Randomness is only random within certain parameters defined by probabilistic structures. Randomness is not equivalent with probability. Randomness refers to pure chance, probability to that which is statistically likely. The two – randomness and probability – condition one another. Probability governs which random events are most likely to occur. A new random event which occurs outside of what is mathematically likely forces a change in the probability structure of likely events. It increases the set of what is likely.
According to the theory of very large numbers, anything can happen. Mountains can float upside down. Children can be born with the tentacles of an octopus. Yet, according to this theory, some events are so improbable that they will not arise during the course of the life of the universe. Thus, randomness is contained, tamed by that which is probable.
Probability – that which is likely – represents the containing forces of order. Probability gives birth to actuality, arising from the chaotic sea of potential. Probability governs the form and behavior of organisms. It shapes the random happenstance of mutations into the orderly force of evolution. Probability is what many of us used to call God. It structures. It governs. It disposes.
The distinction between the concepts of God and probability is that probability is a mindless process of mathematical selection and deselection. Randomness is similarly nonconscious. There is no intelligent agency behind these processes. There is no consciousness. Yet, it is said that these mindless methods gave rise to mind.
Like tends to give rise to like, an ancient principle formulated in the West by the Greeks. It is less likely that an unconscious, disorderly set of processes (randomness and probability) gave rise to a conscious system associated with the human brain. This is not proof of God. A conscious, ordered system which transcends sensate experience is unprovable. Here, the agnostics have it right, and they are the most honest of the three groups: agnosticism, atheism and believers.
Yet if like tends to give rise to like, then it is more probable than not that a conscious agency created the universe. Still, the roles of probability and randomness, qualities always extant in the cosmos and yet in some ways more recently uncovered by humanity through mathematics and science, gnaw at the old theological edifices. Is this their role, and this only; that randomness is contained, in some sense swallowed, by probability, which in turn is enveloped and superseded and perhaps transcended by consciousness? That’s the deistic view. To those of us who believe in a higher power, it is assumed that consciousness preexisted the random and the probable and will ultimately survive the chaotic heat death of the universe.
Did they co-arise? Some Eastern spiritual traditions hold that life and matter, the conscious and the non-conscious, arose simultaneously.
If God exists, is not this God also subject to the laws of probability? Does God exist because God is probable? Or rather, is God’s existence an improbable event? Perhaps from the human perspective, something supernal – a God, or at the very least a ‘good’ God – divine existence is indeed an improbable condition. But if there is a deity, this Something which supersedes rational human minds is perhaps beyond thought itself. God may know Itself as obviously inevitable.
Is God’s existence a random event? Some physicists postulate that life arose on earth because conditions were just right. To materialists, the range of conditions, such as a cosmological constant, a terrestrial planet with the right mix of atmospheric gasses which rotated at about 93 million miles from a medium sized star in its midlife, all arose by accident. Most evolutionary biologists hold to the assumption that evolution is powered, at least in part, by random mutations. Without addressing whether the improbability of all these factors, in combination with many more coinciding events and conditions, arose randomly, we can guess at an answer as to whether God, if It exists, is also random.
If there is a conscious creative agency which gave rise to life, it would most likely have existed in eternity. The very idea of God implies something outside of time, or at least something that existed forever going back into the past. It therefore could not be random, because It always was. It would have to be inevitable. If it stood outside of time, the laws of randomness and probability would no longer be applicable to Itself. Therefore, if there is God, God did not arise randomly. If God did not arise randomly, God is not subject to random events. It is also more likely than not that, if God did not arise randomly and is not subject to randomness, the universe itself may not be operating according to random events. It may appear random, but if there is a God, it is probable that nothing that happens occurs by accident. Randomness and probability may, instead, be agents of a consciously creating force which uses them to condition reality by giving rise to possibility through randomness, and then containing it through probability.
It is possible that life arose randomly, and that once life evolved conscious forms through ourselves, consciousness accrued into incorporeal structures which survive after bodily death. Eastern thought recognizes these ‘subtle’ bodies. Having an initial biological origin, life may throw off its need for material form. If this is the case, then the unconscious material of the universe could have produced the equivalent of what we call God randomly, through materialistic processes.
Yet this misses the point. Life is. Consciousness is. How it came to be doesn’t necessarily determine where it’s going.
Bookends are nice, but the cosmos’s evolution may reflect a fundamental asymmetry. The strong version of the Anthropic Principle informs us that the rise of intelligence in the universe was inevitable, and that once it evolves, it will never die out. If Ray Kurzweil is right and we’ll soon reach a singularity where our minds merge with an artificial reality, if we develop the ability to develop self-sustaining off-world colonies, then perhaps we will never die out. Then, the questions of randomness and probability take up much less importance. They may have given birth to us, but they exert less and less influence over conscious processes. It is intention, it is observation, which imposes its parameters on the random and which creates probabilities.
The universe gave rise to conscious observers. We’re neither random nor probable. We just are.
© 2025 by Michael C. Just