What Is Chance?

When we say that something is caused by chance, what we're saying is we don't know what caused it.

We don't know why it happened. We are expressing not a new form of magical causality, but we are expressing our ignorance. Have you ever noticed when scientists talk about the origin of the earth, they refer to it as a cosmic accident that happened simply by chance billions of years ago? The idea is if they push it far enough back in time, the folly of their thinking might be a little easier to accept.

Their formula goes like this. Space plus time plus chance equals the universe. But if you think about that logically, space plus time plus chance equals nothing.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul helps us use the rules of logic to show that it's nonsensical to say that the universe was caused by chance. As we continue now with our discussion of cosmology and the relationship between theology on the one hand and science on the other, which has given rise to so much debate and so much controversy, I think it's important for me at this point to make something clear that should be clear already, and that is that I am not a physicist, nor am I an astronomer. My field is the field of theology and apologetics, but I dare to speak on these subjects for two reasons. First of all is in spite of our living in a time of intense specialization in fields of academic discipline, one cannot study any particular area of investigation for very long without bumping up against other fields of inquiry, because that's just the nature of the whole scope of knowledge. And as a theologian, I'm profoundly interested in theories that are set forth about matters such as creation, questions of the nature of the cosmos, and of the origin of the cosmos.

So my interest in physics and astronomy is pretty much limited to that place where these disciplines bump up against theology. The other concern, however, that gets me engaged in this is as incompetent as I feel myself to be to evaluate the inductive research and the data that is being explored and analyzed by the natural scientists, I am interested in understanding the way in which these ideas are articulated. That is, my concern, again, has to do with the formal side of the scientific method, the side of deduction. One does not need to be a physicist, a biologist, or a chemist to be able to examine the cogency of inferences that are drawn from various data. That gets us, as I say, into the formal realm, the realm that involves the use of logic and language, logic and language.

We're all involved in that enterprise of trying to speak in an orderly, cogent manner about the things that we study. Now, it's important for us to understand something about logic. Logic, which is the formal side of the scientific method, has no content. Logic gives us no information.

There is no data found within the confines of logic. All logic does is measure the rational relationship between propositions. More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle, who did not invent logic but rather defined it and discovered it, argued that logic itself is not a science, but rather it is what he called the organon, which is the Greek word for tool or instrument, of all science.

Let me say it again. Aristotle said that logic is the organon for all scientific inquiry. Now, what did he mean by that? He said that logic is necessary for intelligible discourse. If I say to you, for example, that the piece of chalk I'm holding in my hand right now is not a piece of chalk, if I say this piece of chalk is not a piece of chalk, I have not spoken intelligibly. I have contradicted myself in the second premise from what I asserted in the first premise. And so now, logic as the policeman on the beat, on the corner, he comes along with his big stick and he hammers me on the head and he said, no, no, no, no, that doesn't compute.

The statements that you have made do not fit together in a rational manner. Now, if we are students of logic and consequently students of language, we should be able to evaluate the statements that people make regardless of the scientific discipline from which they are speaking. We are involved in analyzing these things. Now, all of us are engaged in another aspect of science which is what is called taxonomy, taxonomy. Now, if you recall back when you were in junior high school and you had freshman biology, you learned that term.

I promise you, you learned that term. You may have forgotten that term since then, but the word taxonomy has to do with the science or the discipline of classification. Do you remember in biology you had to learn the different kingdoms and the different orders and the different phyla and genus and species and all of that sort of thing. We divide the world between animals and plants and vertebrates and invertebrates and mammals and reptiles and so on.

Now, what is going on here in that classification system is this whole business of taxonomy. And this enterprise began, according to the Bible, in the Garden of Eden. The first scientific mission to which Adam and Eve were assigned was the business of taxonomy. They were called to do what? To name the animals.

And they could have done it in a very simple way. There's a duck-billed platypus, there's a giraffe, there's an elephant, there's a rhinocerosaurus, and so on. They put names or labels on individual kinds of animals. Now, this may sound like an extravagant overstatement, but I am convinced that in the final analysis, all of science is nothing more and nothing less, ultimately, than taxonomy at various degrees of precision. As we learn more and more and more about reality, we make closer and finer distinctions among various things. We measure, we observe, we experiment, in order to understand similarities and differences among things.

The doctor, who is a capable diagnostician, has to be able to know the difference between a common ordinary stomach ache and a life-threatening cancer. The two symptomatically may be similar at first glance, but he probes deeper and deeper into his examination, not only to discern the similarities among various maladies, but also to discover the distinctions among them. That's taxonomy.

That's the science of learning with precision. Now, what does that have to do with our discussion about creation? Well, again, what logic and taxonomy do are a couple of things. In the first place, as I said, logic has no content, no data. It can't really prove anything, but it can falsify.

