I’m saying everybody really secretly relies on God, but they won’t admit it. And what happens is that the regularities, the lawful regularities of the entirety of probability theory and the entirety of its application in various realms in life depends on these lawful regularities. They’re there, but the person who doesn’t believe in God, says he doesn’t believe in God, he still relies on those, but he thinks of those regularities as impersonal. So they’re just there. They’re kind of a cosmic mechanism. And you know, I argue that that really doesn’t work because the features of the regularities include personal aspects.

Vern Poythress is by any reasonable standard a deeply and widely educated man. He has six academic degrees, a B.S. from CalTech and a PhD from Harvard in mathematics. An M Div, ThM, M Litt, and a ThD in various theological disciplines from Westminster Seminary, Cambridge University and the University of Stellenbosch respectively. He now teaches New Testament (and on occasion: philosophy of science and philosophy of language) at Westminster. He publishes books, popular articles and journal articles on a broad range of topics.

We sat down across a Skype connection recently to discuss Poythress’ recent book Chance and the Sovereignty of God, theology, probability theory, finance, economics and the information theory which makes that Skype connection possible.

The standard modern culture-war revolves around God vs. the mathematical sciences. Take your choice: Faith or physics. Then there are the voices of mutual toleration, which attempt to leave room for science among the faithful and for faith among the scientific. Poythress, though, taps into a different tradition entirely, one which is seldom heard in modern debate: That God and science are neither enemies, nor partners, but rather that God is the necessary foundation for mathematics and therefore of every science which uses it.

The argument is that mathematical laws, in order to be properly relied upon, must have attributes which indicate an origin in God. They are true everywhere (omnipresent), true always (eternal), cannot be defied or defeated (omnipotent), and are rational and have language characteristics (which makes them personal). Omnipresent, omnipotent, eternal, personal… Sounds like God. Math is an expression of the mind of God. Sound strange? It isn’t. Modern natural science was created by people who said like that they were trying to “think God’s thoughts after Him.”

It occurred to Poythress that this argument applies to the ‘laws’ of mathematics, but what about the mathematics of what is allegedly outside the law, the mathematics of chance? Does chance kill the laws of math and with them, the need for their Lawgiver?

For Poythress, chance is not chaos, it is simply missing knowledge. To say that in a fair coin toss there is a 50% chance of heads is to say more about our knowledge (particularly the lack thereof) than it does about whether the laws of math applied. Fifty/fifty simply means that out of the two options we have no knowledge which we can use to favor one outcome or the other. The outcome is not random, not chaotic: it’s just unknown. For Poythress, the Calvinist, the outcome is known by God and even determined by Him. It’s not chance to Him, it’s plan. With our limited knowledge, however, it looks like chance. If we knew enough, we’d know the outcome of the toss and we’d know it with 100% certainty.

The ingenious insight behind modern probability theory is that even our zone of ignorance still has a structure and an order to it. Probability and statistical theory model what we don’t know. They help us predict our lack of prediction. The paper by W.S. Gossett on which pretty much all statistical analysis is based is about creating a ‘prediction’ of the ‘standard error’ of ‘the mean.’ It’s about predicting our errors. The zone of uncertainty is not a zone of lawless chaos, but is instead a realm of higher mathematical laws.

You can listen to the entire interview here

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