Freedom & Creativity: Chance Vs Choice

Nov 9, 2004, 12.00am IST
Janina Gomes.

Is there a purpose in this world or do things happen by chance? The Book of Ecclesiastes says: "Time and chance govern all", posing an existential dilemma for humankind. Is there a God who plans everything or do things just happen?


John Habgood, a Bishop of Durham who began his academic life as a scientist asked himself the poignant question: "Does God throw dice?" Einstein, too, expressed a similar doubt, worried at the way physics was developing in the aftermath of the quantum theory. He found it impossible to believe that there was a deep-rooted element of indeterminacy in nature.


In moral and religious terms, the question is whether the man who believes in a rational universe, a godly universe, can allow a major place in it to chance. To believers, history is in the hands of God and if men are going somewhere, their direction is determined by how they respond to God. For others history is just an endless series of repetitions going nowhere.

This sense of purposelessness was not just a scientific vision of a world governed by chance, but merely the way many non-scientific people lived. Durham felt that he had to accept that God does throw dice. He also discovered that this belief does not go against rationality.

Taking the combination of chance and selection that drives biological creativity as an example, Durham felt that many had been misled by phrases like "blind chance" and "unplanned development" into thinking that the universe just goes crazily on its way with no God to care or control it. He found it was not just chance alone, or natural selection alone, or any rigid law of development alone, which allows this creativity. It was all these elements operating together in the world we actually have. What results therefore, is not just anything.


The fact that our world has developed conscious creatures, marvellously responsive creatures, capable of responding to each other and to God could not be a matter of chance. But the believer must accept chance which provides the possibility of freedom and creativity, both components in God's design.


Durham's religious and scientific vision met when he realised that God allows real freedom to the world to create itself. Human beings have real responsibility. The world is full of tragedies, events, occurrences and experiences which are meaningless and cruel. But he felt, it was this very openness and unpredictability of nature, which allows these things to happen, which provide the raw material for human freedom, human development and ultimately human love.

How does the acceptance of unpredictability and freedom affect our vision? It makes us responsible human beings, responsible for ourselves and for the natural world, and conscious of the way in which we can spoil and destroy it. We are part of nature, yet responsible for it before God.


We do not need to bow to fatalism. We need not accept the premise that commercial pressures and scientific necessity have the last word. Time and chance may provide the matrix out of which our life flows, but the one who governs all is God.


God does throw dice. But that is because we have been born with human freedom, the freedom that allows us to respond to God. We are here to build a kingdom of love with the raw material that we have before us. Sometimes the raw material we have just decays or cracks or gives way in our hands. But in the seeds of that disintegration, are the beginnings of new life.