That's the policeman on the corner. If I draw inferences from my data, which inferences are contradictory, the logical alarm bell goes off, and the policeman stands up with his club and says, your conclusion is false. Violations of logic falsify assertions and propositions. Now, again, where we're concerned about taxonomy is this. In the process of taxonomy, what we're really involved with is the process of individuation. Individuation.

Let's take a word like this, share. If I asked a simple question, what is a chair? What would come to your mind? Well, you say, well, I think of a overstuffed chair. I think of a cane-backed chair. I think of a captain's chair.

I think of an aluminum chair, or I may think of a canvas-backed chair. They're all different kinds of chairs in the world. And yet, the word chair separates all kinds of things from all kinds of other things. We understand that there's a difference between a chair and an elephant, although you can sit on an elephant and you can sit on a chair, so there's also some similarities between a chair and an elephant.

How do we individuate a particular chair and recognize it as exactly a unique particular item? Well, all of that involves looking at reality, and in the first instance, noticing similarities, and we group things according to similarities. This is what taxonomy is all about. And then after we group them according to their similarities, then what do we do?

We separate them according to their differences. Now, this kind of thing can get easily confused and muddled, and our language becomes fuzzy and at times irrational. Now, what I'd like to talk about today significantly is the language that is used in contemporary society of chance. I mentioned that chance is not a thing. It has no power because it has no being, and yet we find people using the term chance frequently as if chance were indeed a thing, not just a thing, but a powerful thing, powerful enough to create the whole universe. And so what I'm asking today is this, what is the meaning of the word chance? I said briefly in our last session that chance is a perfectly legitimate and useful word that we have in our vocabulary and in our language to describe mathematical possibilities. And it's important to understand statistical possibilities in many, many different areas of our lives. We say, what are the chances that such and such will come to pass?

That's a meaningful question. Or we'll use the term chance, for example, in common speech to refer to certain events that take place without a particularly known cause. We speak of chance meetings or chance encounters.

Last year I came into the train station, Union Station in Chicago, one morning about 9 o'clock. And as I was walking through the train station among mobs of people who were coming to and fro the commuter trains, as it were, I suddenly recognized a man carrying a briefcase who I hadn't seen in about 15 years. And I said, Al, how are you? He's the guy that designed Mr. Peanut.

We used to call him Mr. Peanut Man. And I said, Al, how are you? And he said, R.C. And we had a nice reunion and talked about this chance meeting. And he went on to work, and I went on to spend the day in Chicago, and I was leaving for Los Angeles that night on the evening train. And I came back to Chicago Station around 5 o'clock, and as I'm walking through the station, who do you suppose I bumped into?

The same guy. He was going home from work back to the suburbs. Now that was a chance meeting, not in the sense that there was no cause to it, but in the sense that I did not go to the Union Station in Chicago with the intent of meeting Al Youngren. He did not come to Chicago's Union Station with the intent of meeting me. And since neither one of us intended to be at the same place at the same time in this day in history, we say that the meeting was a chance encounter, because neither of us intended it. But that is not the same thing as saying that our presence at the same place on that day was without a cause or without a reason. It's simply what we experienced was the intersection of several causes and reasons working their way out. So we have to be careful to understand that there is a legitimate use of the term chance, and unfortunately what happens in the logical arena is a subtle error takes place, which is a classic fallacy in logic, which we call the fallacy of equivocation.

Now equivocation takes place in an argument when the meaning of the term changes all so subtly in the middle of the discussion. My favorite illustration of that, quickly, is the old syllogism that proves that cats have nine tails. I ask people, do cats have nine tails? And I say, no. And I say, well, I can prove to you that cats have nine tails. And they say, well, let's see it. And I'll say, okay, do cats have eight tails? And they'll say, no. And I'll say, does any cat have eight tails? And I say, no. I say, okay. Well, my first premise is no cat has eight tails.

Everybody agrees. And I say, okay, I have two boxes here in front of us, and one box is empty, the other box has a cat in it. Now how many more cats' tails are in the box with the cat than there are cats' tails in the empty box?

Simple mathematics. What's the answer? How many more cats' tails are in this box than in this box? There's one cat here, no cats here.

One more, right? Okay, so one cat has one more tail than no cats, right? Now, if no cat has eight tails and one cat has one more tail than no cat, then we've proved at QED that one cat has nine tails.

What's going on here? If you believe that I have some wonderful real estate for you here in Florida. What has happened in this specious form of argument is that the term no cat has changed its meaning in the middle of the discussion. Now that's what happens with the term chance. Now I'd like to refer to some scholars from the scientific and philosophical community who have these things to say about the language of chance. First of all, Paul Genet makes this comment that chance is a word void of sense invented by our ignorance. Now I have to quibble here for a moment with Genet, and that is because the word chance is not void of sense. We've already seen that it has meaning.

