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.