“All-praise to the unity of God, and all-honor to Him, the sovereign Lord, the incomparable and all-glorious Ruler of the universe, Who, out of utter nothingness, hath created the reality of all things“
Bahá’u'lláh
May 27, 2012. According to the Baha’i teachings – and the world’s great monotheistic religions – God created the universe and everything in it, including us.
Since the Enlightenment, many have said that science tells a different story.
The universe and “us”, they say, evolved. What we see around us, and indeed, our very own existence, was not preordained. Rather, we came into being through natural processes that first created the minerals necessary for our existence, and then created planets with the warmth and atmosphere to support life. Additional processes caused living matter to come into being, and other processes brought about a proliferation of lifeforms and eventually our existence.
It didn’t necessarily have to turn out this way. We – our intelligence, our societies, the things we love – could just as well not have been. There was no creator.
Now, ignoring the “not preordained” part, it is hard to see how these two stories disagree. Line up the Biblical Genesis account side-by-side with the modern scientific account and they simply look like two different tellings of the same story.
The First Day
So why the conflict? Why the rancor and distrust?
This – it seems – is where the “not preordained” part comes in. The idea that we were created by God, according to the anti-religious camp, does not jibe with the observed facts of the matter. What we see from scientific studies is process of slow and gradual growth whereby things evolve in a chance-like and random way. This means that there are no pre-existing divinely-instituted entities and we cannot say that God created the reality we see arrayed in front of us. We came into being by an accidental growth process, rather than by a Genesis moment of creation.
At least this is how many biologists see things. Others – including many physicists – see things differently.
The Building Blocks of Nature
Physicists – who study more fundamental processes – typically have a different perspective. They think in terms of things like states, structures, systems, and in terms of concepts like stability, symmetry, coherence, and complexity.
Physicists ask about the possibility and stability of various physical configurations. What configurations are allowed by the laws of nature? What aren’t? What are the natural processes that allow those configurations to come to be?
Often, physicists think in terms of building blocks of nature. The building blocks of atoms, for example, are electrons, protons, and neutrons, each of which, in turn, has its own building blocks. The building blocks of heredity, for example, are genes. James D. Watson and Francis Crick credit the physicist Erwin Schrödinger and his 1944 book “What is Life” for this concept and for inspiring their search for structure of DNA.
The building block perspective leads to a picture of how things come to be that has ladder-like features. Building blocks for one rung of the ladder of creation have to come into existence before the next rung can be created.
Consider the perspective of astrophysics as it describes the emergence of the conditions necessary for life (described by Wikipedia in its article on the Big Bang):
After its initial expansion from a singularity, the Universe cooled sufficiently to allow energy to be converted into various subatomic particles, including protons, neutrons, and electrons. While protons and neutrons combined to form the first atomic nuclei only a few minutes after the Big Bang, it would take thousands of years for electrons to combine with them and create electrically neutral atoms.
The first element produced was hydrogen, along with traces of helium and lithium. Giant clouds of these primordial elements would coalesce through gravity to form stars and galaxies, and the heavier elements would be synthesized either within stars or during supernovae.
Next, planets were formed out of protoplanetary discs made from the debris of stars and galaxies, some planets emerging at the right distances from the sun to support environments favorable to abiogenesis – process that lead to the emergence of amino acids that are the building-blocks of life, and to the emergence of RNA, DNA and cells, the building-blocks of heredity and living organisms.
Only then does evolution as Darwin describes it come into play. To a physicist, it is a continuation up the rungs of the ladder of increasing complexity, a process that started with the creation of the first subatomic particles.
All of this is a process where something has to be created – a basic building block of nature – before the whole scheme can advance the next step further.
The Role of Randomness
Randomness plays a role in all the transitions from one rung of the ladder to the next. In each case where stable particles, atoms, heavier atomic elements, molecules, chemicals, and cells come into being, the transition to the next higher levels involves randomness.
The role that randomness plays can be described in two major ways. One way is the generation of outlier phenomena – events with extremely low probability but which happen none-the-less. Examples are extremely rare but highly energetic or influential events such as the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan or the confluence of events that led to the recent global economic meltdown. The big bang originating the universe is another.
But more generally, randomness acts as driving mechanism to create change and to increase complexity – and includes outlier phenomena as a special case. It does this through the huge diversity of arrangement of events that it causes.
It is as if the universe were carrying out simultaneously billions and billions of experiments continually for long periods of time. As a result of these “random process experiments”, every possible combination of parameters is tried out. Occasionally something new is created. And occasionally, new building blocks are created.
Consider the emergence of the first cells of life on earth. Once planets were created that allowed the possibility of life, then the universe, operating through the laws of nature, with the absolutely essential help of randomness, tried all possible parameters again and again until not only a successful self-replicating cell was created, but also an environmental niche capability of supporting that self-replicating cell.