It is an appropriate word to refer to certain things like probability quotients. But what Paul Genet is saying here is that chance is void of sense if we mean by it something that exercises real power. And he says that it is invented by our ignorance. Jacques Bossuet says, quote, let us stop talking of chance or luck or at most speak of them as mere words that cover our ignorance. David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, made this comment, chance is only our ignorance of real causes. All three of these men have said virtually the same thing, and they've used the same word to describe the misuse of chance.

And what word is it? The word ignorance. When we say that something is caused by chance, what we're saying is we don't know what caused it. We don't know why it happened. We are expressing not a new form of magical causality, but we are expressing our ignorance. Now, how does this happen?

And what is my complaint with respect to sloppy language that I hear coming out of certain circles in our society? When the Hubble spacecraft was launched a few years ago, I was driving my car down the highway when I was astonished to hear a broadcaster quote a very famous physicist in America, an astrophysicist, and he was rhapsodic about his hopes for what the Hubble spacecraft would achieve, and he made this comment. He said, 15 to 18 billion years ago, the universe exploded into being.

Now, as one interested in being, interested in the science of ontology and philosophy and theology, I almost drove my car off the road and had an accident. I said, what did he say? He's a brilliant astrophysicist, but he just went to sleep. He said 15 to 18 billion years ago, the universe exploded into being. Well, what did it explode from?

Non-being? Did it not be before the explosion? If it didn't exist before the explosion, then what was it that exploded? You see what I'm saying? You don't have to be a physicist. You don't have to be an astronomer to see that that's a nonsense statement.

The policeman from the corner comes over and says, hold it. You've just made a statement that is analytically false. Now, let me give you some other examples of this sort of thing. A Nobel Prize winning scientist made the comment that in this day and age we can no longer believe in spontaneous generation.

I was glad to hear that. He went on to say that now science requires us to believe in gradual spontaneous generation. And again I did a double take. I said gradual spontaneous generation. That is, something cannot suddenly, quickly, spontaneously pop into being by itself. In order for that to happen, it takes time.

Well, another Nobel laureate seconded the motion and made this comment, one has only to wait. Time itself performs the miracle. The impossible becomes possible, the possible probable and the probable certain. What begins as an impossibility becomes certain through miracle and the miracle is performed by the causal agent of time. What is time? How much does it weigh? What are its dimensions?

What's its ontological substrate? Time is not a thing. Time has no power. Time has no being. But here again, we're in magic because this man is telling us that spontaneous generation can happen given enough of nothing.

I see it this way. Space plus time plus chance. I don't know how many otherwise brilliant people I've heard use this formulation for creation. Space plus time plus chance equals the universe. What this amounts to is nothing plus nothing plus nothing equals everything. The nadir of this discussion was reached when I received a letter from a scientist who had read my book, Not a Chance, where he was complaining about my critique of nothing and told me in his letter that science has now been able to isolate and identify five distinct types of nothing. I wanted to ask him, what is it about type one of nothing that differs from type two in the taxonomy of nothingness? What is it that nothing number two has that nothing number one lacks?

What's the answer? Nothing. Now, if one say we have five different definitions for nothingness, that's a legitimate statement. But to speak soberly of five kinds of nothing illustrates the failure of the deductive side of the scientific method to prevail in our day. We live in an age when reason and logic have been abandoned. It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland telling the queen that she couldn't believe in impossible things.

And the queen replied, I daresay you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday. I'm Lee Webb, and we are thankful for Dr. R.C. Sproul's careful examination of the myth of chance. The message we just heard is from Dr. Sproul's series Creation or Chaos.

R.C. looks at all sides of the conflict between self-creation theories and the rational idea of a Creator. We'd like for you to have this six-part series, so contact us today with a donation of any amount, and we'll be glad to send it to you.

It's contained on a single DVD. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343, but you can also go online to make your request at renewingyourmind.org. Students of all ages are bombarded with this worldview, and this video series provides a firm foundation for them and a helpful response. And it's a format well-suited for Sunday school or a small group study. So again, request Creation or Chaos by Dr. R.C. Sproul with your gift of any amount.

Our web address again is renewingyourmind.org, and our phone number is 800-435-4343. This series is also one of many courses available at Ligonier Connect. When you sign up for a community subscription, you unlock a library of video courses for your family, Bible study, or church.

You can study together online from an ever-expanding library of interactive video courses, and you can learn more when you go to connect.ligonier.org. Well, Dr. Sproul's series exposes the folly of this secular worldview regarding the origin of the earth, and it points us to the ultimate truth of the matter. Self-creation is a logical impossibility. Self-existence isn't, and what Christianity asserts is that God is an eternal being who exists in and of Himself. He is not an effect. He didn't have a beginning. Nothing produced Him. He is eternal. I hope you'll join us Friday for Renewing Your Mind and another message from the series Creation or Chaos. .