Unpacking Chance, Providence, and the Abraham’s Dice Conference:
A Conversation with Dr. Karl Giberson

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by Olivia Peterson

In November of 2014, over a dozen scholars from around the world descended upon the rolling hills of Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts - a small Catholic institution just south of Boston. Their origins were various, their collective knowledge vast and their purpose singular: to address the relationship between chance and providence in the monotheistic traditions. Over four days, scholars and participants of the Abraham’s Dice conference took part in lively discussions and lectures on the topics of chance, providence, and the concept of “unknowability”, as well as theological questions that result from randomness in nature. The scholars will be compiling their work on the topics discussed into an upcoming publication.

I was able to sit down with conference organizer and Stonehill Professor Karl Giberson to reflect on these stimulating topics, as well as on the conference itself.


 How do you define the terms chance and providence, and how do these concepts interact with each other?

The term providence is mainly a theological term that comes out of the monotheistic traditions. God’s superintending care over creation is described as providence. It encompasses everything from the orderliness of creation that allows us to function in a predictable world, to supernatural miracles where God might providentially provide food for hungry people or open the Red Sea.

The notion of chance is complicated. There are two fundamentally different notions of chance. The most familiar is the chance we encounter when we roll dice. We don’t know what number comes up, so this makes it interesting. But from a strictly physical point of view, the roll of dice is not a chance event. There are actually laws of physics that determine how they will roll, and that kind of chance is interesting only on a local level because it allows for us to play games; but it is not interesting from a philosophical point of view because it’s merely a function of our limited knowledge.

The kind of chance that is more interesting is the chance we’ve discovered in reality through quantum mechanics, which says that certain events in the world don’t have causes at all, and occur with complete “unknowability”. Absolutely no laws determine what is going on, and we have to deal with outcomes of situations, which are completely unpredictable.

So the question that arises is whether or not such chance events can be understood by God. We cannot understand them, but if God knows the future, then does God know what these intrinsically unpredictable events will do? Most Christian theology would say that God does know those futures.

But, the more interesting question - directly relating to providence — is whether or not God can control these events without causes. It’s a speculative possibility that God can control these outcomes, and can do so without violating the laws of physics. If God is able to interact with the created order in that way, perhaps this is a mechanism by which God can exercise providential interaction with the universe. So, this is the speculative connection between providence and chance that motivates this discussion.

In light of modern scientific advances and innovations, how does our human desire to know ourselves — such as where we come from and where we’re going — fit in with the Christian desire to know God and the story of creation?

Well, prior to the development of the science of origins, which began in the nineteenth century, the only way we understood anything about origins was theologically. There are people because God created people, there are laws of nature because God created them, there are planets because God created them, and so on. All of those explanations were theological. Then challenges emerged in the nineteenth century. Darwin claimed that We’re not the way we are because God created us that way; we are the way we are because we evolved, and in that explanation we have a developmental understanding and a narrative of change that we recognize is a large part — and maybe the entire part — of the story of how we got to where we are. So, reconciling those two pictures is very complex.

This relates to the question of providence, because if we developed through evolutionary processes then the question arises whether those processes were blind and mechanical, or whether they were simply the way that God was doing the creating. And if our evolutionary history is the way that God is creating human beings, then God has to have some mechanism to influence natural history. There has to be some kind of providential possibility there. 

As someone who has one foot in the science world and one foot in the religious world, what difficulties do you face?

The difficulty with being “two-footed” is that science and religion - although in that phrase there is a kind of symmetry there - are so different. Science has this extraordinary capacity to compel agreement and harmony, and as rancorous as certain cutting-edge scientific notions might be, the overwhelming majority of science is completely uncontroversial. The chemists establish the periodic table and everyone is happy with that. All the physicists agree on what electrons, protons and neutrons are like. Everyone shares those foundations.

When you get to religion, it is so much more complicated to do that, in part because of the nature of religion, but also because religion is answering much bigger questions. It’s a lot easier to say, here’s the evolutionary history of human beings than it is to say, here’s the reason that human beings exist in the form that they do. When we get to religion, we are confronted most immediately with the plurality of religions and, while there are shared similarities, even within an individual religion like Christianity, you have radically different emphases.