The perspective of physics, then, is to see the laws of nature as having a built-in potential for structure. Chance and randomness, combined with the deterministic large scale physical laws like gravity, electricity and magnetism, etc. 
are the ways of accessing that structure, of converting potentiality into actuality.
Randomness in this picture is not the accidental properties or purposelessness of ordinary everyday description.
Yes, We Are Preordained: Potentiality and Actuality.
Central to the physicist’s perspectives I describe above is a conception of nature and natural laws underlying the universe that is central to the modern concept of science: everything that can possibly be realized is built into the laws of nature.
If something doesn’t exist now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t happen in the future. The question is whether or not the laws of nature allow it to happen in the future or not. And the corollary question – very relevant to way the universe is structured – is whether a phenomena is stable or not, i.e., whether once it is brought into existence, it will continue to exist.
There are some things that don’t exist at a certain time that potentially exist. The laws of nature allow for their possibility. Immediately after the big bang, cells were only potentially real, not actually real. What make things real are the dynamical processes of growth and development that push potentiality into actuality. Essential to this process, we have explained above, is randomness.
So are we preordained? Is the existence of human beings – defined as living beings with the intelligence that we have – preordained? Yes, if we consider the universe to be built on the laws of nature. At all times, we were either potentially here or actuality here. We are a built-in feature, as it were, of the laws of nature. We know this because we exist, proving that the laws of nature allow us. Before we actually existed, we potentially existed.
Were we created by God? If you consider God to be responsible for the laws of nature, yes. The laws of nature, again, allow for the existence of humans. If God created the laws of nature, then logically it follows that God created us.
And we can say that randomness is a centrally important aspect of God’s dynamical mechanisms for turned potentiality into actuality. Randomness is a driver of growth and progress. It is not even in the slightest way evidence against God.
Next Week
Next week, I will continue to discuss how physicists see random processes in complex system driving the phenomena of emergence – and how this is consistent with thinking about ideas of divine creation from the world’s great religions.
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This is the 16th in a series of blogs on evolution and religion. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.
16 comments
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Koinotely
May 28, 2012 at 3:20 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
How do you define randomness? What does it really mean for something to be random mathematically, not just physically?
Stephen Friberg
May 28, 2012 at 11:38 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Hi Koinotely:
You asked:
Defining randomness mathematically is not straightforward, but defining it physically is even harder. Here are three websites that do a reasonably good job of trying to explain it mathematically:
Mathematical Randomness
Two more references that are good are:
defining randomness?
Randomness and Mathematical Proof.
Koinotely
May 28, 2012 at 3:31 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
“Randomness has somewhat differing meanings as used in various fields. It also has common meanings which are connected to the notion of predictability (or lack thereof) of events.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘random’ as “Having no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; made, done, occurring, etc., without method or conscious choice; haphazard.” This concept of randomness suggests a non-order or non-coherence in a sequence of symbols or steps, such that there is no intelligible pattern or combination.
…
Donald Knuth, a Stanford computer scientist and Christian commentator, remarks that he finds pseudorandom numbers useful and applies them with purpose. He then extends this thought to God who may use randomness with purpose to allow free will to certain degrees. Knuth believes that God is interested in people’s decisions and limited free will allows a certain degree of decision making. Knuth, based on his understanding of quantum computing and entanglement, comments that God exerts dynamic control over the world without violating any laws of physics, suggesting that what appears to be random to humans may not, in fact, be so random.”
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness
Yanli
May 29, 2012 at 6:10 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Randomness tends to drive things to the lower energy state, a more stable state. That was kinetic mechanism of the natural selection process.
I appreciate you described God in such a patient way…because evolution is such a long process from the most simple forms of building blocks to our current lifeforms. It has take millions of millions of years. However, in the Genesis description, God only took 6 days to finish that process:).
Maya Bohnhoff
June 1, 2012 at 11:45 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I note that most theologians grant that a “day” in the sight of God (especially with no solar passage to mark it), was a storyteller’s conceit. That is, the people to whom the original concepts were revealed were incapable of grasping the idea of “billions of years”. Life revolved around seasons and days—the sorts of processes and events that could be visually noted.
Patient, I think, is a good word to describe God’s part in the process.
Koinotely
May 31, 2012 at 5:00 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Well I don’t mind being in the minority by saying that I don’t think randomness really exists, only apparent randomness. By randomness I’m refering to acausality. I think there cannot be effects without causes, many who use the term randomness seek to suggest there can be effects without causes. I think either we have to be very precise in how we use the term, or not use the term so casually as if there is some implied universal consensus among scientists, mathematicians and philosophers on what it means epistemologically and ontologically…I realize it’s the accepted popular wisdom of today to embrace the concept of randomness, and I have no problem with the concept unless it refers to acausality, I think the only valid interpretation we can ever be certain of is causal ignorance.
