably easier.

As I worked through his 1731 essay on God's goodness, his openness to the creative power of difference surfaces repeatedly.  He resists, in particular, the idea that there is only one way to be Good.   That, from his Nonconforming perspective, seems both oppressive and limiting, and too much like the state religion that tried to enforce a single order.   He writes things like this:

"If the universe were to consist of one uniform sort of beings, however happy they might be, 'tis evident that they could not in some respects enjoy so great happiness as they might by variety..."

As for Creation itself, he sees variation and difference as amazing things, and a necessary part of a loving God's creative power.  As he describes it:

"..a most happy universe is so far from being unbeautifully uniform, that it must be most beautifully various..."

From that place, seeing chaos as creativity and possibility wouldn't have been much of a stretch.  I think Bayes would have liked the multiverse.

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.

Faith, Prosperity, and Probability

Before wandering into some reading of Rob Bell, I'm taking a detour.

My recent completion of statistician Nate Silver's book clued me in to the existence of Thomas Bayes, an 18th century Presbyterian pastor/theologian/ mathematician/ wakeboarder.  Well, the wakeboarding thing is admittedly speculative, but we know so little about Bayes.  He is largely lost to history, having left us only two written works.  Even this picture of him isn't certain.  It might be him.  It might not.   It is also possible that he looked like this.  We're just not sure.  That this image is possibly him is sort of ironic.  Why?

One of those works gave the world Bayes Theorem, the probabilistic equation that has become the touchstone for all modern predictive statistics.   Bayes Theorem helps us account for the inherent uncertainty in all prediction.  I'm not so much interested in that one, not because it's not cool, but because it's not what floats my boat.

What I've found fascinating in doing more research on Bayes is that his work on probability appears to have arisen from a monograph on the sovereignty of God.   Back when I was a lad, obscure 18th Century monographs used to be hard to find, but Lord Bless The Internet, this is now some seriously public domain stuff.  So I went out and found a free eBook version and downloaded it to my Kindle.

It's got a typically catchy 18th century title:  Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His Creatures.

Rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?   Not quite sure that'd pass muster at Harper Collins these days.  "You know, Tom, we've been thinking about your title.  We need something that pops.  Our marketing guys have come up with this one, you'll love it, seriously, 'God is Cool: Seven Reasons He Wants You To be Happy.'  Oh, and that picture?  Do you have something better?"

The work itself is remarkably dense, a gleeful thicket of words piled one on top of the other.  We were wired differently in the 18th century.  With some adaptation, you can get into it.  As I've begun reading it, I can already feel how Bayes thought theologically.  Honestly?  I like the guy.

One of the questions he is clearly asking himself is data related.  Assuming we want to genuinely answer the question, what metrics would be reliable measures of Divine Benevolence?   Meaning, what would tell us that God is loving and good?

What's striking is the thing he immediately dismisses:  Material blessings.  As he reasons through it, he asks himself whether the giving of rewards is an inherent sign of goodness.

The answer: No.  No it isn't.

As Bayes sees it, rewards can be given by the manipulative to curry favor, or by a tyrant to cement their power.   They are not, in and of themselves, a reliable data point informing our assessment of another being's love or compassion.   So as he develops his argument for the probability that God is good, he rejects material blessings almost outright.

Fascinating.   Perhaps someone should tell Joel Osteen.

The Wager

The last few days, I've been working my way through Blaise Pascal's Pensees.   It's been a nifty read, a peculiarly rich mix of essays and fragments of thought, edited from the francais by none other than T.S. Eliot.   Not all of it I agree with...in fact, much of it I don't.   Pascal's defenses of tradition and clear deference to royal authority are just not my cup of tea.

Still, there are minds I enjoy because they're just delightful to be around, and Pascal is good company.  Sipping wine and bantering with him would have been a delight.  Frustrating on frequent occasion.  But like Antonin Scalia after he's downed half a bottle of single malt scotch, it's highly entertaining.

In large part, my populating my Kindle with a free copy of the Pensees rose out of my interest in engaging with Pascal's argument for belief.  Pascal's Wager is a probabilistic argument for belief in God, one that sees faith in terms of the possibility of gain and loss.   I'm on a probability kick at the moment, as recasting our ethical response to existence in terms of possibilities resonates potently with a Many Worlds-friendly theology.

Should we believe or not, asks Pascal.   Let's think of it in terms of a bet, he suggests.  Our existence is finite, but beyond the boundaries of our lives lies either God or oblivion.  If it is God, then our believing during this finite existence will result in either reward without measure or punishment without end.   Finite belief results in infinite reward.   If, however, God does not exist, then our belief may be incorrect, but we have lost almost nothing.  In terms of a wager, it's like paying a dollar for a single lottery ticket when the payout is a bazillion gabillion dollars.    If we win?  Wow.  If we lose?  Eh, it was only a buck.

This is a cute argument, and Pascal presents it in prose that swirls and sparkles.

But as much as I enjoy him, I just don't buy it.   This is not because I'm not a gambling man, although I'm not.   This is because on a variety of levels, the Wager rings hollow.

First and foremost, Pascal's Wager seems too rooted in self-interest to mesh well with the core ethic of Christian faith.  "What's in it for me" is just not the right question to be asking when presented with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  The moment you make that your priority, you've missed the point.  You are no longer seeking first the kingdom of God.  That sort of grasping starts you off on the wrong foot, and things go tumbling from there.  

Pascal's assumption that we're to pursue things from the basis of our own desire for eternal reward seems strangely at odds with how Jesus actually taught us to live.  The ethos of self-giving and compassion, of a radical love for our Creator made real in our actions towards neighbor and stranger, those things don't click with the Wager.   

Second, I just don't buy Pascal's assumption that our finite existence is of lesser value.  As existentialist theologian Slim Shady once put it, you only get one shot.   That doesn't imbue the existence we inhabit with lesser value.  Instead, this existence is freighted with immense weight.  This is it, kids.  This life is the foundation of our eternity.  What exists outside of these moments is of less significance than what we do with the life we've been given.  If that were not true, then our actions within it wouldn't be so gosh-darned important, eh?

Third but related, Pascal's Wager assumes an ontological separation between ourselves and the question of God's existence.  Meaning, the Wager approaches belief as an abstraction, and as a transaction.  It cannot be this, not if it is to lead us to the kind of engagement with God that the Christian faith requires.  Faith is the orientation of the whole self, not a rational construct.  Faith is not a game we play with our minds.  It radically defines us.   We're all in, everything that comprises us, or we do not understand faith.

I'm willing to risk, and to risk all.  But honestly?  This life doesn't feel like a game.

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.