Now that I’m at Stonehill, which is quite theologically diverse, I think it’s a very engaging question to ask if the universe is just a purposeless chance event and here we are. Or we can ask whether there is some underlying purpose to the way things are, and whether that purpose is something we can try to make sense of. And so that keeps the question alive for me.

Let’s discuss the Abraham’s Dice conference that was hosted at Stonehill in November. What major themes emerged from the conference?

Well, I think Peter Harrison best expressed one of the major themes, and that was this gigantic transformation that took place in the nineteenth century when two things occurred. The first was the emergence of the historical sciences, and people began to realize that history needed to be looked at scientifically. The second was the realization with Darwin’s theory in particular that a lot of this history seemed to be a very random process that didn’t look purposeful. As Harrison points out in his essay, there had never been a tradition of trying to discern providence in history. That was something that was seen through the eye of faith, but providence could be discerned in nature, with the beauty of the flower and the intricate design of the eye. However, when the design of the eye was attributed to a historical process of mutation and natural selection, it had to become both a chance-driven historical, and a providential, story—and it was hard to do that. I think that was a very consistent theme.

Moreover, Michael Ruse’s contribution to the volume is his argument that basically the process of evolution is just too random. While it might be possible for there to be a providential role for God, it doesn’t look like God was doing anything.

And lastly, John Barrow’s point as a cosmologist looking at a very different part of the natural order was that underlying all of this randomness is a set of simple, remarkable, highly rational laws of nature, and those don’t look like the “higgledy-piggledy” that people said Darwin’s theory looked like. So even within the scientific worldview, you have two very different perspectives. I think the clearest theme is that the question is just deeply ambiguous.

Did any opportunities for new research come as a result of this conference?

It’s hard to know. I think this was more a conference in which a lively conversation could be engaged, more so than a platform for more scholarly research. But one never knows how these things will result. I’ve had interesting projects myself where you have an interaction, you start thinking about it, and then two years later you find yourself writing a book about it. You never know.

A lot of skeptics of religion might wonder how people can still take a religious viewpoint, despite the progress that science has made. Why hasn’t religion gotten weaker as science has gotten stronger?

Well, in a sense religion has gotten weaker. In more secular countries in Europe, religion has all but died. There is a sense in which a well-educated, modern society slowly loses its faith over time. I think this happens because religion is misconstrued as an “explanatory scheme”, and one of the things that we try to do in the science-and-religion conversation is clarify what kinds of questions are purely scientific and which are religious, and make sure that science and religion aren’t viewed as two competing explanations for the same thing. For example, religion doesn’t have any stake in how old the earth is. That’s a scientific question, and it’s only a group of biblical literalists who think that the Bible should have the final edge on how old the Earth is.

But I think an interesting religious question arises when you look at the conditions that have to be just so for the universe to have creatures like us in it — purposeful creatures who can love each other — and ask, is that just an amazing accident that the laws of physics somehow managed to create habitable planets where evolution can occur and here we are? I mean, it’s reasonable to say that these characteristics of the human experience seem so significant that to make them random events doesn’t do them justice.

And we also need to ask the question about individual religious experiences. Are we to dismiss certain people and say that the religious beliefs that motivated them were complete fantasies with no basis in reality? Or is it possible that people who feel like they have these extraordinary religious experiences, are having valid experiences? And maybe not everybody has these experiences, but for the people who do have them, perhaps they are actually real. I think those are the questions that we need to be engaging from the religious perspective.

Do you anticipate that there will ever be a final consensus between Science and Religion?

I don’t think many people are optimistic that there is a grand resolution to these things. And I also think science and religion are so multi-faceted. There are certain things that we need to study because we need to get them right and now we have them wrong, and there are other things that we would like to study because they are viable questions and we try to come up with answers, or at least locate the space where answers could possibly be. But I think the conversation persists because there isn’t any agreement.
Olivia Peterson is studying English and Biology at Stonehill College, and plays varsity softball. She worked with Karl Giberson on the Abraham’s Dice conference at Stonehill in November, and is an editorial assistant on the forthcoming book from Oxford University Press. 
Karl Giberson holds a PhD in Physics from Rice University and has been a prominent writer, editor, and lecturer in the science/faith community for many years. Currently, Dr. Giberson teaches writing, and science-and-religion in the Cornerstone Program at Stonehill College. He lectures at universities, churches and other venues across the country. He is the editor and organizer of the Abraham’s Dice project and is also working on his 10th book, due for publication in 2014.