Creation by Chance

Today I'm Renewing Your Mind. How do we respond to those who claim that the universe was created by chance chance has no being.

Chance is not a thing that operates and works upon other thing. It is simply a mental concept that refers to mathematical possibilities… When the question posed deeper because modern science places a lot of hope in this concept.

For example television series recently or to the BBC. You may put this way complex life requires a good dose of random chance, examining that statement through a logical lens reveals it to be absurd, so let's join Dr. RC scroll as he puts these theories to rest my last lecture we were looking at the concept itself, creation, and I looked at with respect to several varieties of it in terms of spontaneous generation, gradual, spontaneous generation universes exploding into being, and so on. But I ended that session by saying that in the contemporary scene. The alternative to theism is most often described in terms of some kind of an appeal to what we call chance creation and so I want to look at that in some detail in today's session I mentioned in passing in the last session that I had written an entire book on this subject, and I'll explain the reasons for that.

This is the book by the way, entitled not a chance.

That's an analysis of the function and role of chance in modern cosmology and cosmogony and what provoked the writing of this book was having read several offerings from people in the scientific community tried to explain some of the most difficult concepts for the modern scientist to deal with things that occur in the laboratory with respect to subatomic particles and lights in quantum mechanics and so on, and I point out in this book by way of disclaimer that I am not a physicist. I am not an expert in quantum physics by any stretch of the imagination, and I do not presume to correct physicists on what they are learning in their experimentation, nor am I trying to put up barriers to the continuity of those experiments as they seek to expand their understanding of reality what my brief with the physicist was was not with their experimentation, but with their articulation of the results of their experiments and the inference they were drawing from the data that they had worked with. Now I don't have to be a physicist to be able to analyze the content and significance and coherency of statements and the propositions that what's is something that philosophers majoring giving a logical analysis of the truth value of propositions and when physicists articulate their theories in ways that are nonsense, then it's time for the philosopher to blow the whistle and say we don't understand what you're saying because what you're saying is absurd and unintelligible. Please go back to the drawing board and try to rephrase your statements or else to simply say you don't know what you're talking about because the way you're talking about, it would indicate that you at least don't know how to talk about what it is you're talking about. It may reveal a deeper ignorance than that. But at least it reveals an ignorance with respect to intelligible speech in the preface of this book I make an allusion to Arthur Kessler who said as long as chance rule God is an anachronism I picked up on that because I thought that that was a very significant insight that Kessler made as long as chance rules God is an anachronism and I agree with that sentiment. As far as it goes. My only criticism may be a little pedantic is that I wish that Kessler would've gone a little further with that statement because I don't think it's necessary for chance to rule in order to make God and anachronism. I think all that it has to be demonstrated is the chance exists in order to make God and anachronism that there is really such a thing out there. In reality, that we call chance so if chance has any authority it opposes God altogether and all needs to do that job is to exist and I wrote that the mere existence of chance is enough to rip God from his cosmic throne just doesn't need to rule does need to be sovereign, if it exists as a mere impotent humble servant. It still leaves God not only out of date, but out of a job in the basic thesis that I have in this book is in the final analysis, there is no such thing as chance that the greatest myth in modern mythology is the myth of chance and that's what I am getting at here. What provoked this work in the first place was a discussion that I had with the professor in the graduate school of Harvard and the philosophy of science.

When we were discussing the origin of the universe and he denied creation and he went on and I asked him a simple word of the universe come from, and so on. And he said the world came to be.

As a result of chance. The University said was created by chance and I looked at him and I said the world was created by chance and he said yes and I reached in my pocket and I took out 1/4 and I flipped it up in the air, caught it and turned it over and turned it up heads.

I said no I just toss that corn in the what were the chances that that coin given the didn't stand on its end would come up heads or tails he understood said hundred percent because it only has two options, either heads or tape so it's got to come up one of the other so okay mathematically. What are the odds that it comes up heads.

He said 50-50 is a good ice only ask you this, how much influence this chance have on whether it turns up heads or tails. In other words, if we had a completely controlled experiment, where we had a coin on an Armature of some sort and it was started heads up every single time the experiment took place in a vacuum where the exact amount of force was exercised on that coin. Every single time and it went exactly the same height in the vacuum every single time and had the same number of revolutions in the vacuum every single time I landed at the same place every single time and didn't have the variables of what you're gonna turn it over captured here ear area or any of those variables I said would you be able to increase the percentages of its coming up heads over 50-50 set of course is the right is a because what we understand is that the causal agencies that are involved in coming out with the effect of whether that coin comes up heads or tails has nothing to do with some mythological power called chance it has to do with.