Stephen Friberg
June 1, 2012 at 7:43 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Hi Koinotely:
One of the points that I was trying to get across in these posts was that the popular notion of randomness and chance – the one from the Oxford Dictionary you used above of no aim or purpose – is not the one that should be used for science. But real randomness in the sense that you can’t predict it ahead of time and it has a random property pretty much in accord with mathematical descriptions does exist – and physicists and others use things like simple quantum processes (e.g., arrival times of photons) to implement it physically.
Another point that I was trying to get across – and it might be much more important – is that real world phenomena almost invariably have a “statistical” component in that there are huge numbers of component activities involved and that either is directly connected to what happens – for example, voting trends in a country with a large populations or friction and wind resistance – or to the time frame on which something takes place – for example, how long before someone wins a lottery.
The random component of these things is pronounced, but they are not acausal.
Ian Digby
June 17, 2012 at 3:13 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Well this is fascinating indeed! In some way I can’t articulate, it suggests to me that randomness is what makes free will possible for humans. Hmmm, I feel a lot of meditation is required!
Kevin Proudman
June 23, 2012 at 8:01 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I have just read a book “Signature in The Cell” by Stephen C Meyer. It seems to conclusively rule out randomness – in particular regarding the first cell – and makes a pretty much unassailable case for “Intelligent Design”.
Stephen Friberg
June 24, 2012 at 2:24 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Stephen C. Meyer is well-known for his work in the modern Intelligent Design movement, a movement that has adapted the view that proof of divine creation requires identifying components of life that couldn’t have come into being without direct divine intervention in evolutionary processes.
So I would expect him to be looking for some definite creation–like event that would bring cells directly into being rather than one involving natural evolutionary mechanisms and random processes. Is that his approach? Anything that you could share about his approach and how he supports his conclusions would be appreciated.
Just to clarify: the “book of nature” view that permeated Christian and Islamic scientific thinking until well into the 18th century – and which still dominates mainstream religious thinking – holds to the view that nature itself is the miraculous creation and the proof of “Intelligent Design”. From this point of view, things like randomness, etc., are just aspects of the natural laws that brought all of existence into being.
Thanks for your comments!
Stephen
Kevin Proudman
June 23, 2012 at 8:09 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Thank you for all the obvious hard work you put int this blog. I appreciate it. You do seem to glide over some ideas a bit cavalierly though. I can’t think you are seriously putting the economic crash, the tsunami in Japan and the “big bang” into one category – ” the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan or the confluence of events that led to the recent global economic meltdown. The big bang originating the universe is another.”
Stephen Friberg
June 24, 2012 at 2:44 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Hi Kevin:
What is common to all of these events is that they are very rare – what statisticians would call “outlier” events. They have a very low probability of occurring, so they are not expected – or adequately planned for if happening in human affairs.
There are several ways of thinking about these extremely rare outlier events, one of them being that if they are extremely rare, they are unlikely to reoccur. So Stephen J. Gould, in his famous comments on the improbability of life on earth, sees the emergence of human beings as being such a rare phenomena as to be unlikely to happen at all. From my point of view as an experimental physicist, this is a “popular” or “folk” interpretation of randomness.
The point of view that I tend to is to think that the large number of “tries” – the different combinations of factors in all their variety that natural processes go through – readily access even the most improbable occurrences due to their very large numbers. Statistical processes, thus although having a random component, act very often as if they were deterministic in nature in bringing about things. In other words, outlier events will happen in due time.
Ned
July 3, 2012 at 12:40 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Hello Stephen, I would be interested in a discussion on Common Ground on the phenomenon of self-organization in the evolution of living systems and the universe in general; perhaps paired with a perspective on the attribute “Self-Subsisting.” The idea that “creation” and “creator” are wholly independent yet interdependent creates a paradox. This exchange you have had with Kevin here reminded me of it. If nature contains all of the attributes of God, including Self-Subsisting, then perhaps self-organizing principles and processes in the universe represent or embody that particular attribute.
bahaiscience
July 4, 2012 at 7:08 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
And the universe itself is self-subsisting.
bahaiscience
July 5, 2012 at 6:04 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
The Bab wrote:
“The cause of its existence [all that to which the name "thing" can be applied], in truth, is ITS OWN SELF and naught else.”
Stephen Friberg
July 4, 2012 at 12:39 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Yes, lets try it. I’m in Israel, but when I get back towards the end of the July, I will be doing some more blogs on the topic. We could start there, or if you have some other format we could try it out.
Stephen