What is chance?

1 • “Chance”: a placeholder word

Chance is a concept that has always fascinated me.

The toss of a coin, a d20 rolling in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (if you haven’t seen it, there’s the door)…

But when you really think about it, the word “chance” is a strange one.

For starters, it’s one of those words we use all the time but can’t easily define off the cuff.

Come on, quick! Give me a definition of the word “chance”! (No googling!)

Well…

We don’t know exactly what it means, but it’s an incredibly common word.

I’d call it a placeholder word.

Kind of like the word “instinct”… in fact, Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) remarked, tongue in cheek:

2 • Is chance scientific?

When I was in high school, a classmate of mine—a die-hard atheist—used to argue that the world came into being “by chance.”

This friend of mine said he had faith “only in science“; he repeated it like a mantra:

The word “science” comes from the Latin verb “scire,” which means to know, understand, and comprehend.

There’s a famous Latin saying: “verum scire est scire per causas,” meaning “true knowledge is knowledge [that moves] from cause to cause.”

This saying, in turn, sums up what Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) wrote at the beginning of his eight-book treatise, the Physics:

Science tries to “trace the chain of causes back“: from 99 to 98; then from 98 to 97; then from 97 to 96… [etc., etc.]… then from 3 to 2; then from 2 to 1.

Then again, long before scientists, kids are already doing exactly this…

Generally speaking, something happens “by chance” when it occurs:

• without a definite, identifiable cause;
• due to causes that certainly exist but are unknown.

Funny thing: even the definition of “chance” doesn’t talk about the “absence of a cause,” but about a cause that is unidentifiable or unknown.

If we take Aristotle’s definition of “science” (“knowing the causes”)…

…and the definition of “chance” (“not knowing the causes”)…

…I’d say that when someone says “it happened by chance,” they’re not saying something very scientific!

Now, don’t get me wrong: I can be unaware of what caused something…

…but to deny that there’s any cause at all, I’d have to deny the principle of causality.

3 • What if there were meaning at the origin of everything?

Since in our sense experience there’s no such thing as an infinite chain of causes (*), Aristotle argues that at the origin of the chain of causes and effects that makes up reality, there has to be an uncaused cause (cf. ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, 1071b 3-22).

(*) (If you know of one, hit me up)

The philosopher calls it the “first cause” or the “unmoved mover”: the something/Someone that started everything (without itself being caused by anything else).

But you don’t even need to bother Aristotle: Archibald Duckcrusher said much the same thing:

Archibald Duckcrusher—better known as “Ol’ Prostate”—is a gentleman I met at the local bar here in the beach town where I moved about a year ago; he’s no philosopher, but he’s a wise and spry ninety-three-year-old.

Whether it’s Aristotle’s subtle reasoning…

…or Archibald’s folk wisdom…

…the point is that there’s a convergence of clues suggesting that reality is made up of a chain of causes which, the further back we dig, leads us to a first cause.

In short, when we look around, plenty of signs seem to suggest that reality is meaningful:

In an interview in the late 1980s, John Carew Eccles (1903-1997), an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Medicine, said:

It’s not by chance that the author of the Book of Wisdom (*) describes “the ungodly” in these words:

(*) (The Book of Wisdom is the most recent book of the Old Testament; it was probably written in the 1st century BC, when the Jewish people had already come into contact with Hellenistic culture… and it’s no coincidence that it’s a book steeped in “Greek wisdom“)

4 • And what if at the origin of everything there were… God?

There’s a handful of questions that have stayed burning, century after century:

• What is the origin of everything?
• What is the end of life—where is it headed, and what is it for?
• Where does everything come from, and where is it all going?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

Over the last century in particular, questions about the universe—its origin, its age, its fate—have sparked a great deal of interest and research in the scientific community. Just a few examples:

• Georges Lemaître’s Big Bang theory (as I mentioned a couple of years ago, Lemaître was a Belgian Catholic priest);
• Hubble’s law (which indirectly gives us a rough estimate of the age of the universe);
• Boltzmann‘s research on the so-called arrow of time;
• the experiments on the Higgs boson at CERN’s particle accelerator in Geneva.

Why all this interest?

It’s no coincidence, either, that when Leon Lederman (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1988) wrote a popular science book on particle physics in 1993, he titled it:

Conclusion

The Bible speaks of a “Creator.”

When it was written, we knew nothing about neutrinos.

We had no idea there was such a thing as cosmic background radiation.

We didn’t know how complex every single atom, every single cell of every living organism, every planetary system orbiting a star in the universe really was…

So there you go.

Honestly, I don’t see why everything we’ve learned about the clock should force us to give up the idea that there’s a Clockmaker.

On the contrary: all this order, this harmony, these perfectly balanced equations, all this beauty surrounding us—shouldn’t it suggest that believing in a Creator is sensible, reasonable, plausible?

Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic, wrote:

And Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), the British writer and journalist, said something similar:

salt

(Fall 2021)