Indeed, the factors I've mentioned. Whether you started, heads up, or tails up much force is exerted by the thumb how dense the atmosphere is cowhide goat. How many revolutions it makes to catch a deer decanter here to catch a deer, and after catch up to you look at it right away or do you turn it over all those variables can impact the outcome of the experiment, but we know that given all those things that we don't have time to examine every time the still the odds tell us that in the final analysis, it has to come up one of two ways heads or tails, and so we say the odds are 50-50. Now there's nothing at all wrong with the word chance the perfectly meaningful word when we use it to describe mathematical possibility becomes a synonym for the offense by the odds that something will happen.

One of the chances that something will happen. We even in a popular way make meaningful use of the term chance when we speak of quote chance encounters. I remember one time I was traveling by train from Orlando to California on that train trip.

First I had to go to Washington DC in Washington.

I had a layover, then I had to get back on the train go to Chicago and I have to get off the train in the morning for an eight hour layover, so just at the time that commuter traffic was coming in the downtown Chicago from the suburbs of Chicago and I was going to be in the city for eight hours until I would go back to the train station and get on the train to take me to Los Angeles and it just so happened that I boarded the train late in the afternoon. At the same time that the commuter trains were going back to their destination. Well I got off the train to Chicago in the morning and walking through this building, crowded with the teeming mass of humanity, and I look up and all of a sudden I see a friend that I hadn't seen a 10 year how are you we had a wonderful conversation as it is, what you doing here is I just happen to be coming through town and I have a layover here for my next rent which are no radars Erica back into the same terminal building gunner thousands of people crowding their way to the trains run into him again. One of the odds of that we call this a serendipitous experience. We call it a chance experience insofar as this chance encounter took place because we did not meet by intentionality.

When I left Florida I did not design plan or intend to meet my friend Al in the corridors of the station there in Chicago and with the left is on that morning.

He had no intention of meeting may, but we, as it were bumped into each other in a chance encounter but chance doesn't explain why it happened that is to say chance didn't cause it.

The reason why we met each other is that we happened to be at the same place at the same time for a host of different reasons that converged in time and space so again.

Chance is a perfectly legitimate word when we use it in a popular way to describe these kinds of unintentional meetings or in terms of mathematical probability.

But what is happened in modern jargon is that the word chance as subtly been elevated to indicate something far more then mathematical odds or probabilities where actual causal power is attributed to Sheehan when my talk to this professor at Harvard and I said to him do you see with my coin toss analogy that there was no power being enacted or exercised.

By this thing you call chance to cause the coin to come up heads in my coin toss wasn't. He agreed with me and what he did. When I did that simple illustration with them just using ordinary language. He literally took the heel of his right hand and banged himself in the head went like that. He said I guess I shouldn't of said that the universe was created by chance.

I said that's right because when it comes to the science if you will of ontology ontology has to do with the study of being of essence of reality of is nests and what I was saying to my friend from Harvard is that the ontological status of chance is zero chance has no being. Chance is not a thing that operates and works upon other thing. It is simply a mental concept that refers to mathematical possibilities but didn't have itself has no ontology. It has no being. Now this piece of chalk has some beating to it and the being of it can keep these physicists and the philosopher busily engaged for centuries trying to penetrate the ultimate form of essence or substance that is found in this piece of junk.

But one thing we will agree is that it's not nothing that this piece of chalk is something in.

Remember I said the simplest argument for the existence of God is that if something exists. If anything exists. If there's anything out there with ontological status than you are driven by necessity to a self existent eternal being, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Not noticing this piece of chalk has ontological status.

It's a thing that has existence. It's real, rather than illusion.

I have ontological status. I am a being, I'm not that the supreme being about a divine being on the human bank, but I am something rather than nothing. But when we come to chance, but I was saying to my friend from Harvard is the chance has no being. And because it has no being.

It therefore has no power, because that which is absent of being must of necessity also be absent of power because for power to exist or to operate it must be the power of something you can't have power being generated by nothing anymore than you can have objects being generated by nothing. Power for doing requires a due word justice Descartes was saying, thought requires a thinker so the premise that I want to give you and this is what the philosophers and scientists of all ages have all agreed that the word chance becomes a word to define our ignorance we throw the word chance in the equation when we don't know what's going on out there.

When we can't do our homework analytically and come up to a cogent understanding, we begin to attribute things to chance, to the power of chance civil women are say we play games of chance were the cards are shuffled randomly and the cards are dealt in their statistical odds that you can determine on the basis of the dealing of every hand of cards that you place that's true and I like to play cards and I've studied mathematical possibilities and bridge and gin Rummy and all the rest. And when I play I plan according to the oughts and it really helps me to know what the mathematical possibilities are in so-called games of chance is a game of chance because I don't know how those cards were sorted, but the reason why I am dealt the hand that I'm dealt in a game of bridge or in a game of gin Rummy is because how they were arranged when they were shuffled the first time how they were raised whenever shuffled. The second type how they were dealt in on the what sequence they were built, and so on chance was not some invisible demon that jumps into the middle of the car dealer and causes certain cards to be set in a certain sequence because there is no such invisible power call chance because again chance as no being. And since it has no being. It has no power. So I said again in my friend I said chance is not a thing we can exercise power do green finally said yes. Chance is not a thing, let me say it a little bit differently. Chance is no thing reset faster. Chance is no thing faster. Chance is nothing better to do nothing and when you say that the universe was created by chance you are saying analytically that the universe is created by nothing. You're not just attributing some power to chance attributing the supreme power that we can ever conceive of to chance by declaring it possible not only to do something, but to bring into being the whole of reality. And that's what I say that concept under five minutes of analysis yields its own absurdity and manifests itself as the worst kind of mythology. But if you crouch it in respectable language and if you communicated in the language of science.

It's almost like former phony science. You know when people thought they could turn metal into gold, and they gave those theories on the basis of scientific jargon and it was respected for centuries and you can give respectability to mythology.

If you count your myth in sufficiently academic language in the matter how you scratch it when you attribute any power to chance you're talking nonsense because chance is nothing. And if you think it's something that I would have to say will then what is it, how much does it weigh is that extended is it non-extended is an energy field is it electromagnetism. What is the genesis of this power when you say it's chance you're saying. I don't know that when it came to the supreme example to prove chance we see people like Niels Bohr, who has on his coat of our con cherries soaring to compliment Terry, that is, contradictions are complementary, and that he was willing to affirm both sides of a contradiction that drove Einstein nuts because this is a soon as Niels Bohr starts talking about affirming both poles of a contradiction is not only cease being logical, he ceases being scientific. No with Heisenberg's indeterminacy principles are different ways that you can articulate, you can say we do experiments for subatomic particle and we don't know why they behave the way they do. It seems to indicate that the very experiments it as an influence on the results of the experiment and it seems like that these things are behaving in a completely irrational manner and it's one thing for me to say I do not know why these subatomic particles behave the way they do in our experiment that none of our scientific paradigms are equipped to explain this totally inexplicable behavior. I know that it is happening. I'm observing it. I'm experimenting with it. I just don't know why. At that point, the scientist is exercising a proper demeanor for scientific investigation when he bumps up to the limit of his knowledge. He says I don't know. That should be done in biology should be done in chemistry should be done in physics and become philosophy to be done. Theology that should be the mark of any authentic investigator true, but it's one thing to say. I don't know. It's quite another to say nothing is producing this effect because in order to know that you would have to know every conceivable possible force that exists in or outside the universe and the only way you could have that kind of knowledge is if you yourself were omniscient, so I think it's a matter of prudence with Spock saying that nothing causes some because it's a nonsense statement its mythological and it is not just bad theology. It's bad science to attribute self creation under any John Calvin said that the wisdom of the flesh is always exclaiming against the mysteries of God without a doubt that's the case with most modern-day scientific theories Dr. RC Sproul series on apologetics is our focus each Saturday here and Renewing Your Mind and today RC dealt a lethal blow to the concept of self creation throughout this entire series. Dr. Strohl helps us see the logic and reason are helpful our lives and our pursuit in giving a defense of the truth claims of Jesus would like to send you the full 32 message series title defending your faith is contact us today with a donation of any amount to look at your ministries.

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